026
OPINION
Jess Kinghorn
Why can’t we know more about what goes into games?
I WISH BIGGER DEVS
TALKED MORE OPENLY ABOUT
THEIR WORK! WE GAIN VERY
LITTLE FROM THIS PERSISTENT
CULTURE OF SECRECY.
F
inally I’ve spent time with
The Quiet Man, and I am
absolutely fascinated by it.
I can’t put this no-good,
very bad mish-mash down
and, yes, I may even play
the awful thing through twice to get
the full effect of the story. It’s been
a long time since I’ve engaged with
a piece of media that fails so
expertly at every turn and
everything it sets out to do. Is this
love? Or obsession?
I shan’t be too mean to Human
Head Studios, but I would love to
know what happened during
production to result in that end
product. Given the studio’s relatively
low profile since 2006’s Prey (and the
final nail in the coffin, its cancelled
sequel in 2014), the story of how it
came to collaborate with Square Enix
for a glorified spiritual successor to
The Bouncer is one I want to hear.
Unfortunately, it is a story I know
we’re unlikely to get much sense of
beyond apocryphal dribs and drabs
over the coming years.
Much of game
development and
production,
especially that
of high-profile
titles, is obfuscated. Some secrecy
is understandable, but compared
to other media
industries games is
next-level. This
leads to a
disconnect
between
gamers and
developers that
we see expressedtime and time again through periodic
storms in a, ahem, puddle.MUDDYING THE WATERS
The unlikely furore over –
of all things – Marvel’s
Spider-Man’s puddles,
as misguided as it was,
was a result of all the
other times developers
and publishers have
failed to communicate
effectively
with their
audience.
The visual
reining in of
2014’s Watch
Dogs is apparently
still fresh in the minds
of many players.
But it also doesn’t improve
the chances of having an actualconversation when particularly loud
parties with a limited grasp of the
practical reality of game development
blunder forth with misinformation.
The puddlegate party’s unsubstantiated
claims of a ‘graphical downgrade’ for
Spider-Man was based on screens of
the same scene that were very slightly
different in terms of watery
composition but completely different
in terms of lighting, throwing out any
hope of a fair comparison. This
frequent jumping to conclusions and
misunderstanding of the highly
changeable nature of game
development may well fuel the snake
eating its own tail of developers’
secrecy (and was cited by CD Projekt
Red as one reason why it waited so
long to share a vertical slice of
Cyberpunk 2077 with the public).
Insomniac was forthcoming when
asked on Twitter why the scene
looked different, citing “a design/art/
usability reason thing”. Often we as a
magazine get to see behind the
curtain, with developers discussing off
the record how and why things have
happened, but there’s still a reluctance
further up the studio food chain to
reveal, in depth, the whys and hows of
a game’s development in case it’s used
to batter them with later.
The dev diary so favoured by
smaller projects goes a way into giving
a glimpse of how the sausage is made
but is something seldom adopted by
bigger developers. I still fondly
remember the Making Of Silent Hill 2
bonus DVD included with European
releases and wonder why that wasn’t
the beginning of a trend. I love this
medium, but I do wish we’d talk to
each other a bit more.WRITER BIO
Jess Kinghorn loves video essays, Errant
Signal’s Fallout 76 episode inspiring this piece.
She’s torn through the Noclip documentaries
but her lust for knowledge remains unsated, so
she’s begun communing with dark forces for
a whiff of WTF happened with The Quiet Man.