What video game studios can teach us about creativity under capitalism

Recently, famed video game designer Ken Levine left his studio, Irrational Games, to strike out with a smaller team of about 15 people. He's taking those people to a unit inside the studio Take 2, where presumably he can focus more on smaller, more creatively fulfilling titles. On a related note, designer Tim Schafer funded his recent game Broken Age through Kickstarter instead of the studio system. This trend prompted game critic Ben Croshaw at Escapist Magazine to declare the whole idea of studios as overblown:

This is a common theme of Croshaw's, who tends to take a highly individualistic — almost Thatcheresque — view of creative enterprises. Great games are the result of passionate individuals, while blandly awful ones are "designed by committee."

There is surely something to this view — as Croshaw and his fellow critics have well established, the larger a studio gets, the more its output tends to become bland, conservative, and creatively derivative. But this individualistic view has two problems: First, it underestimates the power of institutions; second, it doesn't provide a convincing account of why larger studios are so terrible.

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Let's take a look at institutions. Because contrary to Croshaw's view, practically every game ever made was designed by committee. Excepting the odd individual project, games — like movies — are far too technically complicated to be made by less than a dozen people, which was true even 20 years ago. Nowadays, of course, cutting edge titles take design teams of hundreds or even thousands of people.

Such projects are and always have been the product of institutions, which are far more than the sum of their constituent individuals. Human beings are malleable creatures, and institutional frameworks powerfully guide expectations and behavior. Anyone who's worked for several different companies knows how a different workplace culture can massively influence the way that people behave. The case is even more obvious on a grand scale: The institution of democracy can entirely change how people behave with respect to practically the whole of life.

This is not to say that Croshaw's case for the auteur is wrong under all circumstances — there are some really good individual game designers out there working all alone. But collaboration in itself can also be creatively fruitful. Division of labor can allow people to develop specialized creative expertise that an individual wouldn't be able to obtain alone. Even novels benefit hugely from an editor.

While it is certainly true that the larger an institution is, the more difficult it is to manage — more unwieldy, more subject to bureaucratic dysfunction — it's also true that larger organizations can plumb more deeply into the well of talent and specialization. Remember King Théoden in the Lord of the Rings movies? Check out what Richard Taylor, one of the film's prop designers, says he did with the king's armor:

That's hours of painstaking work that no moviegoer will ever see, just to maybe help the actor get a bit more into his character. Think of the obsessive creative commitment that implies!

Creative collaboration can also restrain an auteur when their ideas are bad. Red Letter Media's Star Wars reviews make this case quite well. During the filming of the original trilogy, George Lucas was forced to get help in key areas, especially editing, due to lack of money and other factors. During the prequel movies, by contrast, he had total creative control, and the result was an epic disaster.

So larger institutions are not necessarily harmful to creativity — but as I've said, they seem to be much of the time. Why is that?

This is where the culture of capitalism itself comes in. Because big, cutting-edge games take a tremendous amount of money to produce, and big money means big business. That in turn means the active acquiescence of people who control the money in our society — which means corporate elites. In his series The Age of Uncertainty, John Kenneth Galbraith described such people like this:

The only difference from 1977 is that such a view is no longer nearly cynical enough.

The fact that modern game studios — like modern corporations generally — are almost exclusively controlled by people who are equal parts 1) actively contemptuous of art for its own sake, 2) nevertheless convinced of their own high aesthetic judgment, 3) slavishly devoted to profits above life itself, and 4) politically reactionary, reveals why so many big-budget movies and games are plodding, paint-by-numbers sequels, reboots, and ripoffs stuffed with sexism and other prejudice.

But again, such people do not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, they are also the product of an institution, in this case capitalism. I think it probably takes a lot of effort on the part of management to stamp out the creativity of thousands of people who almost certainly got into game design because of a love of the art form, not because they wanted to stamp out cynical dreck like license plates.

Let's look at it from another angle: consider one of the most critically acclaimed game studios of this generation, Valve. The creator of titles like Half-Life and the distribution system Steam, Valve has many structures which explicitly lean against the hierarchical, capitalist tendencies of modern corporations. It is privately held, which prevents hostile takeovers from private equity types. It has a decentralized decision-making process, and an honor-system leave policy. Founder Gabe Newell seems to recognize the necessity of these structures if his company is to be creatively successful, and not just endlessly stamp out sequels:

Absent that kind of strategic thinking, it seems large corporations readily become so creatively stifling that they drive out their own founders.