What the history of the print industry can teach us about the future of the game industry.

I’ve been turning this idea over and over in my head for about three years now. Not constantly of course, but it’s one of those things that I can’t help but return to. In college I didn’t receive a degree in game design, fine art or any of the other disciplines typical of the path of a future game developer. I found my way through graphic design. In the four years I attended Iowa State University, I learned a lot more than how to use InDesign and what font to choose for an annual report. The curriculum was based off of how the Bauhaus taught design to its students, or so I was told. My guess is that the architecture students had much more of the Bauhaus rigamaroll than any of us graphic kids did. Nonetheless I studied a good deal of art history. One class, specifically about the history of graphic design, lent us in-depth knowledge and more importantly, insight into how graphic design came to be what it is today. That course taught me many lessons, but one has always stuck with me largely due to the fact it seems to correlate so closely with the flux the game industry is currently experiencing.

Apparantly I’m an indie developer. Nobody really knows what this means. Some say it has to do with money, others say it’s about your soul. Whatever it is doesn’t really make a difference in this article, suffice to say a lot of smaller groups of people with fewer resources than ever before are making games that are possibly better or at least more interesting than huge developers with hundreds on staff and millions in their war chests. Long story short, when it comes to being a game developer this is the age of the little guy. This scenario is not unprecedented. In fact, once upon a time, mass-producing publications was not unlike traditional AAA game development.

But let’s start at the beginning. Think “Pong.” When Guttenburg made his first bible, he was one man tinkering with a machine that could print a relatively small number of books a day. “Print” was born [don't come at me with other inventions that were marginally earlier and etc. let's just stick with "high school" history here]. The medium of “Print” is not merely about constructing something on paper and giving it to someone else, that’s called “writing a letter.” Print is about mass production for mass consumption, and early on it wasn’t so massive.

Technology got better though, and it was possible to mass produce pamphlets and eventually illustrations! But those were expensive. Incredibly expensive. Eventually the newspaper arrived and it wanted pictures in it as well. Text was boring to people, they saw the printed image and they thirsted for more. To create a newspaper with images was now a huge task requiring an enormous team of highly skilled and dependable professionals. The news couldn’t wait, so deadlines were fierce and so was the work ethic. Sound familiar game developers? To get a single illustration/image into a newspaper would first need to be drawn by an artist. Next it would be taken over to probably several etchers where it would be ingrained in a metal plate for mass production. Since there were probably more than just one illustration in each paper, there would be a whole fleet of these highly skilled people required to create the images for just one day’s newspaper. On top of this, you’ve got writers, type setters, inkers, printers, editors, management and on and on and on.

But then came photography. Dun dun duuuuuun. Photography was still pretty infantile when it first hit the scene, but it cut out an entire job position from the newspaper staff. It wasn’t long before the transfer of photos to plates was made more automatic and then the etchers had to clean out their desks as well. This process of new technology replacing loads of jobs continues on and on throughout the print industry. Typesetting becomes a thing of the past, printing gets more efficient and mechanized, and then eventually… computers take over the world.

Now I used the newspapers as an example here, but this was true of the entire print industry. Magazines, catalogs, brochures, design firms and so on. Sure there were outliers and not all my facts are straight but that’s not too important. As technology made it possible to do things more efficiently, design firms, magazines and newspapers began to struggle. Their massive amounts of employees, dependencies and ultimately outdated practices gave way to a new uprising of smaller, team-based design firms and businesses. Sure some big guys survived and even prospered in that market, but more common today are these smaller groups that have grown moreso by spawning satellites of similar size rather than a massive trunk.

Today, anyone can be a graphic designer. All you need is a rich text editor that can embed images. These kinds of tools would have been considered witchcraft during the early 1900s but today it’s taken for granted when you want to print out 50 fliers advertising your garage sale. It’s not even considered graphic design, it’s just something that’s done. This is hundreds of years into the history of graphic design [if you don't count cave paintings, which I think is a cop-out] and people have co-opted it into their life as nearly a natural function. So where does that leave the professional? The designer? Well, it leaves them to be auteurs of their craft. It’s still not feasible for one person to layout and design a newspaper every day, but only a few people can do so just fine, often under the supervision of a guiding visionary.

Gamemaker. It’s not exactly Microsoft Word, but it’s close. There are flash-based gamemaking tools that aim at giving people with zero experience the ability to create their own games. Allbeit, it’s not a blank canvas by any means, but it’s a start. Would a graphic design firm actually consider putting 40-50 people [or even 10] on a single project in a world where Microsoft Word exists? We’ve come all this way so we can support a design by commitee?

Here come the indies! While a lot of people like to put the independent game developers off in their own corner as “a movement” or a “brand” it’s not the reality. Indies are the future of the gaming industry and while this is probably not a new idea to many of you, what may be though, is that we are not in our infancy. We are a model for the future. Smaller teams with light-weight agile development processes and clear creative visions from a personal perspective will make The Games of Tomorrow [echo].

The success of indie developers is not due to their passion for making games or their hunger for ramen noodles, it’s their agility. Some indies may aspire to amass a large studio filled with dozens of other developers in order to create some large dream-game, but that misses the target. If some of them do go that route I don’t think they’ll like what they see when they get there. These huge teams are already dinosaurs, even if their model hasn’t been made extinct yet, it will be shortly. The stakes are even higher than they were in the early 20th century for the print industry. Technology grows exponentially and that growth will not provide as wide a buffer as it did a century ago. I guess you could say: “We’re not there yet. Two guys can’t make a World of Warcraft, a Halo or a Little Big Planet!” But that’s the wrong challenge. Two guys can’t make a newspaper by illustrating each image, etching it themselves, setting the type, writing the articles, editing them, designing the pages, proofing the pages, loading the printer, setting up the ink, maintain the machines, package them, deliver them and clean up in just one day, can they?

Maybe two guys will make something better.

NOTE: Don’t hold me to my facts here. I’m going off of memory from a class I took about three years ago. If anyone has more precise facts on the fragmentation of the print industry, please let me know I’ll be happy to add more notations.