Can Anyone Define "Selling Out"?

I recently wrote about how using stereotypes in games can be helpful as long as we distract the player from them by providing a twist, effectively “hiding” the fact that we were using a stereotype, and I took a bit of heat for it in the comments.

I guess in retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised.  Talking about stereotypes is a bit like starting off a post by saying “let’s talk about gun control”.  Everyone is pre-invested in the topic, so it ultimately doesn’t matter where I come down on it: someone is going to think I'm an idiot.

Now, I hold the opinion that storytelling is manipulation.  Ultimately I’m trying to get people to emotionally invest in something that they know, full well, doesn’t exist – they are actively paying me to trick them – and so there’s no strategy that isn’t “fair game” to me as long as the audience doesn’t notice.  The more obvious your strategy is the more careful you have to be, but the ends justify the means because both the ends and the means are the same thing: something I made up.  Stories are powerful forces for good and evil, stories can change lives and talk about powerful, universal truths, but ultimately they’re fabrications.  I don’t think it’s in our best interest to treat their construction as sacred: if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t then we should try something else.  There’s a lot of narrative purists that aren’t wild about my opinion, and I don’t apologize for that, but the insinuation that I was more concerned with sales than “quality” upset me.  Does the fact that I care about sales make me a bad writer?  Does the fact that I take the size of my audience into consideration make me less of an artist?

I just want to clarify that nothing “out of line” was said.  No one was rude or insulted me personally: the reason that this particular accusation stuck with me is because I’m actually not sure if they’re wrong.

I’ve always believed that the realms of commercial viability and artistic quality are two very different things.  I can really only directly speak for stories, but I think that it's true across the board: something can be good without being commercially viable, and something can be commercially successful without being good.  That said, I think it’s possible to be both, and I try to only take on jobs that I think have potential in both areas.

Largely, I associate being commercially viable with existing inside a specific set of restraints.  Essentially, in order to be commercially viable (when it comes to telling a story) you have to spin a tale that contains things people will want to hear.  That’s why I think the sales for Spec Ops: The Line were such a chasm.  It was an excellent story, but ultimately I don’t think the majority of gamers wanted to hear about real violence.  I think the number of sales a game makes is in direct proportion to both how marketable its material is and the quality of the game.

I think it’s all about finding your “sweet spot”, finding something where the level of excitement between marketing and development is even: the developers can’t change their original vision any further without becoming less excited about it and affecting the quality of the game, and yet the marketers can sell it to a broad audience.  It’s not about shoving yourself into the most marketable game that could ever exist: it’s about finding the game that you’re really excited to make that is also marketable.  Only a very limited number of people will buy something like Spec Ops: The Line regardless of its quality, but a marketable game with a team that hates it won’t sell either because it won’t be any good.

I’ve always thought this balance was in everyone’s best interest, and so part of what upset me about the comments on my last article was the idea that, because I was concerned about sales, I’d abandoned artistic integrity.  I’d always believed that artistic integrity was crucial to sales, and that without sales artistic integrity wouldn’t matter much because we wouldn’t be making a game.  We’d be waiting tables.

And yet there’s a truth to the accusation about me that I couldn’t shake off.  My favorite story of all time is Caroline or Change, a musical that was on Broadway in 2004.  That particular story means more to me than any other.  It’s changed my life.  It was also a financial disaster.  It was about a black maid in the 60’s who sacrificed her dreams and happiness in order to keep her job.  It’s about how her unwillingness to change both destroyed her and saved her children, which, needless to say, didn’t sell as well as Wicked.  I would have never written Caroline or Change, and I'm not sure that I ever will.

As a writer I’ve always had an unflinching responsibility to provide quality, but quality and commercial viability are separate from each other.  Just because I want to tell stories that are marketable doesn’t mean I don’t tell excellent stories.  Marketability determines what I can and can’t write about, but the quality of my work is determined by how I write about it.  What my focus on sales does mean that there are certain types of stories that I’ll never be able to tell, and certain people who would be helped by those stories that will never hear them.  And I don’t know exactly what that says about me.

The complicating factor to all of this is that I’m a freelancer.  I, routinely and for a living, take developers’ money because I promise them that I can help sell more units.  If my focus on sales is ‘untruthful’ to my story and my audience, then what is my focus on artistic integrity above all else to my clients?  Should I encourage them to craft a game about their semi-fictionalized childhood when I know, full well, that no one will be able to market that story?  Or do I help them change some minor aspects of their story – and possibly make use of some stereotypes – so that they can tell the part of the story that matters to them while also keeping their apartment?

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know.  Generally, I give them both sets of options, tell them what I think the consequences of each will be, and let them decide.  I also write novels on my own time so that I can tell my story without having to care whether or not if teenagers are going to like the poster.

A writer who has changed my life (Anne Lamott) once said that maturity is the ability to live with unresolved conflict, and I think that it’s past time I admitted that I just plain don’t know exactly what being an “artist” means. 

Do I have an obligation to be poor and miserable so that I never have to make a sacrifice to sales?  I don’t know.  Is entertainment simply entertainment, and therefore we have no moral responsibility to use our voices to talk about the unpopular stuff?  I don’t think so, but I don’t have any proof either.  Most of the time it isn’t actually my game, so I just help other people do what they think is the right thing.  If I had a real, moral issue with a developer then I’d quit, but so far I’ve only worked with imperfect people trying their best.

The shitty truth is that I don’t think there is an answer, and I think that most of the people with a fanatical adherence to either sales or artistic integrity as moral imperatives feel the way they do because it’s comforting, not because it’s practical.  I don’t think that we're going to find the truth somewhere in between the two either, because I don't think there's a truth to find.  I think that the arguments about the importance of art and the importance of money are all true because it's like comparing drinking water to breathing air.  Whichever you prefer to spend your time with, at some point you're probably going to want to put it on hold for the other.  It’s comforting when we’re able to draw clear lines between cause and effect, right and wrong, entertainment and lies, but I also think that the real world is rarely that simple.  I think that the best we’re going to do is start with the game we really want to make, think about what will happen once we make it, and take the rest of it step by step.

David Kuelz is a freelance writer and narrative designer based in New York City.  If you like what he had to say, he has free monthly newsletter with tips and resources that you can sign up for here.