L.A. Noire Message Board older than one year ago
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You may have noticed that games that appear on the PlayStation Network, but not on the Xbox Live Marketplace, don't seem to ever come Microsoft's way down the road. The opposite has often been true, with numerous Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade releases eventually making their way to Sony's disc-and-download-based platforms months after the fact. And yet Microsoft seemingly never gets these post-exclusive releases on the other side of the coin.
Apparently, that's because they don't want them.
Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, Xbox Europe head Chris Lewis stated that Microsoft's policy is that titles must ship simultaneously on Xbox 360 or XBLA alongside other platforms, or be exclusive to Microsoft for some period of time. Otherwise, the company may simply refuse to allow the content on its console.
"We're a little biased, so obviously we're going to look to protect our own space as best we can and get exclusivity," he said. "Whilst I can't be specific about the terms and conditions, you can be very confident we seek to maximise our own advantage to ensure the playing field is even, and certainly plays to our advantage wherever possible."Eurogamer obtained a copy of Microsoft's Content Submission and Release Policy, which states the following regarding parity and/or exclusivity:
Titles for Xbox 360 must ship at least simultaneously with other video game platform, and must have at least feature and content parity on-disc with the other video game platform versions in all regions where the title is available. If these conditions are not met, Microsoft reserves the right to not allow the content to be released on Xbox 360.The "parity on-disc" portion of that statement does explain away how Sony was able to secure certain launch exclusive content, such as the added bonus case for L.A. Noire, which came in the form of downloadable content. At the same time, it doesn't explain away how Warner Bros. was able to release Mortal Kombat, which featured an on-disc PS3-exclusive character in God of War lead Kratos, without drawing Microsoft's ire. While Kratos would never appear on any console not branded PlayStation, the fact that the Xbox 360 version had no equivalent bonus character seems to go against the wording of the policy. Perhaps feathers were rankled, and Microsoft simply allowed things to move forward given MK's stature and draw as a title.
This policy does also extend to digital titles as well. This may have something to do with why Sony's new PSN PLAY program, ostensibly an attempt at bringing to the table its own version of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade, features no exclusive titles save for Payday: The Heist, a Sony Online Entertainment developed title. Microsoft, for its part, requires a minimum of four weeks of platform exclusivity to include any title in the Summer of Arcade program.
Regardless of any evidence of apparent flexibility in the policy, Lewis made it clear that he sees no chance for change in the policy any time in the foreseeable future, and emphasized that Microsoft sees this policy as a way of ensuring things remain competitive between the various console platforms.
"But, honestly, and this is going to sound a bit contrived, we just want what our consumers want from us. We want to be where they want us to be. We want the quality bar of what they experience from us to continue to go up. I think it has to happen. Everybody's got to do that. If we want to continue to command healthy average selling prices, which we all do, that which we offer our consumers has got to keep getting better. Despite the fact it can be irksome to have such strong competition all the time, it actually does keep us on our toes. It's great for everyone, and it makes for a very healthy race to higher and higher levels of quality of game experiences."↕
GameStop also cited lower hardware sales and fewer games this quarter compared to last year, both of which the company said contributed to an overall lower quarter for store sales, down 9.1%. The retailer also reported diminished net sales of $30.9 million compared to $40.3 million in 2010.
LA Noire, NCAA Football 12, Infamous 2, Brink and Mortal Kombat were GameStop's top earners in the quarter, spanning the classic genres of shooters, sports games, fighters and whatever you'd call LA Noire. Crime drama genre? The "character actor did it" genre?
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Michael Pachter making headlines? Never!
Of course, now I've just added to the pile...but stay with me for a second.
The Wedbush Securities analyst has never been one to shy away from a bold statement. When a Pach Attack! viewer asked him about the reports of extended crunch development at L.A. Noire's Team Bondi and what it says about the rights of game creators, Pachter had no shortage of opinions on several topics--overtime, unions and more.
I'm not here to offer my own thoughts on Pachter's comments. Instead, I've plucked the statements that generated the most response elsewhere, and tried to prove, disprove or, at least, provide some context to them.
"I've never heard a developer say I don't work overtime and I don't work weekends. I do not think the game development process as having employees that qualify for overtime."
The concept of paid overtime is a contentious one, the argument in favor stemming from the industry's struggles with crunch, where a development team ends up working insane hours--nights, weekends--to finish a project. It's reported Team Bondi operated on crunch hours for more than a year to finish work on L.A. Noire.
Hourly employees can earn overtime pay, while salaried employees are not legally entitled to overtime.
"While compensation is certainly part of the equation, the fact is the problems extend well beyond compensation," said Brian Robbins, chair of the International Game Developers Association board of directors and founder of mobile developer Riptide Games. "At best, extended crunch becomes unproductive for the team, and in the worst cases causes physical and mental harm on the people involved."
The IGDA is a non-profit industry membership organization meant to connect developers with one another and to advocate for issues effecting the industry workforce. It is not a union, a subject we'll touch on a bit later.
The extended crunch time alleged by current and former Team Bondi employees is on the extreme end of the spectrum."Crunch and overtime in gaming is, as any experienced developer knows, a part of life in the games industry," added Haunted Temple Studios co-founder Jake Kazdal.
Kazdal is currently working on the strategy game Skulls of the Shogun, recently picked up by Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade. He previously worked on Rez at United Game Artists and the cancelled Steven Spielberg project LMNO at Electronic Arts, among other projects. He's well on the way to the home stretch of Skulls of the Shogun now.
"It is expected, but the idea that people aren't 'entitled' to overtime pay is simply ignorant," argued Kazdal. "People sacrifice time with their children and spouses, miss important events, completely exhaust themselves for the sake of the project, why the hell shouldn't they be compensated?"
Pachter wasn't saying developers shouldn't be compensated at all, but that it shouldn't come through overtime.
"If a game is good, and LA Noire was really good, there will be a profit pool and there will be bonuses. If you're good, and you hit it big, you make a ton of money."
L.A. Noire might have a profit pool. It might not. It actually doesn't matter. According to the latest annual salary survey published in the April issue of Game Developer, 77% of developers polled--sans business and legal--received income on top of their standard salary.
Profit pools definitely exist, but their are risks associate with them--and they're not common.31% earned a bonus after a project or title shipped, 14% received royalties in addition to their salary and 16% engaged in profit sharing. Some developers had a mix of these, including stock options and regular annual bonuses.
All told, the average additional compensation was $12,712.
"I've been in the industry for 15+ years, worked on lots of cool projects, but not once have I ever received any money from a profit pool," said Kazdal. "Rez was a great game, but that doesn't automatically mean we made a ton of cash and that cash bled out as far as the artists and programmers. To suggest that all good games make the developers rich is just ridiculous. That is reserved for the mega-titles, which my eclectic career has not put in my path."
Kazdal does have friends who've benefited from a profit pool--but they worked on Gran Turismo.
Former Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella had an ugly split from Activision last year, an impasse that's still to be resolved in a splashy lawsuit. Amongst other things, West and Zampella are suing Activision over more than $100 million in unpaid royalties. It's not chump change.
There are no guarantees with a profit pool, either as one anonymous developer who once participated in one told me.
Call of Duty? Gran Turismo? There's a distinct pattern with profit pools: very, very big games."Even if there is a profit pool, it's incredibly unlikely you'll see anything, let alone the whole amount," said the developer. "Most likely the threshold to go into the pool is too high to ever pay out. If it does pay out, the less reputable publishers will find ways to bend terms to reduce or cancel the payout. The payout is almost always staggered out over multiple years too, and they'll almost definitely only be tied to your employment, so if you leave before the payout finishes, you won't get the remaining royalties."
That final point--getting no money because you've left before payout finishes--is one of the egregious allegations in the Infinity Ward suit, in which Activision was allegedly locking developers into continuing to work at the studio in order to receive payouts for the previous game's royalties.
"We're talking about a games industry where the average compensation is well above $60,000 and often above $100,000 a year. I just don't think people who make $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection because they have to work overtime."
Pachter brings up two points. First, the average salary of a game developer. We can pull applicable data from the same Game Developer salary survey, which proves Pachter partially right.
- Programmers: $85,733
- Artists and Animators: $71,354
- Game Designers: $70,223
- Producers: $88,544
- Audio Professionals: $68,088
- QA Testers: $49,009
The overall average? $72,158, definitely above $60,000. "Often" above $100,000? Not necessarily. Based on the survey, earning at least, close to or more than $100,000 is definitely possible in every department except QA, but you need to be at the top position within your field (i.e. technical director vs. programmer) and have more than six years of experience.
Just working at a big studio doesn't guarantee a massive salary. Experience makes all the difference.Lastly, there's the concept of organizing into unions, in order to collectively force publishers to treat developers more fairly.
It's a polarizing topic that, like all these subjects, really deserves its own story to be fully explored.
That said, the results of the most recent IGDA "Quality of Life" survey presented at the Game Developers Conference last year suggested there is support for unionizing game developers, albeit support that's hardly across the board.
Of 2,506 surveyed, 35% were for unions, 31% sided against unions and 34% either didn't have an opinion or preferred not to say. More than one-third isn't a number to scoff at, but there are significant challenges to actual unionization.
"Ignoring whether or not it makes sense to have a union for game developers, the reality is it would be very difficult to create one," said Robbins. "The vast geographic diversity of game development, makes for a significant challenge to unionizing, even before you start looking at the realities for what unionization would mean for developers, and trying to see if a significant number of developers support the idea."
Pachter later better clarified his position through an editorial on Industry Gamers. He reiterated that working conditions at Team Bondi seemed indefensible (a point he made in the original video, to be fair), but there was little to suggest that these employees deserved overtime or that unions would have a natural way of integrating into the video game industry.
Either way, Pachter's just the latest to weigh in on a controversial topic that's swirled for years. He won't be the last, either.
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A few former Team Bondi employees -- the same ones who reported terrible work conditions under McNamara -- work at Dr. D and found it unsettling that McNamara was touring the offices, the source said. Apparently Miller is a fan of Team Bondi's work and is sympathetic to McNamara's reputation as a strict taskmaster, according to one employee at Dr. D: "The word is going 'round that Team Bondi is being folded into KMM studios; Team Bondi is pretty much doomed after the scandal and can't find any new supporters, so by doing this they can hide their name."
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With L.A. Noire's brain-bustingly successful existence as an adventure game, and with Deus Ex: Human Revolution bringing cyberpunk back into the limelight, Kojima was asked whether or not he thinks the world is ready for another Snatcher. "I would love to do something like Snatcher," he said, "but I do not have the time or the means to do so. But if anyone else would like to develop it, I would love it."
It's sad to hear that the series' progenitor won't be returning to Neo Kobe City anytime soon, but at least die-hard Snatcher fans (Snatchies, we call ourselves) can look forward to a radio drama based on the game. What do you think? Should Snatcher be handed off to another developer, or left as-is?View Poll
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Taking a similar stance as studio boss Brendan McNamara, Heironymus says that while employees worked long hours, they weren't being asked to do anything that their superiors weren't also doing. Heironymus also downplayed the 100-hour weeks that some staffers have claimed, saying that he would have discouraged any members of his team attempting to work that much.
However, Heironymus isn't claiming innocence for Team Bondi's management. He writes, "no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project."
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"I know, I know. I'll be labelled as 'Brendan McNamara's sock puppet' or worse," begins Dave Heironymous' post on GamaSutra today, "You'll just have to take my word that I'm doing this because I enjoy working at Team Bondi and don't want to see it destroyed by anonymous ex-employees."
Team Bondi's Dave Heironymous says the story of the studio's work practices has been a one-sided argument thus far.Heironymous is one of Team Bondi's original employees, having joined the company straight out of University as a junior programmer, and eventually worked his way up to a position of team management. He spent the last four years working as L.A. Noire's lead gameplay programmer, and self-identifies as one of the "management goon squad" referred to by the ex-employees of the studio who have decried the working conditions at the studio in recent weeks. Heironymous had much to say on the subject of Team Bondi's working practices, and his own experiences with the alleged crunch hours that have drawn so much ire.
In Heironymous' mind, longer working hours were an inevitability of the development process. Indeed, most developers will tell you that crunching is simply a fact of making a game, but the issue many have taken the studio to task for regards falsified claims of crunch hour needs, pertaining to perpetually missed release dates and milestones. However, Heironymous says that no one at the studio worked any harder than management themselves did, and that compensation for additional hours was routinely given.
Recognising that working on the weekend was inevitable, Team Bondi put in place a scheme to (generously) reward employees for their weekend days spent at work. Additionally, in the last 6 months of the project a scheme was put in place to reward employees for staying back late on weeknights, and this resulted in myself and most of my team getting an additional 4 weeks of leave upon completion of L.A. Noire, on top of the weekend working payment.Towards the end of the project I was probably working (on average) around 65 hours per week. Apart from a few isolated cases (various demo builds) this was the highest my regular hours ever got to, and at no time did I ever work 100 hours per week. If you think about it, that's 14 hours per day, 7 days per week, which is huge. I can't say that no-one ever worked 100 hours per week, but those sorts of hours were not encouraged. In fact, if someone on my team was working that hard I would have done my best to stop them.I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn't expect of myself. The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched. Brendan himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was.In regards to the accusing parties who have repeatedly commented (albeit anonymously) on the dire working conditions at the studio, Heironymous challenged their motivation for coming after the company.
If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I'm all for it. I have a wife and friends who didn't see very much of me during the latter stages of L.A. Noire, and I'm lucky my wife was so understanding. All of the management and staff at Team Bondi want to improve our processes so we can make even better games in a decent timeframe, without burning people out along the way. However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see Team Bondi destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job. That seems to me to be a less laudable motivation.At no point in Heironymous' missive does he lay down any theories as to why former employees would be banding together to ruin the studios' reputation, nor does he address the crediting issues that left a hundred former employees without published credit for their work on L.A. Noire (most recently covered by our own Patrick Klepek here). However, Heironymous does concede that over the course of the game's lengthy development cycle, some mistakes were likely made, and simply asks for the chance to improve on things for the future.
Saying all of this, no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project. The people at Team Bondi are great to work with and I'm confident that we can make Team Bondi a leading game studio on the international stage.Please think about that when you talk about boycotting L.A. Noire or about how heinous Team Bondi is. There is a team of dedicated game developers here in Sydney that look forward to learning from their mistakes, improving on their successes and taking on the world again next time around.↕
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Una Cruickshank worked on L.A. Noire, but you wouldn't know it.
Even if you were patient enough to sit through the rolling credits after finishing the game, you wouldn't see her name. Cruickshank was one of the many people who passed in and out of the protracted L.A. Noire development process that began way back in 2004.
L.A. Noire was a PlayStation 3 exclusive to be published by Sony at one point, remember?
The only reason Cruickshank's listed on Moby Games right now as having contributed is due to a petition, located at www.lanoirecredits.com, organized by 149 developers who claim to have been left off the credits for the joint production between Rockstar Games and Team Bondi.
Cruickshank agreed to talk to me because the issue of proper crediting is not exclusive to L.A. Noire or Rockstar Games, though the company has been publicly criticized for similar problems in the past.
It's an industry-wide problem, one which has no clear solution and continues to weigh heavily over the community.
After graduating from college, Cruickshank started at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, Scotland where all of the major Grand Theft Auto releases have been crafted. She had humble beginnings at the studio, who was developing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas at the time. She started as a temporary contractor, then offered a permanent position as a development assistant after the game shipped in October 2004 on PlayStation 2.
"After about a year I decided I was bored with being a development assistant, and that what I really wanted to be was a scriptwriter," she told me recently. "James Worrall, the lead writer on the GTA series, very kindly gave me some dialogue to work on and with that I was off: I've been writing in one field or another ever since."
During that time, she worked on both San Andreas and the PSP spin-off Liberty City Stories. She was from New Zealand, though, using a work visa. When that expired and she was unable to procure a new one, she left Rockstar North and applied at Team Bondi, a studio she'd never heard of at the time. Strangely enough, she was leaving Rockstar Games to end up working with Rockstar Games again on the company's adopted project, L.A. Noire, as a script assistant.
Cruickshank wasn't there when L.A. Noire's development started or finished, and when she joined the studio, she never heard of any official policy about crediting. What happens to anyone who works on the game but leaves before completion?
"It was understood among the developers that if you did not see the project through to completion you would lose your credit," she said. "I knew this because I had worked in game development before and had seen it happen: how the younger developers with no experience worked it out I have no idea. It was simply accepted as fact that if you quit, got fired or were made redundant you would have nothing to show for your work. In the course of a seven year development cycle, that happened to an awful lot of people, some of whom put years of work into a project they loved. The day I resigned, I knew that one of the things I was giving up was my credit, and it made the decision even more difficult."
If you look up the credits for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you'll find Cruickshank's name.Ultimately, Cruickshank wasn't credited when L.A. Noire shipped in May. She left Team Bondi in January 2008.
Companies are not required to credit everyone who touched a project because there is not an industry-wide forced standard. The International Game Developers Association has established the closest thing we have by actually creating a standardization template for developers to use, but it's all optional.
"The L.A. Noire issue highlights the dichotomy relating to credits," said Brian Robbins, chair of the IGDA board of directors and founder of mobile developer Riptide Games. "Some developers and studio heads see a credit as a 'badge.' They see credits as an award ribbon that you get for crossing the finish line or the pat on the back for sticking through long hours and poor working conditions. The people that feel this way might consider giving credit to an artist that worked on the game two years previous and left for greener pastures after a year almost insulting."
Rockstar Games has been knocked for credits in the past, and it's the last incident that prompted the IGDA to create a Credits Standards Committee to write credits guidelines in the first place.
It was not the only thing the Manhunt series became known for, but long before L.A. Noire, Manhunt 2's release caused controversy for a number of developers left off the credits list.Jurie Horneman was employed at the now-defunct Rockstar Vienna, working as a senior project manager on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for Xbox and a producer on Manhunt 2. He was credited for the former but not the latter, and made headlines back in 2007 for publishing a list with a much more complete list of developers who'd contributed to Manhunt 2.
"I would have been surprised if they had credited us for Manhunt 2 and the other AAA next-gen project we had in development," Horneman told me. "But I kind of saw it coming so I had the blog post with the full credits prepared. The list was made with help from and in cooperation with other ex-Rockstar Vienna people. What I didn't know is that Hannes Seifert, one of the two former managing directors of Rockstar Vienna, was involved with the IGDA credits effort. He knew I was preparing the blog post, so the fact that the IGDA revealed their credits standard at the same time was no accident, even if I didn't know about it at the time."
There wasn't a company-wide policy regarding credits at Rockstar Games, as far as Horneman ever knew. As a studio, however, Rockstar Vienna took it upon themselves to keep a credits document at the start of a project and keep it updated as people cycled through the company. Obviously, the list wasn't used.
"From looking at L.A. Noire and Manhunt 2, it seems they put everyone who was there at the end into the credits, and left off anyone who was not," said Horneman.
And while Rockstar Games has taken multiple hits regarding credits, Mythic Entertainment was under fire in 2008, after the launch of Warhammer Online. It was a similar situation, with anyone still working at Mythic Entertainment when the MMO launched listed in the lengthy credits. Whereas Rockstar Games has mostly ignored both situations, Mythic Entertainment actually built an online database to properly credit anyone who'd been a part of putting together Warhammer Online.
While these situations are unfortunate and uncomfortable, the IGDA applauds the result.
"While creating the standard has helped a few developers," said Robbins, "it’s the public outcry that emerges every time high profile games are accused of omitting people from the credits that really has impact."
The ambitious world in L.A. Noire took hundreds of developers nearly a decade to create.If Brendan McNamara had left L.A. Noire halfway through development, there would be headlines (in fact, that's happened anyway). No one noticed when Cruickshank left because she wasn't put in front of the press. Without a public record of her involvement, it's not surprising no one called foul when the game shipped without her name.
"For many of us, the fear of not being credited was a large part of what kept us working on L.A. Noire through a long and sometimes difficult development cycle," she said. "It wasn't that we didn't love and believe in the game, but this was a monumental project which demanded a lot from its staff over a very long time."
"A number of Team Bondi's developers were hired directly out of university or TAFE [technical and further education institutions in Australia]" she continued. "L.A. Noire was their first real job, and a few years into the project some began to feel that they literally could not leave--if they did, they would be in their mid-twenties or early thirties with what amounted to a blank resume. Fair and consistent crediting rules would have allowed those people to make their own decisions about their employment without fearing that they had wasted years of their working lives."
Horneman shared some of the same concerns, but said this wouldn't be the case for every individual.
"I have blank spots in my resume, it's impossible to tell how much it has affected my career," he said. "If I see someone with a 'AAA' resume, I am not surprised when there are a lot gaps and cancelled projects on there. And you can always find someone who worked with the person and get feedback that way. So I am perhaps a bit more sanguine than most about the value of credits. I can say I've been making games for over 20 years, which probably helps open doors."
Therein lies the rub for some developers.
With the rise of mobile and social games, the IGDA estimates the number of developers who go uncredited on projects has only risen in recent years. Without credit, a new programmer or artist just breaking in could be left with nothing to show for it.
In the movie industry, labor unions like the Writers Guild of America fight for the rights of its members, performing duties such as enforcing credits. Unions don't exist in video games. It's not to say unions are the only way to make credits more important in the eyes of developers and publishers, but unions are one way to collectively force an industry towards change.
"To force an industry to value credits and understand their worth will require employees to insist on receiving them," said Robbins. "As long as we 'understand' and 'accept' that crediting is only a participation award for the finishers, the industry will continue to treat employees that way."
Those who worked on Warhammer Online but left before ship were added to an online database.Games are still in the early stages of maturing as a medium. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision defending the First Amendment rights of games is one signal of that, albeit an important one. As games become better known as creative works worth acknowledging, the demand for those who craft them to, in turn, receive acknowledgement for their work may grow.
"In game development, it is not unusual to be in a dark position where everything seems lost, and then, through a heroic effort involving overtime, suddenly everything works and is done on time, sort of," said Horneman. "From personal experience I can tell you that going through a phase like that is an incredibly bonding experience. And it then becomes very natural to believe that anyone who wasn't there doesn't know what it was like and maybe doesn't deserve to be credited. And, also, that you can solve any problem by crunching--hey, it worked last time! It takes maturity to realize that this a short term solution, and that you cannot build a medium to long term strategy based on that."
If the IGDA's prediction that more and more developers are being left off credits is true, we need more developers to be brave enough to come forward, and gaming advocates need to champion them on.
"The biggest enemy to an industry crediting standard is apathy," concluded Robbins.
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Boom.
Does a game have to be fun? What constitutes a game, anyway? And what's a nongame?
These questions are more weighed after finishing Jordan Magnuson's The Killer (play it here). About a minute in, I died. A mine had killed me, something I had no control over. It's one of three endings to The Killer, an interactive...experience? The pixel artwork will remind you of a video game, and you are a controlling a character from left to right, but it's...well...
The Killer isn't about defeating an alien menace or terrorists or resurrected Nazi zombies. Set in Cambodia, The Killer involves a lot of walking. I'd recommend you just go play it, actually. I'll wait.
Done?
Powerful, right?
A photo snapped by Magnuson and his wife, while travelling through Cambodia this year."I was lying in bed one night listening to Jonsi's 'Tornado' when the idea for The Killer came to me," explained Magnuson, writing to me over email as he makes his way through Europe. "I was traveling in Cambodia at the time, reading about the Khmer Rouge, and I had just been to visit Toul Sleng: a prison camp in Phnom Penh where 10,000 people were killed between 1977 and 1979. As I listened to Jonsi's lyrics, and those haunting vocals, I imagined myself marching someone to the field where I would shoot them, or bludgeon their head in (as was more typical). Imagined getting to the field, and having that simple choice to make, of whether to carry out my purpose...or not. Once anything is in my head that way, it's only half a step to my imagining it as some kind of computer game, or notgame."
Magnuson has no problem with the term "notgame." When you say "game," that saddles certain expectations. Games have an ever-expanding history, compounded by a struggle with the very term of "video game," and having definitions is problematic.
I touched on this idea when writing about L.A. Noire a few weeks back, asking for game experiences that better reflected the broader range of human emotion. As someone who is paid to play and write about video games, however, I often wonder whether my colleagues and I are the only ones who'd like to see more of this. When you're exposed to a random violent military shooter number for the thousandth time (like this year's E3), you crave more. For the vast majority of players who use video games as escapism, the exhilaration of the power fantasy may be enough. Even if that's true, why limit the medium?
But I digress. Magnuson puts it much better, anyway.
"The Killer, as far as I see it, is something like a short interactive poem, and it doesn't intend to be anything more," he said. "I call it a notgame to try and spark a little bit of realization that not everything interactive has to be a game, and also to try and prepare the player for encountering something that won't be fun."
The Killer is a spiritual successor to Walk or Die, another Magnuson experiment.It's best to know as little about The Killer before playing it. The surprise, especially if you encounter the random element that is the mine, has an exponentially greater impact. And the point of game vs. nongame may be moot, as The Killer is simply using the interactive possibilities of software to make a point, and having barrels of fun while making a point is not required.
"In some ways it's an experience to be 'endured' rather than 'enjoyed,'" admitted Magnsun, "which some people may find odd or objectionable, as the idea of 'interactive experience' outside of the realm of software tools has become conflated with entertainment for most of us."
One of the most recent snaps of Magnuson on his GameTrekking trip, this time in England.There are three ways The Killer may end: encountering a mine, choosing to kill the person or firing into the sky, not killing them. The epilogue, explaining how the game was inspired by the horrors faced by the Cambodian people past and present, is the same no matter what.
Magnuson has made nongames in the past (play them all here), but The Killer's one part of a more ambitious, world-spanning project called Gametrekking, whose mission statement is to make games influenced by seeing the world. The Killer is just one example. Following the same path as so many others these days with a concept they're hoping people will love, he funded the idea through Kickstarter. He's been "trekking" for months now, moving through Taiwan, Vietnam, and others.
As mentioned, The Killer was inspired by Magnuson's stay in Cambodia.
"GameTrekking project is not about attempting some objective presentation of Cambodia, or any other place that I've been to," he said, "but rather about my trying to express something of my own particular encounters with places as I travel in the twenty-first century. [...] It was because of this project that I was studying the Khmer Rouge, and it was because I was in Cambodia that I saw how much its past history is still affecting the country today. I strongly doubt that I ever would have had the particular idea that turned into The Killer if I had not been able to actually visit Toul Sleng and the Cheong Ek killing fields."
I've spoken to Magnuson before, as part of a piece for EGM, not long before he hit the road. He's a man who takes the potential of games very seriously, frustrated by today's most popular games (read: Call of Duty) coming to define the medium for a great many people.
We're in agreement there, even if I understand the precarious balance, as ultimately games need to make money. It comes back to this notion of fun for me, and whether fun is part of the equation that makes up an experience, game--or nongame.
Playing with this notion can lead to extreme reactions, as the comments on The Killer at Newgrounds underscore. Magnuson said most of the ratings are either one or ten, basically a love or hate reaction.
Take this one, for example.
"I came here to play a game, not wasting my time with this sentimental sob story crap," said a user named xzibition8612, not pulling any punches. "Who gives a shit what happens in cambodia? I don't care what happens there as long as they keep making my shoes and sushi. Don't waste everybody's time under the pretense of a game."
It doesn't phase Magnuson, but he worries about what it means.
"I think if we're afraid of 'losing fun,' we're going to severely limit our potential for exploration where this medium is concerned, and that would be a shame," he said. "Games are going to be around forever...I don't think we have to worry that our grandchildren are going to end up in some kind of grayscale world where they're forced to play boring notgames all day long. So my feeling is, let's not worry about it 'working.' Let's experiment, and see what's outside the box. I think there's plenty of room for all varieties of fun and emotion and meaning to exist together, and side by side."
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Team Bondi developed one of the year's biggest games in the acclaimed detective adventure L.A. Noire. Over the course of the years-long process to bring that game to fruition, the studio appears to have jilted more than its share of ex-employees along the way. And now they're speaking out en masse.
It all started when somewhere around 100 former developers suddenly found themselves uncredited for their work in the game and launched a website to protest this fact. It continued when IGN published a story from freelance writer Andrew McMillen, who took Team Bondi to task for reportedly troubling work conditions at the studio over the course of the game's seven-year development cycle, providing quotes from both anonymous former employees of the company, and even oft-complained-about studio head Brandon McNamara. McNamara's quotes (which halfway confirmed many of the complaints lodged against the company, and simultaneously brushed them aside as simple facts of being a developer in this business) seemed to tell all the story there was to tell at the time, but evidently, McMillen was far from done.
Things have gotten very ugly Down Under.In a story published yesterday on GamesIndustry.biz (you'll need a registered account on the site to read the whole thing), McMillen went to town on Team Bondi, bringing to light a lengthy series of internal emails collected by former employees of the studio which depict McNamara and the management at Team Bondi as complicit in grinding former studio workers into the ground with insane hours and minimal compensation.
Without just reprinting the entire series of emails McMillen posted in his story (you should read the entire thing, as it's fascinating stuff), the core issues pertain to McNamara and the studio's upper management, who allegedly dangled L.A. Noire's completion date as a perpetual carrot on a stick in order to secure lengthy, unpaid overtime hours from the rest of the company's staff. Multiple emails from as far back as 2008 show studio management proclaiming the game's completion as projected within a six month window of the email's send date. In nearly all instances, these emails were used as justification for increasing work hours at the studio, many of which allegedly were unpaid crunch hours. Sources then go on to list everything from misrepresented announcement dates (one email suggests impending media coverage a whole 14 months prior to the game's official unveiling in Game Informer last year), to non-existent raises and cost-of-living increases, despite hefty amounts of overtime work by employees across various departments.
The really bizarre thing about this whole story is how closely it echoes the now infamous Rockstar Spouse letter, which took the publisher to task for the alarmingly brutal hours it purportedly required Rockstar San Diego employees to work while finishing up Red Dead Redemption. That particular letter is something that one source at Team Bondi even mentioned as signaling something of an alarm bell for those working at the company. However, according to that source, studio management treated the letter as more an object of derision and mockery, rather than any sort of wake-up call to how their own employees might be feeling.
All these former employees bad-mouthing the company certainly seems like it might hit a little too close to home for Rockstar, though reportedly ties between the publisher and developer were strained long before any of this news hit. Though nothing has been said publicly by either company (and, again, these sources are anonymous, and thus cannot be directly corroborated), one source seems fairly sure that Rockstar's relationship with Team Bondi is merely a one-and-done.
"It's pretty well reported now that the working conditions were bad. What hasn't been discussed yet (from what I've seen) is the relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar. I've heard a lot about Rockstar's disdain for Team Bondi, and it has been made quite clear that they will not publish Team Bondi's next game. Team Bondi are trying to find another publisher for their next title, but the relationship with Rockstar has been badly damaged - Brendan treats L.A. Noire like a success due to his vision but I think Rockstar are the ones who saved the project. They continued to sink money into LA Noire, and their marketing was fantastic. Without their continued support, Team Bondi would have gone under several years ago."
"Rockstar also made a huge contribution to the development; their producers were increasingly influential over the last two years of the game's development, and overruled many of the insane decisions made by Team Bondi management. At a lower level, Rockstar also pitched in with programmers, animators, artists, QA, etc. Part of the conflict between Team Bondi and Rockstar was due to Rockstar's frustration with Team Bondi's direction, and eventually Team Bondi's management in turn resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control. It's also worth pointing out that Rockstar used to be very keen on making Team Bondi something like 'Rockstar Sydney' - the more they worked with Team Bondi management, the more they came to understand that this was a terrible idea."
This is, unfortunately, one of those ugly situations that we will likely never know the entire truth of. Rockstar is not a company known for its public displays of self-confession, and it seems unlikely that McNamara will be giving any more interviews following this latest volley of criticism from former employees of his studio. And while the veracity of their claims seems legit, given the sheer number of different sources (and the at least halfway confirmation of several of the claims by McNamara), it seems even more unlikely that any of these developers will step forward and give their names, either out of fear of lawsuit or blacklisting within the industry.
While L.A. Noire is unquestionably a major critical success, and at least a moderate commercial success, we are sadly now left to ponder at precisely what cost that success came at.
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In the story, we see a fracture begin to form in the developer's relationship with publisher Rockstar when the latter pulled out of E3 in 2010. We read why some environments in L.A. Noire seemed lifeless, and about developers scared to quit before the production wrapped, for fear that they wouldn't received accrued overtime pay.
We're familiar enough with crunch time in the industry, but this sounds like a particularly egregious case. We know we should be able to separate art from its artist but, frankly, stories like this make us appreciate the end product just a little bit less.
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Oh dear. Oh deary dear. All is not well between L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi and publisher Rockstar. Rockstar Leeds are busy working away on the PC version, but a report by GamesIndustry.biz, indicates Rockstar have no intention of working with Team Bondi again. Here’s the grisly details:
(more…)
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Thankfully, long-time LAPD veteran Skip Bauchman (yes, his real name) is here to tell us just how true-to-life Rockstar's true-to-life melodrama really is in the G4 video above. It's all fascinating stuff, but after watching the interview we're starting to think L.A. Noire hasn't given us the skill-set necessary to finally figure out who shot J.R.
[Thanks Michael!]
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Robbins told Develop, "Reports of 12-hour a day, lengthy crunch time, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and harmful to the individuals involved, the final product, and the industry as a whole," echoing sentiments made in the past by a variety of game industry leaders. He also encouraged the aforementioned folks tied to Team Bondi to shoot an email to "qol@igda.org," before he added, "But no lolcats please ... okay, maybe a few."
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LA Noire spent seven years in fiery development Hell under production by Team Bondi, and now the gritty details about its tumultuous birth are surfacing like a quick glance away on a pretty face. Following dozens of reports of inhumane work conditions, 60-hour weeks and extreme turnover, IGN Australia contacted 11 unnamed former Team Bondi employees and bossman Brendan McNamara for the lowdown on developing LA Noire Down Under.
One recurring point of contention was overtime: "No overtime was officially paid in the three years and three months that I worked at Team Bondi," one of the anonymous former employees said. McNamara responded to this complaint (and many others), saying Team Bondi had overtime pay in place, "but contractually, we don't have to do that."
Another anonymous source described McNamara as a "24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime." McNamara didn't seem to have a response to that one. Read all of the complaints and McNamara's rebuttals in the full interview.
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