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There is this youtube channel where a couple of guys who used to be with Insomniac play some Ratchet & Clank games and talk about how they made the games, and other related subjects. Overall, I find it actually funny and entertaining, but this video gave me something that seems worse the more I think about it.
At about the 4:00 mark, they start talking about Rule 1, which is “You don’t talk shit” about other people and companies. Since the game industry is actually pretty small, people often just move to different companies and get jobs all over the place.
A small digression for a couple points. Firstly, you would think people would be flooding the industry, but something tells me that the state of it prevents more people that the industry could use. It’s become small and centralized (the superhero comic industry is very similar). Second of all, that could explain why those EA employees could pull off such a dick move as rage quitting to avoid supporting the Wii, since they knew other Wii hating companies would just take them in, when larger industries would just drop them for newer and more reasonable people.
Anyway, due to this, talking shit means you can’t get a job at some companies if they don’t like your attitude. Now on the surface, this seems reasonable, but considering some higher up people have said stupid things, I’m wondering if it’s turned into preventing even constructive criticism and saying things that aren’t “towing the party line”. This could explain why some guy who worked on Spore got rightly criticized for saying BS about the Wii (the “two Gamecubes duct taped together”), but Mark Rein of Epic says working on the Wii would be going backwards, but no one calls him out for it, especially when working on the low spec IOS shows he’s a hypocrite.From what I understand, all the game industry people are friends with each other. The fans might attack each other, but the people inside the game industry would rather hang out together.
There has been an old saying that American presidential candidates would rather hang out with Castro than with the average man on the street. Why? Castro is a ‘ruler’ so he is more in their club than the guy on the street. The Bushes and Clinton are best buds and hang out with each other (while their supporters *hate* one another). Supreme Court Justices on such opposite sides like Scalia and Ginsburg hang out together and often go hunting. Carville (Democrat strategist) and Matalin (Republican strategist) are married to each other.
I suppose I’m trying to point out is that people prefer to hang out with other like-minded people of similar jobs. The Game Industry seems like one giant club.
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