::fibreculture:: Games industry discussion

[Christian McCrea]

Thanks Melissa,

I would just like to also thank Tom and Jean's links relating to Auran
and Fury. Theres a few issues dovetailing
in this discussion, from the games industry question, to the teaching
of games, and to Fibreculture / list activity.
I'll seperate the issues for now even though the strength of Melissa'
post was to link them:

Games Industry
-----------------------
The collapse of Auran was important, but not catastrophic, by all
accounts of people involved and more intimate
with the processes of the company. It is neither representative of the
Australian game development community
nor particularly instructive as an example of what King's article saw
as 'spin'. An exterior analysis of Fury is only
that - exterior - but I would hazard a guess and look at the noises
made by departing staff that it was not entirely
unforseen. In short, the product didn't so much fail, as the process.
Even highly successful MMORPGs aren't
always developed with a sound economic strategy. The whole point of
the developer's association's discussions
about more funding from government are to forestall some of the
effects of producing games in Australia, and it is
possible that Fury may have been a different product with different
circumstances. However, the game's design
puzzled many people (including game academics) following its progress
through the vital pre-release and Beta
cycles. The entire methodological superstructure of games -
prototyping and experience - misfired in this case.
Although as said, without more intimate knowledge, any more discussion
of Fury is pre-emptive of comments that
may appear in a future post-mortem.

There is this one on F13.net:
http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=626#more

Its clear from this interview that King was categorically wrong. It
was not a case of "Developer's expectations far
exceeded market capabilities" but that the team went through a faulty
process and the game never really had a chance.
The strength of the industry is reflected in the voracious speed of
pick-up of key employees from many Melbourne
companies.

Games Education
--------------------------
King's numbers are probably quite low; I would expect a couple of
thousand more enrolled students in game-related courses
across the country by now. Where an opportunity lies for games
academia is to communicate on a very basic level that these
courses are not a sausage factory for industry. Many, if not most of
the students I've met from Swinburne, RMIT, Deakin and
Monash are very entrepreneurial and are keen to create for themselves
a creative career using skills they are assembling
on their own terms. Which sounds frightfully like a normal Bachelor
degree graduate, in the end. It may be incumbent on us
to communicate that games design processes teach all manner of skills
and behaviours that are becoming more and more
important across digital and sometimes non-digital industries.
Graduates are ending up working across areas, adding interactivity
to websites, helping design children's toys, consulting for government
- just to name examples I'm aware of. The process of game
design education is offering skills usually thought of as the domain
of the managerial and technical schools.

Fibreculture and List Culture
-------------------------------------------------
If people are posting or writing elsewhere, then it should be
discussed in order to gauge what FC does and doesn't do for its
members;
that would be healthy. I'm not aware of any lists that survive now
that aren't very closely regulated and match the tempo of a bulletin
board forum, most of which now use PhPBB. The inter-linkage is now so
thick that perhaps some of us feel that posting to something
like FC is not as effective as finding something on the web which can
generate more discussion - and many people have their own
research blogs. Often, these blogs have that little area with littler
icons; linked.in, flickr, facebook, twitter, etc - that they are worn
on the right side of the blog jacket like medals from the Queen. Which
is fine on its own terms, but perhaps technology has moved on
from email so much that a new format - forum or otherwise - may make more sense.


Thanks,

Christian McCrea
Lecturer in Games and Interactivity
Swinburne University of Technology