Denis Dyack Talks Story, IPs, and Genres in Games

In an ongoing chat with 1UP, Denis Dyack continued his discussion of how he believes genres in videogames are on their way out and then moves on to discussing how there are things to be learned from the way other industries operate, and more importantly, what to avoid.

A lot of these people in our industry look at Hollywood and think they’re doing good. Me, I look at Hollywood, and I look at the movie industry and the music industry, and I think there’s a lot of good things we can borrow, but there’s also a lot of land mines we should avoid. The whole idea of putting people into contracts was for the studios to control intellectual property for the movies. It broke people down to the point where it was all about money and control, and it was all about, quite frankly, commoditization of people. They succeeded very well, but after a while, the problem is that now the movie industry is starting to become dysfunctional. A lot of really good directors only work with the same people over and over again. All the people I talk to in the movie industry, I ask them what works and what doesn’t. And they say, “Always work with the same people.” There’s all these myths that you can hire anyone to do all your stuff, but it’s really not like that.

Our model is actually going much further back. We’re taking the model of a traditional guild, where I want to be as close as I can to a university. There’s a learning environment, but at the same time we have trade secrets

Another point Dyack was vocal on was control over IP, which he sees as an important issue in the videogame industry, due heavily to it being so young.

Stepping back to what you said about the old Hollywood model of maintaining control over IP: clearly this is a risk in the videogames industry of certain publishers and developers trying to mimic Hollywood too much in that regard. Looking at big developers like Electronic Arts and Activision, do you think that specific problem of controlling IP is going to be a big issue in coming years? It seems to come up in every other medium.

The younger the medium, the more IP is an issue. If you look at one of the oldest mediums, straight literature, books, who controls the IP is not really an issue. The author always controls it generally. If you look at music and television and movies, the more modern you get, the more it starts to turn the other way. Corporations, or non-people, start controlling things.

I know it’s a big deal in comic books too.

Yeah, exactly. It’s all the same. I think it’s just a matter of exploitation. I don’t mean exploitation of people so much, but corporations want to be able to control the rights and exploit those the most they can. In the end, though, as soon as you take something away from an author, you’re immediately diluting it, and you’re hurting the industry. As an example, I’ll talk about Legacy of Kain. We created the first Legacy of Kain. We came up with all the content, all the story, but in the end we moved away from that series. Crystal Dynamics tried to take it over. A lot of people liked what they did. But if you look at Legacy of Kain where it is right now — so diluted, so dysfunctional — as a property itself, it’s pretty much gone in a completely different direction than we would have ever taken it.

When we were doing Legacy of Kain, we had a lot of research into vampire mythology and a lot of ideas on where we were going. Crystal Dynamics merged in this entirely different game that had nothing to do with the series and then slapped the IP on it, and that’s where Soul Reaver came from. That was just a weapon in the game. Even if the developer’s good, and I think Crystal Dynamics is not a bad developer, you get this dilution of the content, because the original author is gone.

There’s a lot to digest in part 1 and part 2 of the chat with Dyack, so head over to 1UP if you feel like reading about some high-level games industry things.