Mark Ecko at DICE

[J Marv]

Mark Ecko Challenges the Game Development Community

What's a fashion designer doing at a game conference? Trying to shake the place up, that's what.

By Dave Kosak | Feb. 1, 2005

The DICE convention kicked off with a roof-raiser from graffiti artist turned fashion maven Mark Ecko. Hold up! Who? Why is he talking to game developers about their business? This guy hasn't even released a game yet (he's working on one with Atari -- an urban counter-culture game called Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure). To be fair, Ecko said as much at the beginning of his talk: he knew people were squinting their eyes skeptically. But he's used to being the outsider. When he was trying to sell his tee-shirts to chain stores, fashion industry executives rankled or told him he didn't know the business and didn't know what he was doing. Mark Ecko thrives on conflict.

His message was the perfect opening to the conference because it came out and told game developers that they were in trouble, that they needed to seriously change how they looked at what they did. Maybe that's the perfect message for someone outside the industry to deliver; or maybe Ecko was just an obnoxious blowhard who didn't belong. Talking with people after the speech, opinions ran the gamut: Some people thought he was right on, others thought he wasn't saying anything they didn't already know, some dismissed it with a wave of the hand, others resented the talk. Among us GameSpy editors he generated some passionate arguments. That's the whole point. So whether you think Ecko belonged on stage or not, it's worth it to at least look at his message.

Who Killed Jabba the Hutt?

Ecko peppered his speech with classic Star Wars references, beginning with the issue of who killed Jabba. Was it the blind luck of Han Solo? The mind tricks of Luke Skywalker? The masked voodoo of Lando? Leia strangling him with the chain? Ecko says it was none of these: it was Jabba sitting around, fat, getting complacent, thinking he understood what was going on. Ecko says the game development is in danger of being in a similar rut: Focused on budgets, contracts, producers, wrestling with publishers, feature creep, milestones, and the works they're losing sight of what the real problem is. "Life sucks. Business sucks. The consumer doesn't care!" he asserts.

Are people making games that are culturally relevant to the audience?

Just who is the audience, anyways? The new generation has grown up in a world with its own set of issues. Columbine haunts their schools. Music is something you download. 911 lingers. The terror alert zings between yellow and orange. TiVo and peer-to-peer networks give them the entertainment they want whenever they want it. Ecko described it as a world of "Television, Technology, and Terrorism."

This audience, aside from wanting bite-sized pieces of entertainment on demand, doesn't care about the mechanics of a game. They don't care about pixel shaders, dynamic shadows, or real-time physics. They care about the end product, which is simply an alternate way of spending some of their free time.

A New Way of Thinking About Games

Ecko railed against developers who are developing products for themselves, or for publishers, or for retailers. He wants to see people making games that are culturally relevant. He wants designers to "use the force..." and that force is culture. It's the force that made his line of clothes take off while designer labels struggled to figure out why they weren't reaching people.

"Godzilla is here," he announced. "He's hungry. What are you going to feed him?" Your typical player who goes out and buys Grand Theft Auto but doesn't consider himself a 'gamer' is a powerful part of the market. Ecko nicknamed this consumer "Kenny." "Kenny doesn't want code" when he buys a game, Ecko says. "He wants history!"

Five Massive Trends

Ecko identified the five most influential things in consumer culture today that have a potential impact on the games industry.

Popstalgia: This is all about making products feel like history. It's a trend where savvy marketers harken back to greatness. Look at what's happening in the car industry: Ford's new Mustang has classic lines and they brought back the GT. Chrysler is bringing back giant bad-ass grilles. They're realizing that the car isn't the thing: it's our idea of cars, our concept of cars when they were awesome. Muscle and power and speed. Tricked out 70s hot-rod babe magnets. Everyone wants to relive that history, even if they weren't a part of it.

Instant Gratification: The music industry has been turned upside down because they weren't delivering the product the way that consumers wanted it. People today expect entertainment on demand. They save programs on TiVo to watch them when they please, they download their favorite songs for 99-cents and carry them around on their iPod with their whole music collection. Nobody wants to wait for anything.

Apocalyptic Marketing: Consumers are driven by fear these days. What's going on in Iraq? What are the terrorists doing next? A lot of stuff is out of everyone's control. What they can control is what they buy. The latest trends? How about the new Hummer? It's popular because it's this ironclad cocoon of safety in an unsure world. People are spending more money on their houses. Home Depot is taking off. People want to be in control of their world, and they're afraid of what's going on outside it.

Customization: Toyota's Scion brand is taking off in part because people make it their own car, tricking it out right off the showroom. Ring tones? They're huge. Everyone wants to look different, sound different, be different.

Democratization of Design: This cryptic set of terms means that everything has to be designed well at all price points. If you go to a store, everything from the cheapest radio in the place to the monster sound system all look cool. Apple's iPod crushed the competition in part because it simply looks sweet.

What Next?

Ecko saw these trends as part of our youth culture today. There will be others. His point is that the gaming industry has to recognize them and creatively build off of them. He looked at the movie industry of the 1960s: it was a stagnant era, where studios dominated production and cranked out formula pieces on schedule. Then along came a new generation of directors who had something to say -- the Francis Ford Coppolas and Martin Scorseses of the world -- and they shook up the world with powerful films that resonated with people who went to the movies. Ecko says that this can happen -- that it needs to happen! -- in the gaming industry.

Someone needs to develop a game as relevant as Apocalypse Now, he asserts, because "until you do you'll be chained to Jabba in a bra and panties."

Ecko was an awesome speaker who peppered his talk with zingers and really kept the audience with him. But did the message hit the mark? It's hard to say. Immediately after his talk, shortly into the next panel, an executive producer at a major game company said something along the lines of "we're all trying to market to that 18-35 year old demographic, and we all understand it..." But it's clear that some games tap into that cultural consciousness more than others.

Ecko's talk may not have been news to everyone. For some developers struggling to bring an edgy vision to life, he might have been preaching to the choir. But even if it's a message that's been said before it's probably one that could never be repeated too often, and it made a great kickoff to the conference.

We'll see if Ecko is able to practice what he preaches when his own game is released.

I'm scared by how right he, an outsider in the industry, is about some things and might be about others.