The hardest thing about my job, I would say, is dealing with the changing desires of clients who often do not really understand software development. The games I’ve made have always been based on existing properties, like TV shows, films or books. Clients are thus filmmakers or TV producers, and sometimes authors. They deal with linear narratives in which they control their audience perfectly. Games have to give players choices, which means a sometimes branching narrative, and in that way at least they’re a little more complex to build.

Whenever a focus test changes the client’s mind about what the audience will want next year, they casually ask for things like:

“The first level (which has been done for months and approved) needs to take place in space, not at sea” (I’m serious)
“We need the main character to not be human, but an alien” (I’m serious)
“Yes, I know we asked for a shooting game, and the game is now fully designed, but now the emphasis of the movie has moved onto the character’s deep seated love of singing, so we can’t have any shooting” (Yep)

I read an article in Game Developer yesterday about working with Hollywood and how wonderful the interaction would be for our industry, and what a great influx of experienced talent this would bring to games. A couple of weeks ago, Don Daglow (maker of the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game) extolled how wonderful it had been to work with the filmmakers, with Weta changing the movie’s production schedule to make art assets available to the game makers earlier. Uh, WOW.

Still, I can’t help but be a little skeptical. In my limited experience, Hollywood is the true creator, and I make swag (a game) aimed at marketing their product (a movie). Perhaps mutual respect will come the day when Hollywood makes as many movies about games, as there are games made about movies. Hopefully someday, our content will be rich enough to warrant this.