The games industry marks one of the most highly collaborative fields of art currently within our entertainment spectrum. Demanding high-class talents from every other walk of life, The Games Industry covers a cornucopia of talents from artists to cinematographers to software programmers to 'intimacy coordinators', if we're talking about Baldur's Gate 3. As such, you would expect the credits at the end of these games to trail on for time immemorial, and some do, sure, but others... don't. I remember once being told that for every name you see in the credits of a movie there are ten others that go unspoken, but that seems to have ballooned into an actual verifiable problem in the modern age of the game's industry to the point where 'credit update patches' aren't a bizarre head-line drawer anymore.
But what is even the point of credit to begin with? Isn't the product itself enough? Well, credits for the creator is the closest that one can come to stamping their mark neatly on the project that the worked on to prove their collaboration and affirm their desire to stand with pride right by the art that they made. Whatsmore, credits serve as a living record of the things that you've worked on, which can then be used as bargaining chips in future projects. Not everyone's contribution to a movie or game is obvious on the screen, therefore just that little scrolling name can be a valid enough seal of trustworthiness. And finally, it's just good and courteous manners to keep everyone's name attached to the product, it lets people know that you care about them.
So then what is the benefit of keeping people out of credits? Well there's certainly a financial proposition for the truly unscrupulous. I mean if we were to assume the absolute worst out of these people and indeed of the world in general, we might posit that proper compensation can be withheld from workers if their supposed contribution is difficult to prove or insubstantial. God knows that a legal case would be weakened by the lack of written evidence, and even if matters never make it that far the general industry has been trailing ever closer to contract work that forgoes all possibility of a credit in favour of 'ghosting' work. Of course, the prickly issue there being that if the contractor declares themselves too proud to take an uncredited position, there'll be someone else desperate enough to take their place. Really a place between a rock and the hard boot of corporate disillusionment.
Within the world of visual entertainment, the question of the rights and compensation of writers has reached such a boiling point as to be strike worthy, and even though those people are getting their names listed in the credits of products, most of the time, they are utterly powerless to call upon the success of their products for fair pay. In an industry that can't even be preoccupied enough with the pursuit of fair pay, isn't it fair to further extract a likeliness not to care enough to list people in the first place? Afterall, how many times has an extra stood in for a single moment that isn't worth the added millisecond to the running tine? Simple, that's literally every movie ever made. Given the nature of game design you'd imagine things would be more buttoned up but... well, then we have stories like what happened with Larian.
Yes, it seems the only negative story that Baldur's Gate 3 was possible of generating pertained to a lack of credits for the staff that translated the mammoth script of the game to other languages. This was, however, quickly cleared up once Larian insisted this was a mistake with the third party company they had hired for the work simply not providing an exhaustive list, and in typical Larian fashion the team committed to patching in the missing credits as soon as possible. A nice and tidy wrap up to a mess up possible because of the digital age all gaming now exists under. But what about the times when the situation isn't always resolved so gently, but instead whittled down to semantics and surprisingly rigid policy calls?
A God of War Ragnarok controversy that drummed up around that game's release related to the name of one music artist that discovered, much to their dismay, that their work on the Freya Chase scene apparently didn't warrant so much as a credit. This composer, who served Studio Santa Monica as an intern, was told that her contribution didn't reach the 'minimum criteria' to be included in the list of credits which draws into question: What is exactly the threshold of 'contribution' at which a person is considered as 'existing'. Because I have to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what is stopping a video game from jotting down the names of literally everyone who added so much as a sentence to the script in passing. They don't have to deal with tight cinema time slots... so why isn't an intern composer's work 'real' in their eyes?
It feels like such a morally black and white issue- telling people that they don't matter because they didn't work quite enough is just a crappy way to treat artists. In a world that is bereft with conflict between publishers and developers, and developers and consumers, and publishers and consumers- do we really need to start shooting shots between developers and developers now? I just feel like fellow artists, who understand how cutthroat and inhospitable this world is to people who don't fit into the natural toolset of the solid world. Start nickle and diming even in within the creative sectors and you're robbing the community heart of this industry, that community which was stolen out of the movie industry once Hollywood industrialisation took over.
So at the end of the day all I have to say is: At the very least credit people for the work that they do for you: that really shouldn't be a point of contention in any industry. For some people that little glimmer of recognition is the only spark of accomplishment in a mire of vacuous disappointment that is their reality: and taking that away for stupid penny pinching purposes or 'neatness' is just asinine. Ghost writing is stupid. Uncredited contract work is stupid. The only excuse not to credit someone is if you've literally stolen their voice clips without telling them and are trying not to get sued, as with Star Wars regarding John Wayne- and in that situation you're already in a whole other pile of crap you need to deal with.
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