The Laziness of A Ghost

Over on Patreon, friend of the blog and Viking Accountant Doc Destructo wrote a recent article on Asshole DNA, a series that seeks to study the way a game can leave you with a certain insight into the person who made it who’s a dickhead. He, naturally, started with Watch_Dogs.

Now I’ve spoken in the past about the Ghost of the Author, which is really just an extension of Barthes’ original idea, the Death of the Author. The notion is that there is no singular, pure entity that is the author, and therefore, the person who may think of themselves as the creator is gone and it falls to us to try and interpret who and what they do. In videogames, I argue, it’s not even possible to call that creature the author – they are the ghost of an author, a creature that came about because so much of the creative process of videogame development is

Now I want to highlight something in Doc’s piece:

This phrase he uses, this is lazy gamedev. And then he goes on to qualify how it’s not you know, laziness, but this is defintiely laziness. In this case I kind of want to chime in and note that there is a laziness here, just not the laziness of lack of energy or work. Rather, it is the laziness that reflects a lack of thoroughness.

The thing with laziness in videogames is that it’s sort of impossible to be actually lazy when you’re in this industry. Everyone is working long hours for lots of work and even the person whose work is vanishing down a hole isn’t actually being lazy – they’re just having their effort wasted by other, mistakenly made management practices.

If the ghost of an author is the collected information, behaviour and effort of the entire crew making it, this person can view the allocation of resources as effort. That is to say, while there is no actual laziness from any individual in the organisation, it can be said that having the opportunity to spend resources on a particular field of the game’s development and choosing not to, especially if those resources are being spent in a way that leaves large, unpleasant gaps in the work’s sense of reality.

Nobody on this dev team was lazy. But the author, this ghost of an author, chose to not allocate energy and effort to making sure this world’s gangs and its image of race and racism in Chicago were meaningfully well-thought out. They were done as simply as possible, using shorthand, using a general, broad method that didn’t involve spending more resources on second drafts or rewrites or double-checking narratives or implications or sensitivity testing.

No developer, writer, individual worker, creating this vast project was lazy. But the author of this work was lazy.