With all the reports coming out from the Star Citizen production about unchecked excess fueled by ego, it would be naïve to think that this is an isolated problem in gaming. It isn’t and the great man myth has a lot to answer for in gaming’s recent and unsustainable budgetary excesses.
Star Citizen was one of the truly rare crowdfunded success stories. At the time of its inception, the gaming market was a barren wasteland when it came to space combat games. So when Chris Roberts, one of the figures behind the original Wing Commander games, stepped up and offered to make an all new and modern space combat title, fans leaped at the opportunity and funded the game to the hilt.
To date the game has amassed around $90 million for its budget, solely from fan based contributions it seems. That is an incredible sum of money and in the same kind of ballpark as many modern big budget games.
Unlike those games though, making the money back is not so much an issue as fans have already paid for the game upfront. That said this kind of scope channeled through what appears to be a single individual often results in unfortunate consequences when it comes to actual production.
Games are predominantly made by large groups of people, with their cumulative skill and talent resulting in the production of the game, attributing the creation of something as complex as a game to one person is reductive and not at all accurate.
The great man myth predates the processes by which games are made and comes from a time when society was more strict and regimented.
If you use a singular decision maker in game development, you end up with production bottlenecks that simultaneously result in a drop in quality and hugely escalated production costs.
No one person can be in all places at once and without proper delegation a solitary decision maker has to check the quality of the team’s output in a linear fashion, ratcheting up the budget, as you can’t parallelize tasks.
The bigger the team gets, the worse this problem becomes.
With many in gaming suffering from a degree of cultural insecurity, because of the medium’s sketchy social status, this often fuels the desire for prestige further. That in becoming this singularly creative figure you can assuage future denigration. This then often feeds into the desire to copy film and accrue status by thematic association.
Coupled with the increased potency of gaming hardware, the result is a toxic mix where production bottlenecks are encouraged. Especially on games that try to emulate films with huge budgets already.
This appears to be broadly what has happened to Star Citizen, according to the reports at least.
I get why people like to think that one person is solely responsible for the creative vision behind a game, as it’s an aspiration. That maybe one day you too could be in such a position to do something similar.
Except that broadly speaking the great man myth is a lie when it comes to games. One that is often used to hype games from a PR standpoint. After all, people are more willing to support a game if they feel that they too can vicariously become a singularly creative individual themselves.
Unfortunately the affects of all this don’t stop at the water’s edge when it comes to PR but also bleed out and over into publishing as well as development.
This is where publishers place expectations on a studio’s management that result in the great man myth becoming more than a straightforward PR concept; many begin to believe the lie.
They believe that only they can make the game the way it should be done.
In the case of Star Citizen, the also game lacks a large publishing body behind it to handle any kind of PR fall-out. This lack of shielding also caught out Peter Molyneux earlier this year and now Chris Roberts is getting to experience something similar.
The more beneficial result of this though is that employees are not frightened about talking out more openly, so in that sense we can have a clearer understanding of what has actually happened.
While I wouldn’t say that Roberts is entirely without fault in all this, the real culprit in Star Citizen’s escalated and excessive costs is an ideological one.
An ideology that gaming can no longer afford to support.
Disclosure: I have not backed this game in terms of the crowdfunding campaign nor do I have any financial links to it.
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