Posted 08 July 2010 - 11:21 PM
It's going to be a difficult to be an auteur in the games industry, unless you're doing it all yourself as an indie, or overseeing a very small team. When you get to be in control of a major project, how do you oversee dozens of artists, programmers, designers, scriptwriters and imprint your vision on them? Where do you find the time? How do you even do it, when you won't necessarily understand how they do what they do? It's nothing like film or music, where you can pick and choose your staff with ease, selecting a cinematographer or producer for specific stylistic reasons. If you're making a game, you have your studio, and you can outsource this bit and that bit, and you might poach someone if you're lucky, but that's it.
Games deaden the effect an auteur has anyway, because currently the medium doesn't give a shit if you're an auteur or an arsehole, it's focused squarely on the technical aspects of the medium. This is just as retarded as one book being better than the other for using a finer grade of paper or more varied inks or fonts, but that's the way it is.
There are precious few games that you can point to and say "Only [insert name here] could have designed that." This is because [insert name here] hasn't done much work, but it's more to do with the fact that the industry regards unique visions as dangerous. To make a truly unique game is to take a risk, and pubs/devs would rather make a shitty game and money than make a great game and a loss.
And Bioshock was shit.
Erfworld - the finest comic about turn-based gaming ever.