Who needs BioShock's objectivist grilling when you've got the creator of Eternal Darkness, Dennis Dyack, on hand to talk about sewing machines and sweatshops? In an interview with Gamasutra, Dyack, whose Canadian company Silicon Knights is currently designing Too Human (Xbox 360) for Microsoft, argued against the notion of film industry-style "free agency" for game developers, suggesting "you become a utility, and your value becomes diminished significantly" and comparing design ability in such a model to mass production technology:
When the sewing machine was introduced, it was introduced and marketed as something that was going to free women from sewing. It was going to change their lives so that they could sew five minutes a day, and do more sewing than they could otherwise. After awhile, they became mass-marketed and commoditized, and then someone figured out, "Hey, I can make these sweatshops where people can be sewing all the time," and suddenly, this really good thing became this really bad thing.
Developer free agency was pitched in an article earlier this year by designer Michael John, who argued it was already pervasive (but not openly acknowledged), that it's a good thing because it would allow bigwigs like Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux (and Dennis Dyack!) to move more freely between projects with less studio creative constraint, that studios would win-win by being able to add or subtract talent as necessary, and that -- since moving around frequently is becoming the norm anyway -- all we need do is "lift the veil" to make transience an acceptable phenomenon with correspondingly beneficial "best practices."
Dyack's response:
I think from the perspective of a business model, it would be great if you didn't have to carry staff and look after them, and if you could just bring people on when you needed them and let them go when you didn't. I think for the talent itself, though, that's a commoditization. You become a utility, and your value becomes diminished significantly. At Silicon Knights, we don't hire part-time people. We don't outsource. It's all to protect the talent, which we are. I look at these models in Hollywood, and I think it's kind of broken in many ways. There's a lot of people who are struggling.
In principle, Dyack sounds correct to me. Turn game developers into free agents working (slaving?) contract to contract and you encourage whosoever holds the project purse strings to view those agents and their abilities purely in terms of what they bring to the bottom line. It's the most dehumanized version of the free market, i.e. the idea that creative value is wrought purely in dollars.
And what about the less obvious downsides of free agency? What about health insurance? You'd almost certainly need independent coverage, or risk the woes of inconstancy and/or the woes of changing providers and doctors. You might have to travel or even move fairly often depending on the telecommuting capabilities and/or culture tolerance of your temporary gig, not to speak of the issues that come with locational volatility if you're trying to have a family. And filing tax returns is always interesting (read: pain in the butt, speaking firsthand here) juggling multiple sources of income and state tax rules. Call that bit of surface scratching "administrative overhead" if you like, the issues that come with going free agent are far from trivial.
What do you think?
