AGDC 2008: Harvey Smith is lucky

AUSTIN, Texas--Perhaps more so than his role as lead designer on Ion Storm's acclaimed Deus Ex, some may remember Harvey Smith as the outspoken former creative director of Midway Austin. In a postmortem for the tepidly received BlackSite: Area 51, Smith slammed his soon-to-be-former employer, saying, "this project was so f***ed up." Smith went on to describe the game's development schedule as "completely reprehensible," claiming Midway prioritized milestones over bug fixes. Midway went on to reach a "mutual agreement" to part ways with Smith.

Midway has since canceled an unannounced game and executed sizable layoffs at its Austin studio, while Harvey Smith has landed on his feet as the game director at Arkane Studios, an indie outfit at work on its own unannounced project. Smith's recent travails with the industry notwithstanding, he is still of the opinion that game developers are the luckiest people alive. Coincidentally enough, that was the topic of his keynote address for the Game Career Seminar track at this year's Austin Game Developers Conference.

"The industry is tough at times, people complain about working hours," Smith began his uplifting talk. "One of the most painful things is when you work on a game for a while and it turns out bad for whatever reasons." Smith then regaled the room of young faces with the pitfalls of working in the game industry, saying long hours, bad games, insurmountable problems, canceled games, imploding studios, and doubts about the industry's future are all realities of the field.

So how can a reasonable person make the argument that those working in the games industry are the luckiest on Earth? The answer, he said, is very simple.

"Spending your energy on something you love is a great way to live," he declared. "Until you've done it for a long time, whether you're a carpenter or whatever, you can't look back at it and realize how wonderful it is. A field with hard problems to solve is going to put its mark on you. Working on games has had a huge impact on me, socially, culturally. It's an exciting field when you can look around a room and say, do we even know how we're going to do this?"

The designer may be a 15-year veteran of the game industry, but he believes the interactive medium is still in the Stone Age relative to other forms of expression such as novels, films, and television. "If you're getting into games today, you can be involved in a medium that is still taking shape," he said.

Bruce Sterling's keynote address from the night before notwithstanding, Smith quoted Alan Yu (of EALA fame) as saying, "No one knows what the game industry will look like in five years." Instead of seeing the prospects of the unknown in a dour light, Smith said he sees the uncertainty as exciting.

The game designer noted that gaming has become pervasive in our culture, and that the entire world is wired now. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., GSC Game World's shooter/role-playing game hybrid released last year, was one of Smith's favorite games in 2007, especially because it was made in Kiev, Ukraine, which lent another culture's undertones to the experience.

"Had an American made this game, the hero, no matter what, would have won," he claimed. "In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you were constantly reminded that you were just one of many."

That diversification extends well beyond just the people who are now able to make games. Smith pointed to differences in subject matter, purposes for playing games, demographics, and methods of distribution have all seen dramatic escalation in recent years.

"The iPhone App Store is absolutely a revolution," Smith commented of the latter point. "The fact that you can pull out this beautiful device, controls very simply, buy something immediately, and play it, and browse through all these types of media, and it fits in your pocket...This is a watershed moment. It is going to influence the types of games that you can make, the design decisions you can make, how long your content will be...I've got a great idea for a 20-minute game, you can only play it three or four times, and then you're done...The App Store facilitates this kind of thing."

Games have also progressed far beyond the single-player experience, Smith said, lauding titles such as Rock Band, where, "standing in a room with a bunch of other grownups, and singing and pounding on drums, that's an unusual thing." Smith also called out the gifting feature in Viva Pinata, where crates could be sent along with notes to anyone, saying normally this game and others would "just be playing on your couch by yourself."

Painting his picture of a rosy future for game development, Smith turned to the concept of peak realism. Questioning colleagues on whether the industry is at least halfway there to photo-realistic graphics, Smith recalled his friend Clint Hocking's (creative director on Ubisoft's Far Cry 2) comment, "Who knows, but we're more than halfway to 'nobody gives a s***.'"

For Smith, graphics have reached the point of "good enough," and he'd rather see game makers spend more time working on re-creating realistic behavior than cranking out 1 percent more in photo-realistic graphics.

Noting that most advice is meaningless, Smith then offered a few tips that he has learned over the years. "Embrace changes to the medium," he began, noting that it is important to find an angle that will advance the medium. Smith noted that while he wasn't a big fan of Epic Games' smash hit Gears of War, he was taken aback by the game's active reload system, which breathed new life into the "calcified" ammo/health kit pick-up system.

He then said it's important to not approach making games as if you're writing a book, painting, or playing music. "You are not creating your masterpiece," he commented. "You are creating the environment where the player will experience his masterpiece."

Smith then offered two seemingly contradictory bits of advice. On one hand, he urged aspiring game makers to embrace constraint, saying that it is important to be an innovator, but it's equally important to be fully aware of what is possible with the tools at hand. On the flipside, Smith quoted his Deus Ex mentor Warren Spector as saying, "There's too much settling. Dare to dream of doing great things. Find the moment of magic you can introduce into a game, regardless of your role."

Closing out his keynote, Smith affirmed "play is ancient," and is not inexorably linked with "the game industry." Calling up the corporate record industry bumbling the transition to digital distribution, Smith assured the crowd that even if one part of the industry collapses, play will continue on.

"Realize how lucky you are. Do something great. Always try to advance the medium."