Controversial idea: Developers should talk to the press

A few weeks ago at a party I was talking to an acquaintance who works at a big game developer that works on a very big franchise and he was telling me how it's kind of a joke within his studio that the people who do press interviews about their games are usually not the people who were most intimately involved in their development.

Of course to me as the person occasionally on the other side of the interview (though luckily not too often, since we don't do "previews"), it wasn't funny so much as sad. Though honestly, it's not that surprising. So many of those interviews are more about a series of canned PR lines than genuine back-and-forth discussion that being intimately involved in the game doesn't seem like the key qualification so much as being able to deliver those talking points.

It's one more bizarre state of affairs in the world of videogame journalism compared to other media. I can't imagine an article about a film or TV show where the interviewee is not the director or producer or head writer. But in games we often get people with amorphous titles like "product marketing manager" giving quotes that are not the way any normal human being would actually talk about something they are working on (especially when those quotes are delivered via e-mail or later approved in some way by PR people). That's not to say interviews about movies are always enlightening and games aren't, but it seems to happen more often that way than the other.

I was thinking about that after reading this little item on GamaSutra in which Gas Powered Games' founder Chris Taylor makes the crazy suggestion that "press questions out to go right to the people best qualified to answer them." What a radical notion! Of course, publishers trying to use the press to get out a certain message may not be thrilled about this, but I would like to think that as the videogame audience matures, this will increasingly become inevitable. Gamers will want to hear directly from the people who really make their games and won't accept phony PR-driven interviews. Not to mention everyone in the industry will recognize that their mature audiences can accept hearing about features that didn't make it into the game, flaws in the development process, and other things that real people talk about in real life.

This issue also ties into an excellent post a few weeks ago on SexyVideogameLand where Leigh Alexander pointed out that it's rather bizarre that Dennis Dyack is considered "controversial" since the things he says are actually hardly controversial at all. It's just the fact that he, as a developer, is able to talk to the press regularly and do so honestly that somehow makes him "controversial." Which is a very sad state of affairs.