It’s a funny business, making games. In one week this year the Empire team had artists illustrating game events by painting epic scenes in the style of old masters, and doing it so well they might be mistaken for originals. Modellers were creating 3d ships based on original ship plans licensed from the National Maritime Museum. Animators were setting up for a motion capture shoot, checking that the actors were all set and the scripts rehearsed and ready. We had teams of programmers busy creating new suburbs and fixing potholes in the millions of lines of code that is the empire codebase city. We had writers adding to the 4 novels worth of text carefully crafted from raw wit and eloquence, and linguists translating it in to a dozen or more languages. Our musicians were trying to figure out how to write oft repeated background music that conveys theme and mood without permanently burning it in to the player’s brain. The Foley guys had dragged in an old dishwasher that they intended to smack with sledgehammers – I’m not sure what that was for. The tech guys from Intel were visiting, along with an assault team from Sega’s core tech group, helping the engine team squeeze the pips out of Intel’s integrated graphics hardware. Our historians were researching the finer details of the defences of 1750’s Quebec, and an ex-management consultant was tweaking our mathematical models of 18th Century economics. Our AI guys were busy containing a “desires” subsystem that had gone chaotic. We ran out of address space again. We hired the Slovak national orchestra for three days, and a belly dancer for one.

It was an interesting week, but a typical one. We were working on Empire: Total War, an epic strategy/simulation game based on the 18th Century. Considering it was a game about the great age of polymaths, it is perhaps fitting that it required a polymath team to execute it.

It’s tempting to think of games as just another medium, one that is taking people away from music, TV and movies as a source of entertainment. But there are things we can’t do in games that you can do in movies. Schindler’s List is a good example – it’s a story you can tell to great effect in a movie, but it would be utterly unacceptable in any form in a game. The difference is that the movie is passive, but a game is active. You participate and make choices, and bear some moral responsibility for those choices.

We had to solve this problem with Empire with slavery. It’s a central factor in the 18th Century history of Europe and America, but a large portion of our audience would put it in the same category as the holocaust – any active participation in slavery in a game would be completely unacceptable, and yet we pride ourselves on the historical accuracy of our games. How can we model 18th Century transatlantic trade and the role of slavery in the economic development of the 13 Colonies without slavery? Is leaving it out editing history and potentially as offensive as putting it in? Do we become “slavery deniers” if we don’t allow the player to build his empire on a slavery driven economy?

In the end we found a reasonable compromise – slavery is there, bit it’s a passive feature, not something the player actively engages in. The player does however actively engage in its abolition, and the prestige gained from being the first nation to do this contributes to victory.

Maybe a movie might bring together almost the same variety of skills, but only games development has large numbers of the nerdiest of coders working alongside the most voguish artists and musicians. We end up with a group of people who are collectively average, but individually all extreme. It’s a recipe for a team that is way, way more than the sum of the parts.

It’s the coders that glue together the rest of the team. Nothing gets in the game without a piece of their code ripping it up, transforming, compressing, sorting, indexing, caching, accessing, decompressing, combining, transforming again, reassembling, post processing and pushing it out through a piece of hardware. How well they do that is a multiplier on the quality of the raw material, and the quality of the raw material fed to the programmers is multiplied by how well the designers and artists have interpreted and an expanded the initial concept into fine details.

The net result is that a given high level design can turn out either brilliant or atrocious, depending on how good the team are. The same is true for movies – it’s the quality of the director, the actors, the writers, and the production team that make a great movie, not the 5 minute pitch the execs base their initial decisions on. Most decisions based on pitch quality are bad ones, and a string of bad decisions on new IP makes the execs mistrust new IP rather than their own decision making process.

The end result of this for both industries is endless remakes and sequels. I’m sure the frustration of this is one thing we share.

. Read the rest at Intel.com.