Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: I don't agree with that

[quote name="jeep"]Quake was coded by Carmack (at least), but the final experience for the player is designed by other people. Just like Rage, from what he's said in public. I like that he has opinions about games as virtual amusement parks or whatever but everybody in movies has those kind of opinions about movies, they still specialize in different jobs while an auteur takes responsibility for every part of the resulting work, even if he's helped by others <i>after he makes major decisions in that area</i> (I guess the reference here is to Scorsese or Tarantino who decide how they want each scene in the movie to look and then rely on the same editor to get it done film after film, compared to Soderbergh who usually edits his own stuff). If Carmack is an auteur behind Quake and Rage, even if he's only telling people "in this cave complex, make a gang of british punks for the player to fight" he has a lot of shitty content to answer for, and I'd like to give someone who's been alive that long a little more credit than that. The public image is he spends all his time perfecting new rendering tech and he has other people who he has to rely on to do good work, and they didn't hold up their end as they make content decisions. Which makes Carmack something a film auteur has almost never been: a producer who makes his own cameras. Edison? who else. I can't point at James Cameron and his pile of patents here, because when it comes right down to it, Carmack's rep may not reflect how involved he is in that content. In a world of video game auteurs, every game designer would be Johnathan Blow, except better because they would not have to call buzzard to help with the rendering code, and he would make more of his own games, too. However, overall the auteur metaphor, even though I was always a fan of it, was already stretched pretty far to go from books to movies, and to some degree it didn't make it to video games beyond whatever Johnathan Blow is working on and maybe that guy who made the Binding of Isaac. I'm pretty sure modern AAA games are too big for that and what one person can manage is capped by tools. I think the best way to get the auteur thing is to go back and look at the people who made it a thing in film: the new wave was started by people arguing for a certain way to do things, but it was the new small portable camera that enabled them to work the way they wanted to. The current game equivalent of this is working with moddable engines until the modding process gets easy enough to work fast and flexible enough to tell new stories that maybe weren't intended by the guys who made the engines. Those fucking cameras were cheap, though. Not the $350k you need to get unreal engine or whichever thing. It's been a long time since I fucked with C++ so it's slow going digging into hl2 source, but I'm 99% sure I can do the one small thing I need to and get a new bit of gameplay out of it without boring people to death with the same old horseshit extra guns mod cliche.[/quote]