Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Roguey]

Does DLC even sell that well? It seems mostly a cope unless you've built a massive paypig operation around a big franchise that can support it, but I'll let you correct me.

DLC budgets are typically low enough that it's easy money. One would have to screw up big time to make a DLC that isn't profitable.

 

[Butter]

Cain answers the most important question: What is an RPG?

 

[Infinitron]

The decade when Tim Cain made Fallout, Arcanum and TToEE was a "lost decade" for him. The price of your hobby, Codex!

I talk about my lost decade, from 1993 to 2003, where I worked so much that I barely was home and knew almost nothing going on outside of work. Consider this a cautionary tale of work-life imbalance.

 

[Harthwain]

The price of your hobby, Codex!

That's a sacrifice we are willing to make.

 

[Roguey]

That doesn't seem so bad.

"I know also," said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."

"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

"Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

And it could have been worse https://web.archive.org/web/2015032...com/click_nothing/2015/03/ten-years-down.html

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

 

[ciox]

I mean, he DID miss all of Britney Spears' music videos as they were coming out.

 

[mindx2]

I mean, he DID miss all of Britney Spears' music videos as they were coming out.

I would count that as a blessing...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So, is his channel any good? The faggot video made me ignore the channel completely.

 

[Roguey]

So, is his channel any good? The faggot video made me ignore the channel completely.

The latest video has more fag talk.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Yeah…… fuck that channel then. I don’t care to hear about that shit.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Big dollars? No. I made less during that decade than in the two decades afterward. I had bought a house because I got a raise and used all of that money (since I never did anything but go to work) to buy a home during a slump in the market, and I had to refinance my house in the middle of that Lost Decade because I couldn't even afford that mortgage. The two other Troika owners and I made far less than our employees for the first two years, and the same amount after that. I remember a young man at PAX in the early 2010's who asked me about Fallout and "all the royalties I made from it". He assumed I was set for life, and when I told him it was work-for-hire like most games in the business, he was shocked. I think he said "why bother?".
Why bother, indeed.

 

[ciox]

StarcraftBro bringing the hard hitting questions.

 

[Zeriel]

Modern game devs crow about "work/life balance" because they're not passionate because they feel no sense of ownership over the product. If it's a corporate product that hundreds of people are working on, nobody is going to voluntarily work overtime to make it as good as possible.

It's also not the job of consumers to care. I mean, sure, it's nice if they do, but I'm not going to ask customers to buy more products where I work because I/my union failed to negotiate a good wage, or because I have no job security. That's up to the individual to figure out. Not to mention a lot of the time the "hard work" these people do is laughable. Sit in a chair all day, make anywhere from above-retail-wagie grade up to professional tier money, then bitch about how it's never good enough. I'd love to see these fags work manual labor 10 hours a day for 20 days straight and then say how miserable their "crunch" is.

 

[Roguey]

Humor in games:


Tim finally ran out of new shirts to wear. I counted about 90 (!).

Tim's responsible for the wereshark throwing fish at you and the sheriff-bat throwing people at you at the end of Bloodlines.

Mentioning things he's talked about before, like how he prefers referential humor that works even if you don't get the reference.

"Humor makes the dark parts even darker" - Leonard Boyarsky. Didn't work for The Outer Worlds though, just turned the setting into one big obnoxious joke.

Tim believes there's more humor in Fallout than Wasteland, though I'd say that Wasteland was far goofier with its situations and character designs (which carried into its two sequels).

"I don't think you should build an entire game around dumb dialogue and I've never built an entire game just around humor" - once again those who have played The Outer Worlds would disagree.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I wonder how much comedy was in Wizard’s Crown. I don’t need “yuckity yuck chuckle fuckity yucks” in my games to enjoy them. It is not a requirement.


Edit…. I forgot the hilarious white rabbits.

Spoiler

….. until the massacre your party.

 

[Infinitron]

The Outer Worlds isn't really like haha funny all the time, it's got plenty of somber moments. But unlike the Fallout setting, it feels like absurdity is an essential component of The Outer Worlds - regardless of how often it's expressed. Humor is fundamentally a bonus in Fallout, whereas TOW doesn't make sense without it.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about the ubiquitous sense of insecurity that a lot of game developers have, that feeling called "imposter syndrome".

 

[Roguey]

I've said it before, but every game dev I've seen who's talked about "imposter syndrome" is someone bad at their job feeling sad over an honest assessment of their abilities.

Though the Dunning-Kruger people are pretty bad too, likely even worse. So many games to make, so few people actually good at it.

 

[Warhawk47]

Career talk. If you can design a game that you like to play and you think it's great, then it is. For you, at least. But that caveat is no demerit in art. Some of the best art in the world was created by people whose work wasn't appreciated by others or compensated for at the time, only to be rediscovered much later. But if you're going for a product, to sell it to make a living, then suddenly you have to think about pecking order, office politics, professional credibility, review scores and so on. You have to compromise ideas for the sake of appeal or accessibility, even though neither of those would have held back the design for your personal enjoyment. Impostor syndrome is mostly about feeling inadequate in the hierarchy and the rat race. The only time it applies in personal pursuits is if you knew for a fact that you had created something better in the past.

 

[Roguey]

Tim's really hyped up about Arcanum's procedural generation


zzzzzzzzzzzzz from me though

 

[Bad Sector]

It was an interesting video to see how they did it in Arcanum even if the overall concept was something other games had already done the same or something similar before. As someone mentioned in the comments i'd be curious about a video for their technical inspirations.

 

[mindx2]

I talk about the ubiquitous sense of insecurity that a lot of game developers have, that feeling called "imposter syndrome".

Was he trolling talking about the Codex at 5:54...?

 

[ItsChon]

If he said that people go on forums and throw out their ideas that they think are "brilliant", when in reality none of these people have ever designed a game and don't understand some of the nuances/difficulties that go into the process of designing a game, that would have been a fair argument, though a bit of a cop-out. Just because someone hasn't designed a game before doesn't mean their ideas don't have merit. A good developer can parse the shit takes/ideas from the ones that have merit, and then take these raw, unrefined, ideas and build upon them/edit them/hone them, into something that is actually good.

Instead, people that have these ideas must be "insecure" lmao? I can see words such as arrogant, autistic, or Dunning-Kruger being used, but insecure is not how I would describe the psychology of the people he's describing in the video.

You see this kind of argumentation a lot more now. "Oh you're not a woman so how you can have anything meaningful to say about women's issues". "You're not black so you don't have any idea/contribution about the state of blacks and their culture in America". And so on and so forth. When someone who doesn't know shit about Physics/Chemistry/Mathematics tries to state bold ideas about these fields, an actual Physicist/Chemist/Mathematician would have no issues refuting their ideas/suggestions/theories in a well thought out and reasoned argument. For some reason though, we don't see the same thing in the social sciences, in politics, or in fields such as cinema and game development. I shouldn't say some reason, because the reason is obvious, these are fields that are far more abstract than the hard sciences, and they require a lot more creativity and philosophy to properly understand. This leads to many people in these fields not actually understanding/knowing the field/industry as much as they think, and when they are pressed to defend their beliefs/practices, they have to fall back on arguments from authority/credibility to defend themselves, since their actual capability/knoweldge in their field/industry/career/etc is not very high.

 

[Shadenuat]

Funny I have opposite opinion from coder who worked in mobile and then on microprose. He said sometimes they d call whole office on a gathering and ask if anyone had idea for an interesting game. And noone could propose anything interesting and exciting. It was like an actual problem.

 

[abija]

Calling people out of the blue with ideas for a game is a bit different than people working on a project having ideas about it. Tim keeps notes of settings/game ideas so obviously "gimme an idea for a game" is not considered a mundane task.

ItsChon he meant you are insecure if you present your idea on a forum and react badly when it's rejected, especially if you have no experience.