October 10th, 2008
Partners and competition
Today I’m at the Tokyo Game Show, the first I’ve attended in four years or so. Makuhari Messe is a convention center way the frick out in Chiba, past Tokyo Disneyland and near the end of the Keiyo Line. It takes at least a good forty-five minutes to get to from anywhere in the center of the city, a long, noisy train ride rolling through vast, unbroken stretches of warehouses and danchi (apartment complexes) below an eternally overcast sky. But, it’s a work day.
Seeing what the competition is doing is helpful to a degree; games are on display here a good several months to half-a-year before they are released to market. For me mostly it’s a reference to see how well other companies’ developers are taking advantage of the hardware. My job is to be sensitive to the representation of light and motion in particular. Jagged lines and rough approximations of shadows aggravate me, partly because I know it can be done better, but mostly because these are vivid reminders of the pressures of game development in general, and how many sacrifices in quality are made along the way due to project management blunders and an unskilled staff.
More or less though, it’s the same every year. Implementations of the same interaction systems pile up, most of them chaff. The truly excellent titles still stun, but these are usually the ones that show up at least three or four years in a row, a painstaking exercise in dedication and stamina. Sometimes I’m a little disheartened to think of what it takes, and how little appreciation and understanding there is for the art. But, it’s arrogant to think that most industries aren’t like that. Almost everyone has to work this hard to make an honest living, and that’s what’s really depressing.
