Editorial: I Hate L.A.

There’s always a certain hesitancy on my part to write an article like this, as you want to avoid biting the hand that feeds you (literally in this case, they served me lunch). But, after my experience last week at the Los Angeles Games Conference, I felt very strongly that something needed to be said.

I hadn’t even heard of the con until two days before I decided to attend. I found out about them in a very new-media sort of way: They began following us on Twitter.

Looking over the agenda, I spotted a few sessions that I thought would be of interest to the readership here, as well as a few people I hoped to be able to pull aside to have an on-the-record chat-I managed to have a fairly interesting discussion with Turbine’s director of marketing this way.

I was somewhat leery that it seemed like the majority of speakers were focused more on the business side of the industry, rather than the development side which I’m used to covering, but I’m always open to new experiences.

Who knows, I thought, maybe seeing into the inner workings of how games are funded and advertised would help me to gain a better appreciation of the industry as a whole.

This would turn out to be a major error in judgment.

I ended up sitting through eight hours of nearly every speaker proclaiming that people such as myself-life-long gamers, who tend to see games as their primary form of entertainment-are dinosaurs, relics of an age long-past. And that all the woes of the industry could be traced squarely to trying to cater to our demands, when really, all along, they should have been focusing on making dress-up games for 50 year old housewives, as that’s where the real money is.

This was what the conference boiled down to: People brought together not out of a love of games, but out of a love of the money they think that games can bring them.

I am not an idealist about many things in this life-hell, in most regards I’m a rank cynic-but games are one of the few. To hear people talk about them as if they were nothing but loaves of bread, or rolls of toilet paper, commodities which existed for the sole purpose of being consumed and discarded once the next fad comes along… this did not sit well with me, at all.

Obviously, the gaming industry consists largely of commercial enterprises, and if people aren’t making any money, they aren’t going to be able to continue making games, either.

But the business side should be a means to an end-not the other way around. You shouldn’t be producing games for the sole purpose of making money for the same reasons you shouldn’t be producing films, or music, or literature for the sole purpose of making money: Because then you end up with soulless, hollow, forgettable trash.

The fact that most-though I stress most, but not all-of the people in the room seemed just fine and dandy with producing soulless, hollow, forgettable trash was all the more distressing.

Emblematic of this mindset were a number of the panelists, who referred to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.”

For those of you who don’t know, a “serial entrepreneur” is a man with an idea. Just one. And somehow, this man is able to convince a venture capitalist that this one idea happens to be worth a lot of money.

Of course, unless you’re Thomas Edison with the light bulb, or George Lucas with Star Wars, having just one idea does not a tangible business make.

In fact, most of them seemed to have no real business models at all, except for making money disappear until they managed to sell themselves off to a much larger company-whereby their idea becomes somebody else’s problem.

Then, once they spend all of their buy-out cash on hookers and blow, they come up with another idea. And, because their last one got bought out, and the VCs made their money back with interest, they get another ten or twenty million dollars to start the process all over again from the beginning.

These people were held up as role-models for the conference attendees to follow: They had solved the greatest mystery of our time, and found the secret to reliably making money off the gaming industry.

For Christ’s sake there is no mystery. If you make a good game, people will buy it. Though there are exceptions to the rule, like The Last Express, there are a hundred others that prove it, like BioShockBioShock reviews and FalloutFallout reviews 3.

And conversely, if you make a bad game, no amount of marketing bullshit, or pedigree, or cheesy stunts like sending your player’s names to the International Space Station can save you. End of story.

So, I can honestly say I did gain a better understanding of a side of the industry that I hadn’t seen up close and personal before-but now, I wish I hadn’t.

All in all, the Los Angeles Games Conference reminded me a great deal of that old saying: You’ll like the taste of sausage a lot more if you don’t know how it’s made.