Xbox finds itself in the midst of a C-suite rotation and the classic destruction of thousands of jobs that follows. As the gaming industry grapples with an overwhelming churn of creative talent, the internet waxes poetic about the creative ability of some of the surviving studios. The discourse around Obsidian has really rubbed me the wrong way.
"The number of times I've seen people, with no understanding of who has worked on our previous games or what they contributed, talk about how Obsidian isn't who they used to be... is staggering. Most of the time they are not just wrong, but spreading an enormous amount of misinformation."
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"Is Obsidian the same as it was 20 years ago? No, of course not. Nothing stays the same. But the DNA at Obsidian is the same as it always was. The same DNA that created KotOR, New Vegas, NWN2, and Stick of Truth."
Brandon Adler
People have a tendency to take formative experiences from their youth and cling to them as sacred throughout the rest of their lives. Their memory attaches a place and time to an experience, creating an ideal vision of creativity that exists exclusively in their past. That vision grows more powerful than the media itself, resurrecting as nostalgia while deteriorating new experiences cast through its lens.
The idea that a studio, given the same cast of creatives, can produce a piece of media that perfectly emulates such experiences is a fable. It cannot be done. No perfect amalgam of creative juice can possibly compete with reminiscence.
Nostalgia aside, there's another aspect of the idea of consistent creative output that to me feels wholly inconsiderate of the creative process. Inconstancy is the name of the game. Creativity isn't produced through a machine and a formula, but the feelings and emotions of individuals collaborating. Were the same set of individuals given an identical forum to collaborate, the output of their creativity will still vastly differ from one work to the next. There are too many human factors at play to pretend that creative work can be reduced to some formula.
Noclip's series on Disco Elysium captures this notion perfectly. It demonstrates that the creation of one of the most powerful games in the last decade was the result of chance and pure human will.
Montaigne's essay on inconstancy of action comes to mind:
We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current.