"Snooty" Shooter Critics Anger Rage Dev

[Treblaine]

When another game developer tries to cash in on the success of a game that isn't theirs, people start to wonder where the creative genius has gone from those that no longer want to defend their own innovations as unique, and start admitting;
"yes, we are aiming to provide something similar to what makes this other popular title popular."

Carmack should be staunchly defending why his games are different from a rival's successful product. How they are instead similar to his own previous successes, etc etc.

No doubt he's been backed into a corner by some journalistic pressure and said something that was later thrown in false light by whatever media has reproduced his words.

I can't think of a better example of the repurcussions of making a game similar to COD than Crysis 2 was, in a multiplayer aspect at least.
Everyone started saying, "oh this is just a COD clone, why play this when I can play the real thing?"

And all you get as a developer is the public comparing your game to the other, and more often than not people coming up with things where your game fell short of the other, rather than focusing on what makes your game unique. You just heard a lot of "it's just COD with a nanosuit", rather than "this shooter runs great with this nanosuit mechanic."

Crysis 1 may have been similar to Halo with the nanosuit, but you clearly only had people comparing the whole 'suit' aspect, as opposed to calling crysis1 "halo in the jungle".



But no doubt Carmack here is just having a whinge about the most pretentious of critics who might abuse him for not being willing to take a total diversion from usual shooter and create a full innovation on the shooter, at the high risk of flopping totally.

He's probably just trying to say "I do what I'm good at and that should be popular because people like what I'm good at, and that's been popular before so why should I change?"

But as they say in the media, "If you've opened your mouth you've already said too much."

But I think the industry including critics are enlightened enough to know that First Psrson Shooters/something can be great:
-Half Life 2
-Bioshock
-Elder Scrolls
-Fallout 3+
-Deus Ex
-Portal
-Metroid Prime

Tho Im not sure about Deus Ex, Im pretty sure Elder Scrolls is not a shooter...
But if you mean that it's a game that many others have copied after and enjoyed relative success, then that is definitely true.

Ah, you shoot arrows? You shoot fireballs?

The title "FPS" isn't perfect but it has come to define a genre far wider than the literal meaning of the acronym. Like how you can have a "slasher film" even if the serial killer has a weapon with zero slashing ability, the important thing is you have a serial killer picking of the cast one by one, not the semantics of the tools used.

The essential thing is the immersion of the first person perspective, one of the initial key benefits is how it simplified aiming as you looked down the light of sight of the projectiles. But I think most significant now is the immersion factor, how literally looking through the eyes of the in game protagonist (often without breaking that perspective) how powerful that game be for gameplay storytelling.

I'd - with some hesitation - call Amnesia: Dark Ascent and FPS game even though there is zero shooting at all. I'd never call it a "First Person Shooter", I'd use the acronym "FPS" with the "S" could stand for something other than "shooter". Like "First Person Scarer" or "First Person Searcher".

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

The reason we always want to see innovation is because doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. I can't speak for everyone else in the country, but I really don't find CoD multiplayer interesting. Similarly, I don't enjoy any of the other shooters that look and feel similar, like Battlefield. Now It's not that I don't enjoy them because lots of other people do, it's because I played one of them, I got tired of it, and then they released another one that felt like the same game. At that point I gave up. On the opposite side of that, I do enjoy the Halo franchise. It's also popular, a few years ago it was the most popular FPS franchise around. The thing is, from Halo CE to Halo 2 they changed the engine and added new mechanics. From Halo 2 to 3 they changed the engine again and modified old mechanics and added new ones. Then there was ODST and Reach. They were games with and entirely different feel. Not to mention the fact that all of the Halo games had their own story lines that continued the tale of Master Chief or the Happenings around him, which felt like new content.

All this to say, popularity certainly isn't the issue. However, claiming that innovation isn't necessary, and that making a game with the same formula over and over again is a good idea for a developer... that's not going to get the industry anywhere. The people who make really fun games and really move things forward are the people who try new things. You have to remember that back when Carmack was getting into the FPS industry... there wasn't an FPS industry. He was one of the people doing something that hadn't been done(much) before.

 

[Dragon_Nexus]

"and that while he was happy that Rage was different from the other shooters on the market"

Really? Cos...I've seen a few trailers for Rage and...well I couldn't see anything in there that I didn't almost immediately identify from another game. Particularlt Fallout 3, Bioshock and Borderlands.

 

[Dragon_Nexus]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

What about Mass Effect? Or Fallout? Or Metro?
There are plenty of shooters that aren't just military gun wank.

 

[crystalsnow]

I was going to post something here, but after looking at some of the replies this thread has on it, I'm just going to put the following:

[Insert trolling here]

 

[bob1052]

Carmacks argument here is that CoD is popular and therefore good.

You are so wrong.

Carmack's argument here is that CoD is popular and therefore people enjoy it.

Not really, he never says that bad games should get a free pass. What's he's sick of is people dismissing shooters just because they're shooters.

I draw your attention to the following:

"That's still a proven formula that people like, and it's a mistake to [discount that]. As long as people are buying it, it means they're enjoying it," he said. "If they buy the next Call of Duty, it's because they loved the last one and they want more of it."

Replace Call of Duty with Transformers in that quote.

He doesn't use the word good once in that quote. You are trying to define his argument as something it isn't so that you can attack the falsified argument you have attributed to him.

Oh and

I didn't condemn anyone. I said Carmack was an idiot.

Stop being an idiot.

 

[Dfskelleton]

I guess I can agree with that. However, I don't see many people dissing shooters just because they're shooters. Well, I guess if someone were to notice, it'd be one of the founders of the genre.
Also, how the hell do you interpret "popularity isn't a bad thing" as "innovation is a bad thing"? How do you do that? You'd have to have pretentiousness seeping from your pores to think that.

 

[Jumplion]

So you're complaining that a immutable constant of gaming that has been around forever and will be around forever for incredibly obvious reasons is around.

I don't recall a point in time where the industry had a flood of "Sonic the Hedgehog clones" dominate the market. I'm not even talking about copying to begin with, it's the over-saturation I'm annoyed with.

You weren't a gamer in the mid 90's, were you? Busby, Bryan the Lion, Mr. Nutz, Aero the Acrobat, Awesome Possum, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrle, Zool, Ristar, Plok, Chester Cheetah, Cool Spot - do you want me to keep going, or are you getting the picture yet?

Those mid 90s ripoffs were just that; in the mid 90s. The FPS dominance has been here for practically 2 decades.

 

[]DustArma[]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

Oh LOOK, if it isn't Snooty McSnoot, Carmack was talking about you now, wasn't him.

I'm not even going to bother to point out what's wrong with your argument (everything), I'll just let the mods do their job.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

My problem with this is that he seems to be acting under the idea that not only does popular = good, but unpopular, or indie = bad. I'm sorry, was Super Meat Boy not one of the best games of 2010? Is Minecraft not the most succesful PC game of the year? Does not innovation and creativity pay off when coupled with good marketing and word-of-mouth? No, I guess that popular and bland is as good as moderately successful and amazing. Nice to see you're reaching for the stars there, Mr. Carmack.

Oh, excuse me Mr. Carmack. I had not realized my behavior was unbecoming, I merely believed that I was one of the millions filling your paychecks and therefore had the ground to criticize your products when they didn't meet my expectations.

Don't worry, I won't make that mistake again.

You're the only one who's made sense so far, amen.

DustArma[]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

Oh LOOK, if it isn't Snooty McSnoot, Carmack was talking about you now, wasn't him.

I'm not even going to bother to point out what's wrong with your argument (everything), I'll just let the mods do their job.

He's not being snooty, he's being vindictive and mean. Call me crazy, but I'm almost 100% certain there's room in this world for "arty" games and dumb fun action games? Unless we're talking about playing the market, in which case, I have little to no opinion that Zero Punctuation hasn't already summed up for me.

Meanwhile, anyone calling every shooter "juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiasts" is probably the kind of person who either hasn't played Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex, witnessing the sort of deep and interpersonal story that can be told from a first-person perspective, or someone who has only ever played Duke Nukem, a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychotic rape-enthusiasts. Oh wait.

 

[ZeppMan217]

Come on, you are not serious. Are you really gonna listen a man who said that story in games is like story in porn movies? Carmack might be a good, even great, coder etc. but he doesn't know shit outside his vacuum sphere.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

It's not popularity that's the problem, but just cranking out the same game. Even if it's still good, some innovation will always make something that much better.

 

[b3nn3tt]

Popularity should have no bearing on whether or not an individual enjoys a game. Enjoyment is a purely subjective factor. To take a recent example, Duke Nukem Forever was fair well-trounced by reviewers, but it still sold well, and I'm sure there are a large number of people out there who thoroughly enjoyed it. Personally, I haven't played it, so I can't opine, but I would never claims someone's opinion to be invalid if it's different to mine. Popularity does not indicate whether something is good or bad, it simmply indicates how popular something is. For example, Call of Duty is an extremely popular franchise. Does this mean it is a good franchise? No. Does it mean it is a bad franchise? No. It simply means that it is popular. I'm willing to bet that most, if not all the people that buy it enjoy it, and that is enough.

In terms of innovation; innovation can be good, it can be bad. Every successful innovation will doubtless lead to imitators, who try to tweak the formula. Whether or not this is good depends on the end product. Copying something else does not necessarily mean that a game/film/book/sandwich will be bad. It may well be, but it might also surpass the thing it was copying. Unsuccessful innovation just acts as a learning curve, there will always be failures mixed with successes. However, I would say that innovation for innovation's sake isn't a good idea.

 

[The Droog]

I draw your attention to the following:

"That's still a proven formula that people like, and it's a mistake to [discount that]. As long as people are buying it, it means they're enjoying it," he said. "If they buy the next Call of Duty, it's because they loved the last one and they want more of it."

Replace Call of Duty with Transformers in that quote.

He doesn't use the word good once in that quote. You are trying to define his argument as something it isn't so that you can attack the falsified argument you have attributed to him.

Indeed, in fact that's the very definition of a strawman argument. Well spotted!

My problem with this is that he seems to be acting under the idea that not only does popular = good, but unpopular, or indie = bad.

Lucky for John Carmack that he didn't actually say that unpopular is bad then, isn't it? As a few people here have already pointed out, what JC said was that popular games are enjoyed by a lot of people. Whether these games are good/bad/innovative are in fact irrelevant to his statement.

I also think that a lot of people fail to realise that when JC says that developers ought to make games they enjoy rather than aim for innovation that this does NOT mean the two are mutually exclusive! A work project that's a labour of love will always be a better product than something you hated but had to finish just in order to pay the bills, right? If that labour of love can show some innovation, then great! But it shouldn't be shoehorned in just for the sake of it.

There seems to be a lot of jumping to conclusions in the comments here and I'm seriously unsure why this is. Carmack's quotes weren't that hard to comprehend were they?

 

[Dastardly]

The kind of snobbery that Carmack describes isn't limited just to videogames; you'll find the same kind of people in the worlds of music, film, books, and every other medium. While there's definitely a discussion to be had about how much creativity it is reasonable to expect from triple A games, Carmack's point about popularity not being an intrinsically bad thing has a lot of merit. Hopefully, no one is letting videogame hipsters ruin their fun.

And that's where we hit the line between "art" and "product."

"Art" has something of an obligation to be creative. "Products" need only be marketable. When a product happens to be created in an artistic medium (or when an artist begins to market their creations), which is it really--art, or a product? Once the artistic and the commercial worlds meet, it's hard to separate them again.

 

[Logan Westbrook]

The kind of snobbery that Carmack describes isn't limited just to videogames; you'll find the same kind of people in the worlds of music, film, books, and every other medium. While there's definitely a discussion to be had about how much creativity it is reasonable to expect from triple A games, Carmack's point about popularity not being an intrinsically bad thing has a lot of merit. Hopefully, no one is letting videogame hipsters ruin their fun.

And that's where we hit the line between "art" and "product."

"Art" has something of an obligation to be creative. "Products" need only be marketable. When a product happens to be created in an artistic medium (or when an artist begins to market their creations), which is it really--art, or a product? Once the artistic and the commercial worlds meet, it's hard to separate them again.

That essentially encapsulates the discussion I mentioned. It's no bad thing to want to see more creativity from the industry, but that desire can become snobbery, and that's what Carmack is railing against.

 

[Dastardly]

That essentially encapsulates the discussion I mentioned. It's no bad thing to want to see more creativity from the industry, but that desire can become snobbery, and that's what Carmack is railing against.

Agreed. One of the biggest problems with that snobbery is that it ignores the contribution of these popular games in increasing the reach of the medium. Forgive the comparison, but children's books are hardly ever "art." They do, however, introduce kids to reading, which increases the chances they'll bump into some art later on, doesn't it? Of course, if we only use that reach to dispense more of the same, yes, that's a problem...

...but that's the second biggest problem with that snobbery: It betrays a belief that only one kind of game can exist. If these people aren't making "real art," then they're somehow making it impossible for others to make real art. It would be like organic food stores complaining that as long as Twinkies exist, no one's eating healthy. Instead, they should recognize that, while selling similar products, they're selling them to two separate audiences...

...which leads to the third biggest problem with that snobbery: It puts responsibility for change in the wrong hands. The assumption seems to be that if they can stop the big guys from selling "crap," all the former buyers of that crap will suddenly... what? Buy Limbo and be happy? Removing a competing product doesn't guarantee people will buy yours. If you want to change the landscape, you've got to work on changing what the audience is looking for. Again, forgive the comparison, but a baby isn't going to switch from strained carrots to hamburgers just because you took away the carrots. You have to get them ready for it, step by step, and it takes time.

 

[adfgsahjfdgshja]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

What about Mass Effect? Or Fallout? Or Metro?
There are plenty of shooters that aren't just military gun wank.

Let me elaborate.

In media, violence should be used as a tool and never as the base structure. When done right violence can be extremely powerful, but when you do it constantly it loses all it's effect. It becomes casual, boring and even silly. If one makes violence seem like a casual thing, then it destroys the whole idea of violence. Violence is a shocking, powerful and a very negative force that most people don't normally wish upon anyone, and in a universe where violence is the norm, our norm becomes their violence. In such a universe our rules don't apply, and when characters react to things like we do, it seems silly and strange (case in point; almost every shooter ever made).

Even in all of your examples, the game has you commit multiple genocide even before you've finished breakfast. Games approach murder and death in a very juvenile fashion even in games like Mass Effect.

http://moviebodycounts.com/

This is a site that counts deaths in movies. Of all movies, the most kills by a character on screen is 150, and it goes radically down from there. In most shooters 150 kills would be a considered a small amount.

I think one of the biggest problem that video games have is the genres we've given to games. A film or a books genre is defined by the general emotional atmosphere of the work. With games, it's defined by it's mechanics (with the exception of "horror"). First-person shooter, third-person shooter, sandbox, role-playing game, real-time strategy, puzzle, etc. Having it this way creates certain rules. Consider if someone wanted to make a game about a man dealing with his drug addiction but it wouldn't feature any of the mechanics that have been laid out by the genres. What genre would it belong to? The game wouldn't be made because it would be considered not fit to be made as a game. When developers choose the genre of their game, they at the same time choose how the entire game has to play. A first-person shooter has to be about shooting in the first person, role-playing games have to be about manging and increasing your numbers in a D&D fashion, platformers have to be about platforming, etc. Imagine if there were only a few different settings for a film and the filmmaker can only add the appearance of the characters and their dialogue. No game should have just one mechanic that defines it. In life, we have to face different kinds conflicts each day and we use everything that we can to overcome them. Just one given solution can never solve all the problems.

If you look at the greatest works of art from any medium and compare them to the greatest games ever made, the games really don't hold up at all.

Oh, also Deus Ex isn't a shooter and Half-Life has an interesting world, but you're still controlling a godlike murder machine.

(I'm not gonna use this account again after this, I just wanted to say this)