作者：Brendan Keogh

几周前在柏林，我很高兴能够与来自Yager（《特殊行动：一线生机》的创造者）的一些开发者见面。2012年，我写了一本有关《特殊行动：一线生机》的书，所以能够与创造这款游戏的人见面真的是一次很棒的精力。

因为这只是一次休闲，非正式的交谈，所以我并不打算在此复述这次的交谈。但是对于我这样一个处于游戏开发领域外部的人来说，他们真的非常出色。光是听到他们讲述创造游戏的部分内容就足以让我大开眼界了。

laid-off(from reddit.com)

我所交谈的人是该工作室的“咕噜兽”般的角色。不是首席设计师，制作人或创意总监，但却是在字面意义上创造了游戏的人：创造了游戏模型，打下了代码并应用了纹理。他们是游戏新闻记者或像我这样的玩家很少能够进行交流的一些人。

如果游戏新闻记者正在基于一款游戏访问一位开发者，他们通常只能接触到主开发者，也就是负责人。通常情况下，新闻记者是通过支持游戏的发行商才能接近这些开发者。但实际上还有无数隐藏在他们雇主和发行商背后的游戏贡献者。我们不能与之进行交谈，或者说通常情况下他们的雇员合同规定他们不能与我们进行交流。

听这些充满魅力的人讲述自己在AAA级工作室创造游戏的经历是我之前从未有过的体验。这不是什么丢脸，腐败或可怕的事，只是一些平凡的人及其日常活动，以及他们如何做出具有创造性的决策。这不禁让我开始思考，作为玩家，评论者以及新闻记者的我们该如何去欣赏那些并不只是由我们在之前的访问和介绍中所看到的一两个人创造出来，而是由无数发挥着创造性的人所创造出来的游戏。

我们知道情况就是这样；我们传达了游戏的评分，但是我们并未真正去欣赏它。相反地，我们只是谈论了Ken Levine是如何创造《生化奇兵：无限》或Todd Howard是如何创造《天际》。

这并不是只有在电子游戏中才出现的问题。在任何创造性形式中，就像我们本能地尝试想象一件艺术品背后的创造者，以及作为观众我们很容易将作者归结为一个人：导演，主唱和领导者。但这却模糊了作品如何被创造出来以及为何是基于这种方式进行创造的现实。

通常情况下当我们在玩一款游戏并哀悼某一阶段的糟糕设计决策，纳闷着“为什么他们要这么设计”时，答案并不是创造者很愚蠢，而是一些更加平凡的解释：两个关卡设计师待在工作室的两个不同楼层，或者一张便利贴从监视器上滑落了下来。

这并不是在为糟糕的设计决策作解释，但我认为我们需要理解并识别为什么事情是这样的真实且直接的原因：因为这些内容是在真实且无聊的约束条件下由一个较大的团队所创造出来的。

在今天早上，这种将一个大型工作室的整个创造性输出内容归结为一个个体的趋势清楚地呈现在有关Irrational Games关闭的新闻稿上。即在Irrational中，《生化奇兵》系列是由一位主流游戏知名人物Ken Levine所领导创造的。

由Levine所编写的新闻稿解释了该工作室之所以选择关闭，是因为他将领导一个15人的小型团队去致力开发一些较小的游戏。而其余的工作室成员将失业。

这是一份非常奇怪的新闻稿。工作室关闭和裁员是电子游戏产业中很常见的事，但是工作室关闭，并且大多数人将失业是因为其创意领导者想要做一些新的尝试的理念却非常奇怪。从外部来看，它这意味着创造出Irrational游戏的许多其他人与该工作是的创造性输出毫不相干：一旦Levine厌倦了他们，便可以随时将其替换掉，他们就像是随时会被牺牲掉的仆人一样。

从表面看来，这真的是一种极端自大的表现。

但因为这是一份新闻稿，所以实际情况不只是表面看来的这样。我怀疑是发行商2K出于经济原因打算关闭Irrational；但是为了继续拥有有价值的资源，即让Levine继续为其未来的产品效劳，他们允许他能够写下自己之后想做什么。

再一次的，有些雇员被隐藏在幕后。有一些段落仁慈地讨论了他们是如何获得帮助而找到新的工作（游戏邦注：但却并未提及有一些工作要求这些雇员必须搬到新工作室所在的城市），但其主题还是关于“Levine之后将做什么？”

通过拟人化工作室的创造性输入内容并承诺来自假设的导演的新项目的需求，这种劳动状况导致许多人失去工作的事实成功被忽视了。

许多游戏新闻关于工作室关闭的报告只是关于表面内容，只是将裁员当成是“Levine之后将做什么”的旁注。

我并不认为新闻记者需要为产业中的雇员而奋斗。这是公会应该做的事。的确，有很多例子能够证明游戏新闻记者和开发者已经养成了非常亲密的关系，即这两个领域间不再具有临界距离。

但是我们有必要在新闻稿的字里行间中寻找“真正的”故事。不过这不仅仅是一个懒惰的新闻的例子。即使我们尝试着从之前的雇员口中询问真实的故事，他们也不能说出什么有价值的内容：不仅因为他们签订了保密协议，同时还因为他们仍想在产业中找到一份新工作。所以他们是在保持缄默。

2K和Levine能够轻松地面对工作室的关闭以及许多人失业的事实揭示了作为新闻记者，玩家和评论者的我们并不能有效地感受到那些付出努力去创造出这些作品的人的价值。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Games by humans: Irrational and the people behind development

By Brendan Keogh

While in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to be able to casually hang out with some of the developers from Yager, the studio responsible for Spec Ops: The Line. In 2012, I wrote a book about Spec Ops: The Line, and it was a revealing experience to be able to hang out with the people who made that game.

As it was just a casual, off-the-record chat over beers, I am not going to regurgitate any of the conversations here. Suffice to say, to me, as someone outside of development, they were absolutely fascinating. It was eye-opening to hear about the utterly mundane reasons parts of the game turned out the way they turned out. Things that myself and other players had projected layers of meaning onto existed, largely, because of technical hiccups or urgent deadlines.

The people I was talking to were, predominately, the grunts of the studio. Not the lead designers or producers or creative directors, but the ones making the game in the most literal sense: creating the models and typing the code and applying the textures. They were, predominately, exactly the kind of people that a game journalist or player such as myself rarely, if ever, is able to communicate with.

If a games journalist is interviewing a developer about a game, they typically only have access to the lead developers, the ones in charge. Usually, the journalist’s access to these developers is through the publisher that is bankrolling the game. The dozens or hundreds of men and women actually making the game are hidden from the public behind the doubly thick wall of their employers and their publishers. We can’t speak to them and, more often than not, their employment contract means they can’t speak to us.

It’s not something I had ever really appreciated before, and hearing these fascinatingly mundane stories about making games in a triple-A studio was eye-opening. Nothing scandalous or corrupt or horrendous – just … mundane and everyday events leading to particular creative decision. It got me thinking about how we – players, critics, journalists – really struggle to appreciate that these games are created not just by the one or two people we see in a dozen pre-release interviews and profiles, but by dozens if not hundreds of people, each with some small say in what the final creative work will look like.

We know this is the case; we tweet about how long the credits are, but we don’t really appreciate it. Instead, we talk about how Ken Levine made Bioshock Infinite or Todd Howard made Skyrim and that is that.

It’s not a problem unique to videogames. In any creative form, as we instinctively try to picture the creator behind the artwork, and it’s much easier as an audience to boil the author down to a single person: the director, the lead singer, the conductor. But this obscures the realities of how that work was produced and why it is the way it is.

Often, when we play a game and lament about an obviously terrible design decision in one stage and ask nobody in particular “Urgh, why would they design it like that?” the answer isn’t that the creators were idiots, but something much more mundane such as: two level designers worked on different floors of the studio, or a post-it note fell off a monitor.

That doesn’t excuse a poor design decisions, of course, but I think it is worth understanding and appreciating the very real and often straightforward reasons why something is the way it is: because this thing was made by a large team of dispersed and imperfect humans under actual, boring constraints.

Earlier this morning, this tendency to boil the entire creative output of a large studio down to a single individual was starkly clear in a press release about the closure of Irrational Games. Irrational, responsible for the Bioshock series, is headed by one of mainstream gaming’s better known auteur figures, Ken Levine.

The press release, written by Levine, explains how the studio is closing down so that he can take a much smaller group of 15 employees to work on smaller games. The rest of the studio’s employees will lose their jobs.

It’s a very weird press release. Studio closures and downsizings are not rare in the videogame industry, but the idea that the studio would be shut, with almost everyone losing their job, because the creative lead feels like doing something new, is incredibly strange. Taken at face value, it implies that the many other people who created Irrational’s games are irrelevant to the studio’s creative output: just grunts that can be replaced when Levine gets bored of them, like sacrificing the servants when the master passes away.

Taken at face value, it’s an almost shockingly arrogant megalomania, one that ironically plays into the exact labour and capital conditions the studio’s games attempted to critique.

But it’s a press release, so of course there is more to it than face value. My suspicion would be that publishers 2K are closing down Irrational for far more typical financial reasons; but in an effort to hold onto the valuable source that is Levine’s auteur-ness for future products, allowed him to write this heartfelt letter about what he would like to do next.

The other employees are, again, hidden from sight. A couple of paragraphs are spent benevolently discussing how they will be assisted in finding new jobs (conveniently with no mention of the fact that such new jobs will inevitably require life-altering relocation to studios in other cities for many employees), but the main thrust of the release is “What Will Levine Do Next?”, relying on the crux that its audience has long personified Irrational’s creative output in Levine alone.

By taking advantage of the need to personify the creative output of the studio and promising new and exciting projects from the supposed auteur, the labour conditions that lead to many others losing their jobs is successfully downplayed.

And it is successful. Many games news outlets reporting on the closure are taking the press release at face value, mentioning the job losses briefly as sidenotes before moving on to an exciting anticipation of What Levine Will Do Next.

I don’t think it is necessarily the job of journalists to fight for the industry’s employees. That’s what unions are for – or would be if the games industry wasn’t so embarrassingly lacking in unions. Indeed, there’s a very valid case to be made that games journalists and developers are already too chummy with a lack of critical distance between the two fields.

But there is a responsibility to read between the lines of press releases to find the “actual” story. But it’s not simply a case of lazy journalism, either. Even if we tried to get the story from former employees, they would not be able to speak to us: either because of contracts they’ve signed or, much more simply, because they still want to find a new job in the industry. And so, they remain invisible to us.

The ease with which 2K and Levine are able to spin a studio’s closure and the loss of over a hundred jobs to one of an auteur’s exciting new venture reveals just how poorly we – journalists, players, critics – appreciate the full breadth of people whose labour creates these works.

But theirs are the only voices we will hear on the matter, and so the myth of the great creative auteur continues.(source:develop-online)