Monkey Island's Gilbert: Industry Must Unionize To Move Forward

Author: by Chris Remo, Staff

Talking as part of an in-depth new Gamasutra interview, Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion co-creator Ron Gilbert has been discussing a move to a floating 'freelance' structure for game development, suggesting that unions "bring a lot of bad things to gaming, but I think they're going to be necessary for us to move into that Hollywood model." In the interview, which also discusses Gilbert's upcoming episodic game comeback with Hothead's DeathSpank, he is asked about the concept of "individual creative people who assemble into teams for the purpose of a project", and whether this film business-style model could ever work for games. His response: "I think that it will [work]... and I think we will shift to that model, but I think that there are a couple of things that have to happen before we really shift to that. One is that I think technology has to settle down a little bit. I think technology is moving forward really rapidly, and part of what a lot of teams do is exploring new technology, and I think that's kind of hard to do with an ad hoc thing. I think the other thing that's going to have to happen - and this is a really big one - is we're going to have to become unionized. Because I don't think that you're going to be able to grab all of these freelance people when you need them if there isn't some kind of a union structure that's over the top of them. You can't really have a bunch of animators just floating around from job to job with nothing in between. So I think there's going to have to be a lot more structure, and I think that's going to have to come in the form of unions - which, you know, I don't know that I really agree with that; I think unions bring a lot of bad things to gaming, but I think they're going to be necessary for us to move into that Hollywood model. And I also think that game people are just going to need to get a bit better at scheduling projects, and planning projects, and hitting deadlines, and all these other things. Because I think if you're going to have a lot of contractors that are going to come in and go away, they really need to know when they're going to go away; because they're going to be booking other projects behind yours, and we're going to have to become a lot better about hitting dates. And I think the movie business, for the most part, they're damned good at getting their movies done on time." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including lots more from Gilbert on why publishers won't take risks on games without demo versions, further parallels with Hollywood, and the state of DeathSpank.