Back in the day, game development took place in someone’s garage or basement with a computer or two that were less powerful than the phones we use today. In the 21st Century, games are multi-million dollar investments by big-name publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision. For the most part developers are given full creative control, but every once in a while, you get the rare occasion in which fans of a series alter the final outcome of a game or even how a character looks. But where do developers and publishers draw the line? If fans had such creative control over a product, it becomes less about the developer and the publisher and the game would never be completed. On the flip side, a developer that completely ignores its fan base is doomed to a quick end. It’s a fine line -- so where do today’s developers stand?
I recently stumbled onto an ign.com article about this very topic that “whining fans are good for gaming.” Nathan Grayson, the writer of the article, wrote that, “Reputation, dedicated fans, publicity -- all of these things are incredibly important aspects of keeping a game popular.” There is a relationship between the developer and the consumer; as Cliff Bleszinski, design director for Epic Games, stated, “to survive in AAA (referring to the big games with big budgets) you need to have players marry your game, not just date it.” This relationship can also affect a character’s appearance in a game.
Before the release of “inFamous 2” on June 7, 2011, there was an outcry from the fans about how different the main protagonist, Cole, looked compared to his “inFamous 1” version. The original “inFamous 2” Cole had hair and tattoos. On July 23, 2010, Sucker Punch, the developer, changed the appearance back to the shaved Cole from the first game so he was “looking more like the person we played as in the original infamous.”
The problem here is that Sucker Punch was only one game into their “inFamous” franchise and fans were already deciding what they wanted him to look like for the rest of the series. If a character is going to grow as the franchise continues, he needs to start looking different or adopting a different attitude to demonstrate that change between the games. But Cole made no real headway about how he acted or even dressed in the New Orleans-style city the second game took place in.
The responsibility of fans is to know the difference between artistic vision and our wants and needs because they are not even in the same ballpark. Only time will tell how the relationship between company and consumer changes and develops in the future, for better or worse.
