Monday, October 20, 2008

Of Shame

I'd like to crystallize in a blog post the wisdom of an australian "developer" named "openglaussie", as seen over at Gamedev.net.

I guess nothing good will come from spaghetti eaters, mafia bosses and short , tan people, who bullshit others as a way of living, italians are the worst catergory in everything.

[...]

I don't think i have a wrong attitude, is just my way to put things on, i don't sugar coat, no way, italians aren't good at making games, i am not talking about knowledge, since we all know that italians universities are among the best ( only in litterature ), [...] technologically italy is many steps behind, no entertainment culture finalized at videogames [...], they don't use their cars anymore to spare oil


Please note how he also edited his posts later on. I'm not sure I feel like commenting on this right now.

Edit: well, while I'm waiting for the report I'm working on to finish crunching numbers, I guess I can spend a few minutes writing down how I feel about this.
That people of other countries have a low consideration for italians is nothing new. It's a sad reality, not shared across everyone of course, but it does happen. However, we're talking about game development here and I'll keep it at that.
I think Italy never ever had the possibility to grow in the gaming industry. We simply don't have a business for that. Many bright minds fly away from this country towards more fertile fields, where they can actually work and make a good living out of their talent. The idea of a game dev convention is both a good and an irrelevant news. A good news, seeing as there's always the need to spark a start, but irrelevant, since I really doubt it'll help investors create business. It's all about earning a living eventually (for big companies even more so). We had a few good productions in a distant past (Milestone with Screamer and a few other racing games, or Lightshock with Pray for Death which was a very nice fighting game at the time), but then it all stopped.

I really think it's hard to start competing with multi-millionaire companies ex nihilo. I also think we wouldn't be able to create a Cave Story clone (which is an amazing game, a one man effort worth gold) even if we really wanted. Why is it so? I don't know, all I know is that they can convention all they want, but that's not gonna help unless someone starts changing the business. And this is something not happening overnight.

I for one have always been interested and secretly in love with game programming. I never found anyone to share this passion of mine with where I live. The italian game dev site reminds me of the desert, with a few, lone explorers along its path.

But then again, I can't complain. I for one am not doing much to change this. I cannot.