As we all know, Twitter is the perfect place to have a nuanced, solid discussion… No, wait, it’s absolutely awful for that, hence the need for this post.

At Develop 2015, Rami Ismail talked about being a game developer versus being a gamer. You can find the relevant fragment in the opening minute of this interview here, or at from 5:47 to 8:03 of the actual keynote here.

(I recommend watching the second video in its entirety; I think it’s interesting even if I disagree with half of it.)

My response was:

Was it a malicious tweet misrepresenting Rami’s point by excluding context?

Some people might suspect that, as the way Rami presents “gamers” and “gaming culture” seems to be the fading echo of “gamers are dead” and “gamers do not have to be your audience” articles, which in return are connected to #GamerGate — and I sparred with Rami on the subject once in the past.

Indeed, I am not a big fan of the way Rami deals with the controversy. I am especially not a big fan of his “#GamerGate are assholes… Wait, why did my mentions suddenly become mean? :(” or “Hey, a guy using #GamerGate hashtag said something stupid, so let me present his opinion as if it’s the opinion of everybody else using the hashtag” variety.

But my tweet about the creators had nothing to do with this, and, this may be surprising to some, it was not focused on the “gamer identity” as such…

…even if this is, I believe, what Rami alluded to. Since it’s an interesting subject in itself, allow me talk a bit about it before I explain my tweet.

Let me start by saying that people talking about gamers should pay extra attention to what exactly they mean by the term. When some say “gamer”, they literally mean the dictionary definition of the word, “a person who plays video games”. When others use the word, they mean a nebulous “hardcore of the gaming culture”.

But what does the latter mean, exactly?

There is a hardcore dedicated community of the players of Visual Novels. There is a Call of Duty multiplayer community. There are people actively looking for and playing obscure interactive fiction games. There are lovers of horror gaming. There are people who play for a hundred hours weekly but they only play Minecraft. There are people who play everything.

Are these communities the same? Of course not. Can we really synthetize that one model member of the gaming culture, then? If so, should not that model be one of a passionate, knowledgeable gamer? Isn’t that the only unifier?

I am not idealizing the gaming culture. Within the gaming culture we can meet trolls, assholes, know-it-alls, entitled brats, and so on and so forth. It’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Sure.

But how are these toxic elements a unique feature of the gaming culture?

They are not, of course. What I just described is humankind. Traces of toxicity are present in every human culture imaginable. There’s nothing special about them in the gaming culture.

Rami, with his tirade on detaching ourselves — game developers — from gamers, gets into a really muddy territory. If I felt generous and chose the least controversial take on the Rami’s talk, I’d say that he conflated gamers with a subset of gamers. He’s like a director who was flooded with critique or unreasonable demands of a few disagreeing or ignorant movie-goers, and instead of ignoring them or explaining his position he made a speech to the fellow directors that “you don’t need to be the lover of cinema”.

I fail to see the logic in that.

Rami says:

So here is the thing. We are developers, not gamers. We gave up gamer when we became a creator. […]

But… Why?

I think this is one big misunderstanding. It will become clearer when we listen to Rami explaining his views with this:

There is not some sort of unwritten law that unless you call yourself a gamer you can’t love video games. When Orson Welles said, “I don’t really like cinema unless when I’m shooting it”, nobody went, like, “Hey, you should be a movier! You should always say you love movies!” Orson Welles spent most of his time talking shit about other movies. He didn’t like other movies, that’s why he made movies! He liked one or two movies. That’s the movies he was inspired by, and he just made his own stuff.

First, here is the context for the Welles’ quote. He did not dislike cinema, he just lost his “movie innocence” (this happens to game developers too, unless the game is so excellent you forget to analyze it and just lose yourself in it):

Second, it’s not exactly true Welles didn’t like other movies or that he merely liked one or two. It’s clear when you read his interviews or the infamous “My Lunches with Orson”. He even listed his top ten favorite films, once (in early 50s, ten years after he entered the business, and no, Nanook is not from 1992 but 1922):

Third, if a “movier” means that “you should always say you love movies”, then being a gamer means you should always say you love games, right? But that’s neither in any dictionary definition nor was ever the characteristics of the gaming culture. Being passionate about or dedicated to a hobby does not mean you are supposed to be forever uncritical of all elements of the hobby.

I mean, how can anyone seriously characterize gamers as people who say “Yeah, it crashes all the time, featured a trojan, and the graphics are much worse than in the trailer, but who cares, it’s never a problem, I love it!”?

Fourth, and most importantly, this is a misunderstanding of Welles. He was a “movier”. He was passionate about the cinema. He saw more movies than most people, and he never stopped watching them. He was insanely knowledgeable on the subject. He lived and breathed movies.

The fact that Welles had his impossible standards — and indeed criticized a lot of movies and people involved in making them — does not mean he has ever detached himself from the movie culture. On the contrary, to the day of his death he kept being a part of it. I mean, he literally died hours after he talked about his life in movies and defended soap operas in a talk show.

In other words, Welles was both a developer and a gamer.

Having said that, do all developers really need to be gamers, whatever is our understanding of the word?

Absolutely not.

The main reason is that today, most games are made by teams, even is such team is merely two people. You do not need everybody on the team to be a gamer.

For example, I know quite a few coders who just like the challenge of programming, but could not care less about the story or gameplay. One of the guys on the Bullestorm’s team, responsible for the tools for our graphic artists and an artist himself, played maybe one game in his entire life.

Even if you are a one man army, you still do not need to be a gamer. Who knows, maybe because you don’t know what a “proper” game means, you might actually achieve something eternal?

So from that angle, Rami is right. You do not have to be a gamer to be a game developer.

However, that’s a bit like saying you don’t have to work, you can just play the lottery. Technically true, but not really a sound advice.

Not understanding your audience or not being passionate about video games may result in a creation. It’s just very likely that nobody is going to care.

In his speech, Rami righteously mentioned Tale of Tales, a studio made of non-gamers, and one that produced games that inspired many developers, myself included. However, I wish Rami also mentioned that, when no longer on governmental grants, the studio failed to achieve any commercial success, and decided to exit video games.

And this is what my tweet was about (especially #2):

If you study your audience, the chances of success grow. If you are a gamer yourself, or there are important developers on your team who are gamers, the chances of success grow exponentially — even if there are never any guarantees, of course.

Finally, Rami, about those guys who demand you “port your 2D game to VR”… I understand this is an exaggerated example, a joke even, but I know what you mean: unreasonable demands based on ignorance.

I offer two counter-quotes, though, and both come from successful, respected creators passionate about their art form.

There is other stuff in Rami’s keynote that I disagree with, but there is also some stuff I like. Again, then, I encourage everybody, but especially developers, to see the videos linked above, and form their own opinion. The keynote is much easier to swallow if you think of Rami’s generalizations as a thought-provoking, highly subjective point of view.