This has been making the rounds recently. Stuff like this really pisses me off. Would anyone care if Will Wright were going to make a movie? Or if that guy who did that space game about cats made a movie? Oh, yeah. He did. It was horrid. And as terrible as Wing Commander was, Chris Roberts at least had some limited experience directing cinematics for the games.

Why on Earth does *anyone* give a shit that Jerry Bruckheimer wants to make games? That’d be like Gordon Ramsay or Bob Vila making a game. Or Michael Jordan playing baseball.

Look, I get that games are still sort of an immature medium, and haven’t really gotten respect from the mainstream. But that doesn’t mean that someone with no experience doing this stuff has a reasonable chance of success. There are people who make extraordinary games – Valve, Bungie, Nintendo… these people understand their medium inside and out, and are masters of their craft. The people working in the game industry have dedicated their lives to making great games. Some people succeed, some do not.

Bruckheimer undoubtedly has a ton of money to throw at this. I’m sure he can hire experts to tell him how to make a reasonable game. But his input is essentially meaningless. Bank of America could “get into game” and have as much of a creative impact.

This pisses me off in particular because designers often get the short end of the stick in the industry. Sure, a lot of the “stars” of the game industry are designers – Will Wright, CliffyB, etc. But in *most* game development companies, design is the one field that everyone and their mom seems to believe they’re an expert in. Let me set this straight: You’re not.

Game design is a complex process. It is to some degree, art, psychology, and application of the scientific method. Yes, anyone can write a spec for a game. Anyone can have an idea that maybe aliens should be in the mix, and one should shoot at them. Yeah, a four year old can come up with that concept and build a game around it. Hell, some designers seem to think that’s fine and dandy.

But just because some people fucking suck at their jobs doesn’t mean that there aren’t designers who bring far, far more to the process than the wanna-be’s and the shouldn’t-have-been’s. The last thing the game industry needs are more ignorant, monied “auteurs.” Yeah, game design is fundamentally something that anyone could do. Writing a novel or climbing Everest is the same. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Feh.