I'll up-vote too. It's ROUGHLY accurate to kinda get the gist of how a studio works, but the animation emphasis was very high. I'm a big fan of "how it's made" so I know that they only have a small amount of time to get across a complex idea and for that, I forgive a lot. But, they barely mentioned level designers, system designers, producers, all the sub divisions of engineering, texture artists, terrain artists and many other talented people that put a lot of effort in to the game.

To put it a bit more in to perspective: On my last project, there were 150+ total developers. Of those, 3 were full time animators. When I was at Lucas Arts, they had a staff of around 5 animators for the entire company. I know animators do an important job and I also know it's easy to show what they do, but the emphasis was a bit disproportional in this segment.

anyhow, I like that they gave a nice overview of some stuff and did not try and vilify the industry

HA! I think I still have a video around (VHS unfortch) of the Doom mod that we made back in junior high for our punk band. You've heard of three chord punk? We were QED, the world's only one chord punk band, and our game was QEDoom.

Our symbol was chuck, our smileyface- we put him in the bottom of the screen. But whats better is we turned him blue and made him un-smiley and rendered him in 3D Studio 3 to become the vicious unchuckodemon. I also modelled Clyde, the Pacman ghost to replace the uh.. flying flaming skull dudes....

Man, I wish I had some of this stuff. It was pretty hilarious. I think we even midified one of our songs and replaced the music.

Our unrealised plan was to create an ingame short using our sprites and sounds. The script ran something like this:

ext, Doom Street, Doom; Daytime;
mrio (that's me) arrives at his friend Ron's (Baron of Hell) place.

mrio: Heya Ron, how's it going?
ron: I just baked muffins, HAVE SOME!
ron: HAVE A MUFFIN!

at which point ron starts to throw muffins at mysterio. Each time, he yells HAVE A MUFFIN! The muffins make a metallic clang sound when they hit the wall

mrio: No thanks, but lets go visit our good friend Un-Chuck!
ron: HAVE A MUFFIN!

they walk down the street to unchuck's place.

mrio: Hey unchuck, how's it going?
unchuck: What the hell is ron doing here?
ron: (throws a muffin at unchuck) HAVE A MUFFIN!
unchuck: (throws muffins at ron) I HATE MUFFINS!

they battle to the death.

mrio: Oh ron, I can't take you anywhere!

:rimshot: fade to black, FIN

Y'know, I have a few regrets in this life, and not completing QEDoom is definitely one of them. I think my friend Jesse might still have the plans... heck, I've got some old hard drives around, I might still have QED.WAD kicking it someplace.

Our main obstacle was level design. How can we constuct a level so that one player can act as a "cameraman" to film the scene as it unfolds? Levels were extremely hard to create for Doom. I made some simple ones, but creating something like that would be quite complicated.

It doesn't help that we were like 14 years old.

Our goal was to have all of the dialog actually in the wad file itself, so each line would be a sound effect triggered by the monsters themselves. Obviously, ron and unchuck's lines would be said over and over again, as they try to kill you/give you a muffin.

Still though, the vid that I had of us running around with graffiti'd walls and our samples and unchucks running around... those were truely priceless. The voice samples of my friend Jesse yelling "I JUST BAKED MUFFINS, HAVE SOME" is hilarious- it makes me laugh just thinking about it, even after all these years. I bet if there were something like youtube back then that we could have shared our QEDoom on, we would have finished it. And I bet it would be top15 VS material.

If only...

I'm about to graduate with a degree in electronic game design, and to be perfectly frank this situation does frighten me a little. But i do have to say the best games that sell is violence, sex, and violence. God of War for example, great game, superb story, sex, loads of gore and it sells great!

This all comes down to a matter of parenting, if the game says M for Mature then you don't by it for your 5 year old.

One other thing, don't take the latter the wrong way, there are plenty of games that sell on story and game play, Okami(clover studios), any number of Nintendo DS games, Nintendo makes plenty of games that aren't violence based.

A classmate just informed me that the trailer here is for a larger piece, and that the documentary does not fall under these tones, but it does get your attention. So mission success many people will watch it in awe and wonder.

BTW you don't have to go to MIT to be a game designer, or a modeler, texture artist, tester, programmer, level designer, etc. These people need to realize that most of the labor put into a 5 year production on a game is 24 hour work every day of the week. The developers want to make a great alternate reality, its just another medium in which we let our minds flee. When talk of banning games you talk of upsetting the world economy. World of war craft (although a dangerous game in its addictiveness)is very well done, and more than 7 million people play this game at a time and the number is growing. I spent 2 years playing the game, and at 15 dollars a month with game sales, and under the table services for player leveling that blizzard does they make a hefty profit.

This is just another strange crossroads we have come to about technology, first it was rock and roll. Now its about video games.

I just hope level designers don't make it so crazy and hard.