But this obscures the realities of how that work was produced and why it is the way it is. In any creative form, as we instinctively try to picture the creator behind the artwork, it’s much easier as an audience to boil the author down to a single person: the director, the lead singer, the conductor. Instead, we talk about how Ken Levine made Bioshock Infinite or Todd Howard made Skyrim and that is that. We know this is the case we tweet about how long the credits are, but we don’t really appreciate it. It got me thinking about how we - players, critics, journalists - really struggle to appreciate that these games are created not just by the one or two people we see in a dozen pre-release interviews and profiles, but by dozens if not hundreds of people, each with some small say in what the final creative work will look like. Nothing scandalous or corrupt or horrendous - just… mundane and everyday events leading to particular creative decision. It’s not something I had ever really appreciated before, and hearing these fascinatingly mundane stories about making games in a AAA studio was eye-opening. We can’t speak to them and, more often than not, their employment contract means they can’t speak to us. The dozens or hundreds of men and women actually making the game are hidden from the public behind the doubly thick wall of their employers and their publishers. Usually, the journalist’s access to these developers is through the publisher that is bankrolling the game. If a games journalist is interviewing a developer about a game, they typically only have access to the lead developers, the ones in charge. They were, predominately, exactly the kind of people that a game journalist or player like myself rarely, if ever, is able to communicate with. Not the lead designers or producers or creative directors, but the ones making the game in the most literal sense: creating the models and typing the code and applying the textures. These people I was talking to were, predominately, the grunts of the studio. Things that myself and other players had projected layers of meaning onto existed, largely, because of technical hiccups or urgent deadlines. It was eye-opening to hear about the utterly mundane reasons this part of the game turned out the way they turned out.
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