In the south of Australia there is a little state, about the size of England, called Victoria. This state, and it's local games industry, makes for an interesting little case study. Here almost half the game development in Australia takes place, largely a result of the 27 year old legacy of the greatest Australian game ever produced. Much of the rest of the Australian industry is located in Queensland. These two local industries are quite distinct from each other. Somehow the many thousands of kilometres between them has created a divide over which very little travels.
There are many curiosities about the Victoria industry, and many ways in which it appears different to the Queensland industry. However, one particularly crucial idiosyncrasy comes to mind, and that is this: the Victorian industry is very fragmented. There are many small studios, each hopeful, energetic and optimistic about their own grand future. Consequentially, there is a lack of large, established studios.
One obvious cause is the long culture of splinters companies and off shoots—this isn't unusual in the industry worldwide, but seems particularly common in Victoria. The experienced local players seem to have a habit of gravitating away from each other, as if caught in magnetic fields. The end result is fairly easy to predict: a situation in which most of the experienced talent in the state, after having cordoned off their own little personal section of the local industry, doesn't have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to compete on the world stage. In other words, it requires large teams with big, long term, budgets to make a mainstream game; but when everyone ends up starting their own little studios, no one ends up with enough collective credibility to reach those heights. So while the Victorian industry as a whole probably has the wealth of talent and experience to make a top five blockbuster, in the last twenty years it's never even got close.
I imagine that the reason behind this is fairly straightforward: the local industry has never had a leader strong enough to unite the most talented and convince them to work towards the same goal. Perhaps one person came close once—but he, in the grandest of ironies, is also the most hated person to ever work in the local industry.
Another possibility is that were missing a component in the works, and upon recognising that, we become disillusioned. Game design, for example, has been typically underwhelming locally. Or perhaps the lack of a local publisher with global ambitions—this has been pointed out as a glaring inadequacy.
One of the reasons that this splintering has caught my attention is it highlights a basic conflict in the industry. That is, a conflict between our practical needs and our creative needs. On a practical level we need to join together in groups and work as a single unit; because this is what is required to compete for the shelves in Wal-Mart. This is the very hardest thing to deal with in the modern industry: teams are massive, and each team member must bring with him or her much skill and love for the project. No one is simply a labourer, each gives his part, and each must give of himself with the most wholehearted belief of the project and of those around him.
Unfortunately, no group of people works so well together: it's just the nature of us. So conflict arises and must be resolved in some way. And while some conflict can lead to great creativity, unfortunately it tends not to. Conflict can also lead to the arrival of great leaders; but again it appears it hasn't in this corner of the world, and instead we somehow end up with a system whereby, to my great dissatisfaction, leaders who cause conflict percolate to the top.
Hence, it's our creative needs that drive us apart. Each of us has our own god-forsaken idea for a game, our own mode of expression, our own reasons to despite and ignore the ideas of others. Sometime our sense of creativity is strengthened by our sense of being lost in the medium. We don't understand our path through this darkness, can't apply rational reasoning to it, so we light our way through arbitrarily, and call whatever void we arrive at “art.”
And so, our creative needs cause us to splinter. While the ways in which we got here might be despicable, the end result is right for the cause. We need an industry of many small time independent developers if we are to start to understand the medium. Shotgun style experimentation and a massive variety of ideas competing for attention is a great way to expand the industry and discover the medium more fully. This is the simple social Darwinism that leads to a meritocracy; that is, after the flood of failure, disaster and chaos in which our hearts become predominantly broken and trodden over.
The disaster of Victoria is that we don't have this, either. In reality, we're caught somewhere in between. On one hand, our practical needs encourage us to clump into groups and attempt to compete for production quality. On the other hand, we're encouraged to splinter, to compete with the creativity of our souls. The end result is many studios that are too small for top five games, and too big to operate purely out of love for the medium. We're caught in dissonance, unresolved conflict and misplaced aggression. Our spirit is gimped and our talent is crippled, and we can muster neither the sweat of our brow, nor the spark of our minds.
So, how do you solve it? Not so long ago, I would have sad that the only solution would be for the local industry to finally, out of mutual need, resolve its differences and consolidate together into fewer, larger, studios. This is, of course, the pragmatic, practical course of action. Not so long ago, I would have said this was the only reasonable course of action, and that any other course would simply compound the issue, and drive us closer and closer to the inevitability of total collapse of the local industry. This excessive splintering is—I would have said—both a symptom of, and cause of, our great failure. These were my thoughts, for example, when Evelyn Richardson appeals to the industry to put aside their differences in her last speech before leaving the industry association.
However, what if there was another possibility, at the other end of the scale? After all, I'm sure many of us hope that, one day, the “boutique studio” model will become dominant in the worldwide industry. Could it be, that by splintering the industry we're foreseeing this change? Perhaps I've been looking at this the wrong way; perhaps our small studios just aren't small enough? What if the problem with our small studios is they see themselves as big studios in the making? Perhaps, rather than missing our chance at the top-shelves, we're actually missing our opportunity to be a cultural focus of the world industry?
There's an obvious problem, however. How do we reasonable appeal to a mainstream gamer audience without big-studio production quality? How could we attract the already dubious attention of international investment? If the industry isn't yet really for a larger presence of boutique studios, there's no using in attempting to force it into that mould.
Well, perhaps this would be a question better answered by Infinite Interactive, or SSG. It strikes be now that they are perhaps the model of a small developer.
It seems, however, that mobile phone games aren't the answer. And WiiWare, Xbox Arcade and the rest are, as yet, still questionable propositions. The indy industry doesn't seem to work; whatever hopes we may have had for it are unfulfilled, as it's fallen on its face. How could we ever possibly hope to reach even the somewhat shallow levels of sophistication and emotional intensity of the big studio industry?
Well, it's a heck of an anticlimax, but I don't quite have the answer to that. But if the answer is anywhere, it's hidden within the nature of the product itself. Ico is the example to point to here. That game was thoroughly accepted into mainstream gaming; and though in truth it was made on a largish budget—it looks like it wasn't. It seems to have exactly the right sense of minimalism you might expect to see in a creative work that has been crushed by an impossible. At the time, it shined for me as a kind of distant hope—a sign of a more agile industry on the horizon. Yet no one took on the bold opportunity that the game seemed to so clearly hint at.
We can also point to the work of the local government, and particularly the Digital Media Fund. A fund like this seems tailor made for sparking off a boutique industry—in fact, its very existence may work against the large established industry. And yet, contradictorily, the goals of that fund seem to be to spark large scale growth.
One things for sure, though. Victoria is a great place to run a developer services company. By that I essentially mean professionals who work on short term contract. This aspect of the industry has been growing recently, and we've seen a number of successful enterprises—I'd like to see more. As there are so many small studios, there is very commonly a demand for some time of expertise on a fixed term basis—perhaps to meet a difficult milestone, or develop a pitch, or polish one final aspect. This type of model suits the prevalence of small studios, because these studios can't reasonably afford to keep staff for all specialisations on full time. I'd really like to see a greater amount of contractors about locally—I think this is a great way for the industry to smooth out some of the bumps, and grow.
All in all, even if we accept the possibility of a functional boutique industry, we're still faced with a great challenge, a great problem. But, in this industry, we're never that far from the next impossible mountain to climb. We might wax fanciful and declare that art only arises when presented with an impossible challenge; without that we become too lazy and indulgent to really stretch our thoughts and our spirit to new places. But we're so beset by difficulties in the industry that perhaps we've somehow misjudged the economies of strife. Maybe after all our hardships, we've forgotten what's truly difficult? Could we have mistaken a valley for the hills? Or as Seneca had it: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
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