Uncreativity and Generation Zero

So I'm having an msn chat with a friend of mine all about why there are so many license movies and games these days. Specifically, I'm talking about movies like the entirely blah Narnia, and he's pimping the teaser trailers for Superman and the new X-men film. Remakes seem to be everywhere, in music, in film, in re-set comics universes and games. Licenses likewise. It seems impossible to get a new idea out of the gate these days if it is not based on something that is already known.


We hit onto the topic of creativity in general. Weirdly, given the amount of power that recognition value seems to hold over us, we live in a time when we are inundated with creative options. We have PDAs to write our novels, DV cameras to make our movies, software that can create virtually any music that we choose, programming languages to create any game we can think of. We have the broadcast means via the internet, p2p networks and so on. We are literally sitting on an embarassment of creative riches.

Our societies similarly have come to embrace openness of thought and idea in ways that were impossible for previous generations. From this modest-priced PC in my room I can access a vast library of information. I can get news from anywhere, I can find discussion groups and forums on any subject. I can order any tool that I need and the modern media is highly free thinking in any one of a dozen directions. I can read anything and I can write anything, and no subject is taboo. I have gay friends, Buddhist neighbours, an empowered vegetarian girlfriend, it's all going on.

And yet we seem to be a profoundly uncreative generation. In the games industry the hot topics of new game creation all center around product design methodologies. In film, it's focus groups and properties. Music seems built on three pillars these days: the pop cover, the dance remix and the hip-hop rip-off. It goes further than this. We seem to have lost the idea of creativity with depth, so a lot of the material that is original is corny and based not exactly in the recognisable, but close enough. Like WW2 games that seem to spend their days copping a feel of Private Ryan's nuts. Or the Incredibles.

There are even a few noble examples amongst all this. My previously cited example of the new Galactica show is good one. The X-men movies actually make a good fist of it too, and some of those dance remix/resamples are cracking tunes. The Zelda games continue to inspire. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic is basically a really cool mash-up.

Our society reflects a strange dichotomy of the possible and the old though. You will see more superhero movies, you will see Terminator 5. You have seen an exploitation of the Exorcist property and the Omen remake is around the corner. Where the film-from-a-book was often a derided practise except in Kubrick's hands (and he basically remade them from the ground up), now we are reviewing and praising these films based on how faithful they are to the source material - regardless and seemingly unaware of how bad or good the resulting movie is (usually turgid).

And here's another realisation. This past-mining trend works. It works and it works really well. Between the combined sales of DVDs, theatre tickets and merchandise tat, a known property can make an absolute fortune. We are not Generation X, we are Generation Retro. We think almost subconsciously about our entertainment in terms of whether we recognise it first and foremost. We objectivise what we see, which almost ruins the chances of good ideas making a splash, and we almost 100% predictably plum for recognition over new.

Some of this is wrapped up in sales technique, no doubt, because it's easier to make a trailer that starts with 'from the novel by' or 'from the creator of' or 'inspired by the hit show' or whatever. I don't blame the studios for buying into a trend that is palpable, because they are there to make a profit.

It seems to me that the problem lies with us ourselves. Despite our liberal outwards and our new society which values multiculturalism and our new technology that literally places the world and our talents at our fingertips, it seems we are in fact an incredibly conservative generation. This may come as no surprise to some, I guess, but it seems as though not only have we opted for safe over strange, we've done so to such an extent that we've forgotten what strange is.

Maybe the root of the uncreative problem is the embarassment of options itself. Maybe it's a profound lack of a spiritual connection that our generation seems to have tapped into robbing us of any sense of courage for the future. Maybe there's some weight to the idea that art and suffering are very deeply linked, or maybe the problem is that we are so media literate now that we only understand reference.

Ironically, if we look a bit further back into the past, we can see that this sort of thing has happened before many times. Modernism constituted a reaction against a staid late Victorian mentality. Postmodernism constituted a reaction against a conservative and violent 40s and 50s. Romanticism was a quite revolution against the intricate establishment aesthetic of its day by re-introducing natural poetry over highly knowing referential poetry before it. The creative bubble of society seems to wax and wane depending on trying to get out from under the binding and increasingly brittle precepts of the old.

Generation Retro seems to me to be the tail end of the postmodern idea. What started out as a movement to break down the intricate symbolism of the past has now resulted in a generation that reveres a set of disconnected symbols instead and has gotten to the point that self-reference is built not on witty ground, but on the ground of faithful recreation and solemnity. How ironic in and of itself that many have chosen to call this decade the 'Noughties' when they are anything but. More like the 'Zeroes'.

And yet even calling for a change of ideas and new theories is in and of itself a postmodern idea. It's objectivising the creative, no matter what level you look at it from, to say 'what we need is a new Romanticism'. In the age of everything recycled, even thinking in the terms of 'what we need is a' is already buying into self-defeat and propagation of the product design/IP idea. It's a profoundly non-new way of thinking to say that what you need is a new way of thinking. Everything becomes a new branding exercise or theoretical discussion or Wired trend. A few have tried punching through the barrier, such as the transhuman idea or the posthuman idea, or even the transmodern 'bring back spirituality' idea, but these are all still inherently postmodern notions. It's all still mash-up, it's not creative.

There's one idea in Buddhism that particularly intrigues me, which is the idea of turning the mind off. Buddhism in general fascinates me, but in particular I had always assumed that meditation was in fact the act of quietening the mind by essentially taking the time to close your eyes and let your thoughts sort themselves out. Not so. Buddhism seems intent on dissolving the conscious mind in total, or rather, allowing a kind of true consciousness to emerge rather than a mind-dependent awareness. Buddhism seems to advocate a stance that most of us are actually unaware and unconscious all the time, that our minds and our egos are so busy reasoning and rationalising everything that we have no true awareness.

I think that there's something in this idea as regards Generation Retro, because the second thing that I've picked up from this is that the main reason that the mind is so engaged is because we fear change. We like control, we like our computers that we never use, our PDAs that sit idle for months on end, our PSPs that become toys for about three months and our DV-cams that we use all of twice. We like the sense of power over our own destiny that all this capability brings, but what we don't like is change. The reason that the retro-themed marketing works so well on us is that we want it to remind us of safety. It's a scary world out there, after all.

Mostly, what I think I'm talking about here is connecting with faith and instincts here. Not so much faith in God, just faith in faith. And instincts as in learning to understand what we feel rather than what we say to ourselves that we feel. There is an expression which says "Those who know don't speak, and those who speak don't know" which is humourously relevant to me while typing all this, perhaps telling me how little I know (after all, I am quite the talker).

Does it even matter that we are an uncreative generation anyway. The world is wracked by AIDS, impending wars, oil shortages and hurricanes. Does it matter so much that Joe on the street likes to go watch Narnia and maybe think back to nicer times?

Yes, I think that it does. Quite aside from the psychological unhealthiness of the symbol of living in the past, and the flip side that the technology promise makes which constitutes living in the future, we seem desperately unable to connect with reasons to live in the present. With all manner of Office-style grind on display and an increasingly vaccuous middle ground in most areas of society, I think creativity matters very much. I think self-acknowledgement matters a whole hell of a lot too, and we're losing track of both. Depression is up, stress is up, terror from planes crashing into office blocks leaves us unable to raise a passionate and clear argument as to why torture is a bad idea. We're all off in a hundred other places other than this one.

Generation Retro is all about being elsewhere.
Generation Zero could be about being right here.

So what is it I'm saying? That we need a new way to think?

No, I'm saying that thinking is the problem. Reasoning and rationality is itself the problem. Articulating meaning and quantifying creativity is the problem. Methodical attitudes are the problem. Self-prescribed rule structures for how things are made is the problem. Reference itself is the problem. Reaching to define our new era with the tools of the old is the problem. Casting creative efforts in an IP/genre/X meets Y framework is the problem.

We need to stop being overly rational and media-aware and start becoming conscious and actually-aware. Unlike in the modernist era or the post-modernist era, the pressing need of today is not to frame our era nor understand the frame. The pressing need is to stop looking at the frame and start looking at the picture. Stop recasting ourselves in the cloaks and symbols of bygone decades and start realising that we don't live in the 20th century any more. We should be conscious of the present, centered in the present and engaging with the present and leave the past and future be for a while.

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The Three Rs

A revolution is a moment in history when the existing political order gets up-ended entirely, new thinking and a new sense of values, power and social order emerge, and is often preceded by violence or generally associated with same. For example, the French Revolution.

A reformation is in many ways the opposite of that idea, as a reformation is an attempt on the part of one or several segments of a society to reassert an original set of founding ideas or aesthetic and essentially re-establish what was (or what is believed to have been). Again, often violent in nature, although a restoration is a gentler form of reformation. For example, the Protestant reformation of 16th century Europe.

A renaissance is somewhere between these two extremes, and usually non-violent. A renaissance is essentially a period of rediscovery of older ideas, but also of putting those older ideas into new uses. Renaissances don't, on the whole, involve the large scale return to the old ways that reformations do, nor up-ending everything like revolutions, but rather pick and choose the best of the old and make some great new as a result. Such as, of course, the renaissance.

So which way is the video game headed?

Well, on the one hand we have the Revolution on the way (although whether it actually is a revolution or not is an open question). On the second hand, we have quite a few seriously 'old skool' indie developers trying to get us all back to the way things were, which might be classed as reformation. Lastly, we see the re-issuing of some old classics in new forms (Prince of Persia, Resident Evil 4), which might, at a push, be called renaissance games.

Is the video game heading any of these ways?

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Game City

I've been talking to a friend of mine about his job and having been in it only a short while, he thinks that he's not gong to stick it out because of the commute. For reasons that are non-negotiable, he's not able to move close to the job, but he's able to get there via car or train. This being Britain though, that basically means a 4 hour round trip. I sympathise, and I asked him whether they would allow him to distance work for some or all of the week. He doubts it.

In Britain especially, game developers and publishers have a singularly annoying tendency to locate themselves off the beaten track, preferring to set themselves up in small towns and on the edge of cities and so on right across the whole country. There are usually a combination of reasons for this. The first is the cost of renting, but the second is usually something like it's the company founders' home town (especially in smaller companies). Thirdly is the confusion that many developers and publishers seem to still experience over identity. They want to be like entertainment companies in the marketplace, but still instinctively use much of the methodology of software engineering firms without realising the enormous differences. The games industry is an entertainment business, not a technology business. It's amazing how many developers still don't accept that.

This is the sort of behaviour that is fine for young startups, but there's a real problem that the industry has to face up to, which is that development staff tend to move around between companies because of costs, but they also get older, form relationships and families, and it's unrealistic for companies to expect them to move house every year from Aberdeen to Cardiff, Cardiff to Brighton and Brighton to Birmingham any more.

At the same time, it's unreasonable for the prospective employees to look for long term (or even permanent) employment contracts with games companies any more, because of the costs issue. This is what leads to a strange scenario where games companies are on the hunt for staff who'll move across the country for 6 months. Fine enough if you're a youngster, but once you hit 30 it becomes about as attractive as scabies. It's one of the chief reasons why something like 90% of games industry workers leave the industry within 6/7 years, never to return.

It's also hugely inefficient for the companies to work this way. Hiring is an expensive and time-consuming process, and has become even more so with the proliferation of employment agencies charging their 20% cut to get the people in the door. Maintaining large office spaces is also not for the financially faint hearted, and the impact on schedules from sudden departures, staff who don't work out, and sundry other reasons is hard. Finding quality staff tends to become very expensive as a twenty-year experienced programmer will charge the Earth for his services and you'll have to pay it if you want him to move to your office in Slough or Leamington Spa or Croydon. Add in travel costs to visit publishers, problems with an inability to find very short term workers (like quality sound engineers), and the companies have painted themselves into a corner where everything costs a fortune without any flexibility. Development companies (and publishers lately) can moan about costs and industry conditions as much as they like, but it's their own strategic decisions of location that breed these problems.

In the US, Hollywood is known as the place to go if you want to work in the movies. New York is the center for the financial industry, the news industry and business in general. San Francisco is where you go if you want to work in technology development. In Britain, London is where television is at. London is also where magazine publishing largely operates out of. In fact, in many industries, especially entertainment industries, a common location is vital to the relative success of everyone, and with good reason.

A common location reduces the price of doing business by encouraging flexibility.

It makes hiring staff much easier and cheaper because they demand less and are more willing to work under shorter term contracts. This allows both developers and publishers to maintain smaller facilities and thus be more flexible if projects collapse. A common location allows for a better freelance culture to emerge, which encourages workers to stay in the industry for longer. If I, as a worker, have three four-month contracts during the year then I am much more likely to be excited by the prospect if each one is commutable from my house. If, on the other hand, the first one wants me to move to Swindon, the second one to Scunthorpe and the third one to Dundee, I'm just not going to seriously entertain the idea.

Common locations increase contactability between publishers and developers, allowing for a much more co-ordinated industry. It allows for real business networks to develop and a community of companies to establish themselves. It encourages better working practises as the reduced timeframes encourage more focused work and therefore productivity. It makes the prospect of using remote workers far more palatable and therefore reduces the inherent risk of moves like outsourcing. Mostly, it encourages both competition and collaboration on a realistic level. Development companies can collaborate on projects, for example, if they're only up the road from each other, while it also facilitates the creation of service businesses like art and animation houses, design consultancies and engine specialists. A common location would encourage PR agencies to seriously court the games industry as a set of viable clients in ways that e-mail communications never do, and also encourage a more vibrant and in-touch industry media to develop.

The best part is that all over Britain, urban regeneration projects sponsored by local councils are practically crying out for industries to set up in their area, providing all manner of discounts and tax-rebates to businesses that do choose to relocate.

The big question is where should Game City exist. Realistically, it should be a major city that has international airports. It should be a city that has representation in other media industries on whom the games industry relies for much of its licensing etc. It should have good transport connections so that staff can get to and from work with a minimum of fuss. This realistically means that the Game City should probably be London, possibly Edinburgh, or maybe Manchester at the outside. Or, if anyone feels like a trip abroad, Dublin.

London is not as scary as it sounds. While the rent in London is supposedly high, south London is less expensive and is replete with councils looking to get business to move in. Southwark, for example, is only just across the river Thames and yet the rent there is really very cheap by comparison to the rest of the city. Southwark is also 15 minutes by Tube from Soho, Shoreditch and the media capital of the UK. Or there's Lambeth, Croydon, or any one of a number of areas in East and North London.

Regardless of which city and which council, the question is whether the British industry has the sense to club together for change. There is an enormous lack of trust in the British games industry, and a deep level of organisational inertia pervades many companies that have gone too far down the route of establishing many remote studios (a costly and questionable move). There has also been an enormous level of closures and company collapses in recent years in the UK, and would-be industry-wide associations like Tiga are hugely worried about the permanent prospects for UK development yet heavily mistrusted by the companies themselves.

The key word here is 'entrenchment'. The established UK games industry is too entrenched, stuck in its old form thinking and essentially being torn apart by its own intransigence. This applies to managers and employees, publishers and developers alike. They're just too cynical perhaps to do it differently. Nonetheless, I think Game City will eventually happen. Old companies will die out, new companies with more nimble philosophies will rise in their place and they won't be so tied to the old garage days mentality. There's a younger generation of creative staff who never worked in the bedroom coder universe, and they have less qualms about trying something different.

This is why I think 5 years from now the UK games industry will rise again in a new form, a better form representing a shift in the generational mindset. As the winds of the current and next generation continue to blow their harsh message, these proto-company owners are experiencing first hand what it is to work under the current regime and they know that things can work much better if they are only given a chance. That chance will come soon.

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The Final Generation

Here we go again. Hardware launches ra ra ra. Hardware-centric branding pushing a false generation war ra ra. Hardware promises co-opting the language of game developers to sell a nonsense vision (online, super-realism, emotion etc) ra ra.

Here's what the next generations are offering for real. More polys, more pixels, on-line play and a controller that lets you, you know, move stuff about on screen. Whoopdefucking do.

I am so... tired of this nonsense. I am so bored of watching the same little bit of history repeating, with the same cod arguments, the same lies, the same messages and the same complete lack of anything really INTERESTING happening. I'm tired of watching developers prostrate themselves before the temple of marketing and watching formerly perfectly good creative people turn into hollow replicants of their former selves. I'm tired of watching journalists become ever more complicit in the squeeky wheel and grease show, and I'm tired of watching an industry regularly deceive itself, blame external forces and otherwise try and pretend that nothing has ever changed.

And I'm jealous.
I'm very jealous of watching other media move on. I'm watching the new Battlestar Galactica today for the first time (always last to the party, I know) and I'm loving it. Normally I regard any remakes as suspicious (this is something that the games industry teaches you after a while) but in Galactica I'm watching a properly conceived bold attempt to really work with material to make something new. I saw Serenity the other week and had similar feelings. I watch US drama shows all the time (Lost and Rome being current favourites) and again, I am amazed at the way that this medium has moved on. And it makes me very jealous. And wanting to make my own shows - but that's another story.

It's a real Gordian Knot that the whole field of videogaming finds itself in because there are several competing forces at work here, none of which is actually healthy for the games. These forces are what drive the generation cycles. PS4 is already on someone's drawing board, as is XBOX5, DS3 and whatever else. Yet any fool can tell you that the current direction of the industry is ultimately going to lead to the death of everyone bar the hardware makers themselves.

On the one hand, the business forces have absolutely come to depend on hardware sales now and second hand sales to offset the public's increasing weariness. There's the manufacturers, whose dominance struggle is beginning to look desperate on all sides, and who are now launching new hardware seemingly every other month. There's publishers, who are increasingly looking for ways to look sweet enough to be bought because they know full well that the costs problem which killed developers by the thousands over the last three years has come knocking at their door. There's the small developers, who've gotten bought themselves, or sidestepped the main industry to go off into mobile land, casual land or budget land - and are finding the same problems there. There's the indie developers, who's belief is driven by a need to return games to their past, and who focus on making 'true' games. And at the center of all this is the sense that maybe the problem is simply that there isn't enough money to go around.

If history has taught us anything, it's that this sort of pack cannibalism is not something that can exist as a permanent mentality. With virtually everyone in the different corners of the industry now entrenched in their position and playing an extended game of Russian Roulette, the industry won't survive in the same shape in which it currently does. As with any form of media entertainment from wrestling and porn to modern art and cinema, these things have a tendency to balloon, burst and then reinvent themselves in a new form.

Well we need our reinvention, but it isn't going to happen before we balloon and bust first. This new generation, as with other generations, is just another turn of the screw. It's not something that *can* be solved by untangling the strings and everyone being reasonable (as is often expressed in forum discussions on the fate of the industry).

We see the same threads and blog posts again and again talking about the nature of the industry, and if only the industry could be made to see sense, and if only it could be made to do things in a reasonable manner, and if only and if only. It can't.

The parties are too entrenched. Like the first world war, the conflict now seems so insane, and yet the fact that the enemies of every faction are all staring each other down compels them all to fight to a bitter end that may or may never come.

Alexander the Great didn't solve the Gordian Knot. He just cut it in half with his sword. The symbol is obvious. Sometimes messes get so convoluted and mixed up that the only solution is a clean break. There are times when the only sane course of action is an unreasonable one.

So we head into generation six or seven (I forget which it's supposed to be) full of fear. Fear for our hobby, fear for our direction, fear for our jobs and livelihoods. The trench guns are firing, the mad charges have begun. The clarions are ringing around the ramparts, and there we are. You, me, a bunch of other guys, dressed in regulation hoodies and sneakers, with shaved heads, mortgage payments or rent, our thirtieth birthdays whizzing by with maybe a kid or two. We all know that it's madness, but we're going over the top anyway.

See you on the other side.

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Label names

I've gottten a lot of interesting feedback on the trade label idea, both in comments forum posts and through private email. It seems about 50/50 in replies. Some people really like the idea, some people thin it's elitism writ large. A lot of people are worried by the idea of who exactly would do the voting, and more than one poster has questioned the sheer validity of the idea at all.

Which is all fair enough.

The simple goals behind the suggested project are to draw the eyes of consumers to games, films, books and whatever that they might find imaginatively interesting. There really are no snootier ambitions to it than that.

So I've been thinking of what the name of the label could be. I wanted to something light-hearted enough that it didn't sound pretentious, something straightforward but slightly witty, but ultimately as easy-to-understand as "Fair Trade".

I like the name "Not Dumb".
What do you think?

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A Trade Label

I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a little while which I think I'll share.

One of the things that annoys me about our culture (and especially the media within it) is that there's an increasing dumbing down/juvenalisation of the whole thing. You have increasingly intelligence free music, games and so on taking up more and more of the shelf space, and the consumerism inherent in that sort of culture essentially does what it does in any other market: It makes it harder to find the more interesting, niche stuff.

I for one believe that there is such a thing as Quality in culture, an indescribable sense of creative thought manifest, from Ico to West Wing to whatever, but I think it's getting harder to figure out where the quality is at.

So I thought: In the food industry you see these specific labels now popping up, like 'Organic' and 'Fair Trade' which are intended to draw the concerned consumer's eye and point them toward quality. In the first instance, quality food, and in the second instance to let the consumer know that the food was not procured by bleeding some farmers dry. Both are successful minority initiatives. They haven't dominated the landscape, but they help.

So I'm thinking, why not start a trade label like Fair Trade which tells media-buying consumers "This media actually has some creative brains behind it and will speak to you like an adult". Not a judgement on the content from a political or whatever standpoint, but simply a message label that says "We think this is an honest attempt at art and/or entertainment".

Ordinarily that would be the province of reviews, wouldn't it?
Well in recent years it seems to me that the whole structure of reviews and review journalists has essentially become untrustworthy. There are too many rent-a-reviews floating around now to give any clear indication of anything, and while sites like metacritic provide a summary, they're still poviding a summary of a skewed data set.

So what I'm suggesting is anonymous groups of maybe 30 people over the age of 25 who evaluate pieces of media and vote whether to approve it, according to a set of criteria (there may be a group per subject, or several if it gets popular, though not split by genre). At first its unlikely that such an effort would be taken very seriously, of course, and its recommendations would likely as not just sit on a website for people to browse.

But over time the idea would be to allow the label of this group of people to be used by manufacturers under a free copyright license on approved products only, be they books, films or whatever.

Interested?

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Comment spam

I'm going to have to turn off comments for the moment to stop the spam.
If you have any comments on any articles, feel free to email me and I'll compile a proper post of feedback etc.

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