The Third Most 'Gamous' Person: A Chat With Tim Schafer, Part II

This weekend, I sat down with Tim Schafer, the prolific videogame designer and funny guy. You can read about games and fame and Kickstarter in Part 1, and then scroll down to read about new consoles, new business models, and new characters for a more inclusive videogame culture. We also made Vines. Check em' out.

MOTHERBOARD: Let’s talk about the new consoles. I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for the big ones, but then there’s Ouya, and Steambox, these more open platforms.

It’s a really interesting time. The fact that we don’t know what the whole industry is going to look like next year, we don’t know who’s going to win, of these new Linux based consoles. The thing I’m excited about is the change in business models more than hardware--so far Nintendo and Sony have both really reached out to the indies to establish themselves on their platform with self publishing. I don’t know if that’s caused by Ouya or just part of that movement for a more open platform.

That’s the part that I’m more excited for more than a more specialized chipset, or new specs. What things will enable new original games? And then we’ll figure out new ways to deal with discoverability problems a lot of platforms have, so that new people who make a great game to have the same chance as someone more popular. There’s this continuum of allowing everything on the platform, and then no one sees anything because there’s so much crap, and then there’s the really curated ones where only the best things get through. But then you have to spend all this money to make a patch or your game doesn’t get approved. All that stuff. You want both ends to go away, so hopefully this is the generation we take care of all those issues.

Well Sony has been very aggressive with courting the indie developers with Pub Fund.

I’m really hoping Microsoft also. They’ve been pretty quiet so far.

We’ll hopefully see on Tuesday, with that new console reveal. I’m a little fearful of what’s going to happen. I think some indie developers are unaware of what they’re getting into. I am a little worried the big boys will take advantage of these developers who are making games in their garage anyway. Do we need to have some kind of safeguard for indie devs?

I think the big industry needs a safeguard from Kickstarter. It’s not like Kickstarter games will wipe out AAA games all of the sudden, but it’s an option now that’s so much more attractive for indies than taking money from anywhere else. There’s money with no strings attached, your only boss is the fans you're making the games for anyway, and the numbers are increasing with every Kickstarter that goes out there.

Why would you take any other money? 'Cause any investor or company is giving you money strategically to either help their platform or to maximize their own profit. It’s not going to get rid of traditional publishing deals, but they are going to be forced to come up with better terms. Especially with an indie who’d be getting a small amount of money, like $500,000, you could definitely Kickstart that. So what other benefits are they going to give aside from money? Exposure, keeping your IP--hopefully developers will hang on to those and finally see royalties from day one instead of recouping costs three times over. I just hope it leads to better deals for indies because now they can walk away, and that’s the only way to get a better deal is if you’re willing and able to walk away from the negotiating table. And now they can.

Having been on the other end of that, do you feel like a lot of the big guys are coming back around asking to do another game? Do you see that as a symptom of them being nervous about Kickstarter, or losing relevancy?

I wonder what they’re thinking. Mostly they saw this phenomenon, and they said “How do we get a piece of that?” It’s hard for them, because they can’t as a big publisher do a Kickstarter. So often they’re just hiding behind a game, telling an indie studio, we won’t fund your game, but if you make it on Kickstarter then we’ll back it after the fact. Which is a little, ya know. It’s going to make some people angry because people thought they were backing an indie and they were really just backing an indie into a big publishing deal.

Well some indie games are going through these new streams, like Sony's Pub Fund, and the Kickstarter is about getting it developed, and then you'll have the big publishers waiting in the wings to put it on the platform, but the development costs are still on the devs.

It has to be carefully handled. I think if you’re honest about it and say in the Kickstarter “look, if we get this amount of money, then this publisher will publish us, and we’ll be able to get it on the platform,” then I don’t think anyone would think badly of it.

But it’s not as appealing of a story. The people who backed our Kickstarter liked that they were enabling something to bypass the system. If you’re backing project working within the system, then you’re really just funding something to help a company make a profit. I don’t think that appeals to most people using Kickstarter.

Right, it takes the heart out of it. Do you think this is the system adapting or just the same old tricks again?

There was a huge cultural movement when we moved to digital everything. If you look at the biggest four things you need from anyone, whether it’s a book publisher, or a music label, or a movie studio, or game publisher, you needed cost of goods funded, financing from them, manufacturing from them, core production, and then you need distribution, and sales and marketing. So when things went digital, you no longer had to worry about manufacturing in games. And then with digital distribution, that’s gone too. No more trucks. And with crowdfunding, now financing is about to be gone.

So now there’s sales and marketing, and then there’s expertise, I suppose. With Sales and Marketing, you can hire those people yourself through crowdfunding. But then there’s still that question of expertise, which is different on a case by case basis. But if you’re putting something on a mobile platform, it could be advantageous to work with a mobile publisher who’s cross platform, who can help with discoverability by plugging you into their network of existing players, then that’s a real thing.

When we did Brütal Legend, EA handled all the liscensing. That’s something that we definitely benefitted from. So I think companies will start to shift toward what they now have an exclusive on, things they’re very specialized in, like certain abilities to get eyeballs on your game. The problem was those companies thought they were experts on a lot of things they weren’t experts on, like game design. They’d give you lots of advice about game design. Some one who happened to have lunch with Miyamoto one day and now he’s an expert on game design. That kind of stuff was really frustrating and will hopefully go away.

Well it seems like the things that are being used, Kickstarter and Steam, are these separate limbs from the old days like you said. And if Kickstarter is taking financing to the masses, then what else could come about through social media and crowdfunding? What other limbs are waiting to fall off? Could we borrow some music label model ideas?

What is the music label model now? Those have changed too a lot. Madonna dumped her label and went to LiveNation.

Or like Radiohead and Humble Bundle.

Right. We’re doing our Humble Bundle right now--I’m wearing the t-shirt, only a couple more days. That kind of thing is exciting because it’s also a new model for… I really think the current, younger generation of entrepreneurs are a lot more flexible and a lot more charity driven, there’s more of an emphasis that charity is something you do on the way up and not just when you’re old and rich, and you’ve just got to give away your money for tax reasons. Or things like paying what you want, and you can only pay a dollar. But most people will pay more than that is really interesting. That people are learning they can make money by giving things away is a really positive and hopeful thing I think for the world.

Especially in combating piracy, just by giving people an option.

As we heard from a lot of our backers, paying for something they didn’t have to pay anything for, some of them gave $100. They felt good about that cause no one was screwing them with DRM or some horrible Statements of Mistrust the way they’re usually treated. I think that would be a great thing for the future, if people were paying for what they wanted to pay for. Basically I think we’re heading for some sort of utopian anarchy, which is what we were always promised. In science fiction, anyway.

Right! That would be nice.

Well in some ways it is that way. Some people of a certain age are taking the entertainment they want for free, and giving to things they feel are worthwhile and charging. It’ll be interesting to see how dominant that becomes.

It’s all changing so fast, like Kickstarter coming around, what? Three years ago? And the landscape of entertainment and videogames in particular are going to change drastically in the next few years. It’s a weird time. It’s exciting.

The interesting thing to me is, all the things we complain about, the gatekeepers of movie studios and game publishers, where you had to jump over this enormous hurdle to get inside the castle, and then once you were in, you’re taken care of and your movie gets made or your game gets made. But those walls are coming down and now everyone can make their own stuff. For a while, you’re going to have this super broad “Oh look, everyone has made a movie,” now I don’t know which one to watch cause I don’t know which ones are good. Someone will have to think of a way to let the good ones bubble up to the top.

You also don’t want to break the back of the beast you're fighting when you’re doing something creative. You want some opposition, some constraints. That’s what makes you come up with creative ideas to bypass it. Like your budget gets cut, and you figure out a clever way to get around it. I think that’s what makes you engaged. Cause with every creative thing that you do, it has to feel a little bit like a war, or a battle, cause that’s what makes you awake and alert and engaged. If it was all just too easy, it would feel like nothing, and you wouldn’t get up in the morning to fight. There’s already so many of these things that occur naturally, creator’s or writer’s block, that we definitely don’t need more imposed by an artificial system of gatekeepers.

It seems like there’s this animosity between the independent and the AAA businesses, albeit likely one-sided. At GDC I saw a rant that said “We can’t have these games made by robots; Make a game about cats ejaculating on shit! Cause we’re humans?” I just saw a lot of people talking about Twine games and comparing them directly to Bioshock Infinite, and declaring it was way more meaningful and special than it. But they’re two totally different things! You can’t really compare the two.

You see that relationship a lot, that “competition.” When I want to UC Santa Cruz we all griped about UC Berkeley. We thought they were the machine, a diploma mill. UC Santa Cruz is where you get evaluations and not grades, and we thought we were superior, and we thought there was this rivalry between Berkeley and us. Then I actually transferred there and they had never thought about Santa Cruz. There was no rivalry, it had never occurred to them to even think about Santa Cruz. So, I feel it’s a little like that, but it’s changed a lot this year because the indies were so present at the award shows and being intermingled, you know, Journey took a lot of awards that would have gone to…

You mean all the awards.

Yea! The awards that would have gone to FallOut 3 or something, and those teams would have been like, “wait a second, we worked really really hard on this, the size of our effort was so… epic. Where’s our award?” That might make some of that conflict go both ways.

I think some of the animosity comes from people being dissatisfied with what’s being offered on the AAA market, and also a lack of empathy toward people who are actually making them, because they aren’t made by robots. They’re made by people, people just like them who took a different path, or are in a different place, you know what I mean? I mean I worked for a big publisher, and I know people work just as hard as indies work on their games, but I do see what they’re talking about in that there’s something lacking in what AAA games are offering. But I still feel like we need both kinds of games in a way. I think both kinds of games have a lot to offer. In the same way that Sundance didn’t kill the movie industry, it just added more variety and health to it. And indie games do the same thing. There’s people who work in indie movies and go back and forth between Chris Nolan and understand both systems and games should be the same way.

The craft as a whole benefits from both sides. Some of the bigger indie games are just renditions of the same themes as AAA games. Hotline Miami comes to mind. It’s very stylized, but it’s very similar to what any number of popular gangster games do. And nobody would dare say, “Hotline Miami would be a lot better if it didn’t have guns in it.”

Anyway, girls are starting to get some recognition in development, and there’s been a lot of talk about characters and women in videogames, like in Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Videogames. How do we as white, bearded game developers… 

Shave our beards.

[laughs] Like making more interesting characters that are open to everybody. What are people missing that they’re not getting how to do this? How are they not seeing this as a good thing?

I think a lot of things that are good for a social progessive agenda are the same things that are good for a creative agenda, which are hearing from new voices. It’s good creatively, 'cause you heard from the same protagonist over and over again in games, the guy with a shotgun on his back and a half-tucked shirt. All of the things that those kind of characters do, it’s great to hear from someone that doesn’t fit that description, and that’s also good socially speaking.

I think when you watch Anita’s videos, like the first episode, I had not heard that story about Star Fox Adventures before, and I thought that was great. She’s speaking to it in terms of the damage that was done by having that repeated trope in games and the impact that has on young girls and boys, but also a reminder of what a cliché it is. I mean, I did it. Psychonauts had a damsel character, kind of--you’d like to hope it was creative or different, but I realize if I do that again, the reason I’d do it is 'cause it works. It sets up tension in a satisfying way, but if you do that everytime, it’s this creative crutch that would not be good. And it’s better to just break free of it and try something new. There’s other things that motivate people to play games other than rescue a princess.

It seems to, especially in the examples she pointed out, show how one dimensional the heroes are in these stories as well. That’s the relationship they have. It’s a point A, point B. It doesn’t really matter--they’re interchangeable and these savvy hacker dads have been illustrating this. Mario is just as one dimensional as Peach.

But we never really played Mario games for the character, or to save the princess for that matter. You’re playing it to beat the level.

They are primitive, but Donkey Kong is the early scratchings that lead to stories being in games.

Well to me, a lot of it was having a daughter and seeing the world. It’s this thing when you have a kid you relive your life in certain ways, you go through the same things again. Going through kindergarten again, I’m remembering my own childhood, and I’m reliving certain elements of my youth. Except now I’m a girl. And I’m seeing what it’s like to be a girl in different ways from watching her interact with boys on the playground, or sitting down and playing a game and hearing her say “I want to play as that girl” or Wonder Woman, in Lego Batman 2, only you can’t play as Wonderwoman. You can play as Batgirl, but you have to unlock her.

So you’re trying to explain all this game jargon-crap to her, so eventually I just found cheat codes on Twitter. Someone told me how to unlock Batgirl. And thinking about what a simple thing that is to miss, to not have a playable female character, no wonder games aren’t as appealing to young girls as they are boys. Basically it’s all about raising people’s consciousness, in the same way I think Anita’s videos are making people more aware of the simple things you’re ignoring. Like Louis C.K. says, “Now that’s a part of me,” a part of something that goes into what I’m thinking about when I’m making a game. So it would be much harder for me to a make a game without thinking about this now, and Broken Age has a playable female character, and it’ll be a lot harder not doing that in the future.

I remember growing up playing Mario Kart with my sisters when we were kids and they’d fight over who got to be Peach to the point where one of them would say “Well, I don’t even want to play then.”

Little kids especially, they will not play a game if they can’t be the gender of their choosing. Try and get a boy and a girl to play a make-believe game and it’s gotta be one that has a part for both of them to play, or they’ll be like, “No, I won’t play,” which is weird because little kids' minds aren’t thinking about dating or thinking sexually, so you wonder why it’s such a big identity thing to them.

It’s pretty interesting what you said about reliving your life through your daughter. Is that an empathy unique to parents or game designers, or both?

Well it’s both. You’re always thinking about what it’s like to play one of your games and see the world through the player’s eyes. So you’ll be watching someone play and you’ll look at what they’re looking at and you’ll be like, “Oh crap, I thought that start menu was super intuitive but now I realize they don’t know what to click on.” Or you know, I tried to play Kinectimals with my daughter. I thought she’d love brusingh the baby tigers, but then she had to stand in a circle and hold her hand while she’s waiting for a timer to wind down, and she’s two and a half years old and there’s no way I could get her to do that. It was so frustrating. And it did give me the idea to make Happy Action Theatre and Kinect Party, which didn’t have any of those barriers at all and it was more about age and accessability, and we made a game that it turns out your grandma can play, or little kids in wheel chairs.

We got videos of kids without arms playing it and just realizing how making it inclusive for some person, my daughter, made it inclusive for a whole bunch of people. And that was really rewarding. It’s funny because that game was probably the most unknown game we made amoung even our own fans. But it’s probably the one in the end that I’m most proud of, and you don’t really get it until you watch a whole room full of people playing that game. You see your grandma playing with a two year old and a dog and everybody’s laughing and jumping around, and using their imagination. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy anything I’ve made to that extend as those two games.

Follow Tim on Twitter at  @TimOfLegend, and Colin at @scallopdelion.