i would take issue with 2 comments in your article:

first, Tim Willits was lead designer, and responsible for taking "the inherent claustrophobia of cramped, military-industrial settings and [amping] it up with ultrarealistic visuals and insanely creepy sound effects," not Carmack. carmack makes a great engine, but doesn't design the levels, interface, sounds or graphics. giving him credit for the atmosphere of the game is an error.

"Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, pioneered the concept of simulation-as-game and perfected a visual style—isometric viewpoint..."
though simcity and populous came out the same year, i would say that the influence of populous was far far wider than simcity, and version 1 of simcity had a 2-d top-down view, while populous had the isometric view that nearly every RTS and godgame has used since. peter molyneux deserves most of the credit for pioneering the sim/god-game genre, not will wright.

Your article incorrectly attributes Carmack's role to be that of a "Designer". While try for Molyneux, Wright, and Miyamoto, Sid Meir, Carmack is recognized for one thing: his graphics engines.

No one claims id is the master of game design (most PC gamers possibly would finger Warren Spector, and the most legenardy of which being Miyamoto).

Everyone loves Carmack because of his support for open source and his ability to push boundries of what computers can do - almost no one calls him a great designer.

...though (based purely on interviews), I'd say he's not without some design acumen. It's hard not to get atleast a little idea of what constitutes good design while working in game development.

It is carmack's engine that allows such designs in atmosphere, sound and graphics. Without it, the above depictions would not be possible. So yes he is part of it, even if indirect.

It's true that I was using "designer" as a catchall phrase for "the guy who heads up the whole shebang" -- though each company uses a different name for that position: Creative head, producer, lead producer, CEO, big muck-a-muck, etc. And indeed it's certainly true that Carmack's games have relied on enormous teams of brilliantly creative people; I think I made that pretty clear in the article. In fact, I'm generally rather loathe to ascribe to the great-man theory of creativity, not least because many people who are "on top" of a particular endeavour are just taking credit for the work of those beneath them!

But in the case of many games, those of Id included, I think it's fair to say that Carmack's role in setting the tone and vision for the project is pretty central. After all, he *hires* all those creative people, and he's clearly smart enough to recognize superb talent -- which is precisely one of the skills that make great directors/producers/auteurs great.

I thought Clive's meaning was pretty clear, especially when he mentioned the big design teams and said:

"Really, Carmack is just like a movie director: His main role is to impose a unifying vision on a huge, collaborative process."

What does it say, though, that for every Carmack or Molyneux, there are 10 (or 100) nameless lead designers toiling under big publishers like EA? I mean, who was the main force behind the look and feel of "Madden", or "Battlefield 1942" or "Grand Theft Auto"? In some ways, maybe game design is more like TV production. Apart from a few high-profile names like Aaron Sorkin or Chris Carter, how many TV producers/writers can you name?

One problem..

Doom 3 does NOT "kick all manner of ass". It's a matter of hype over substance.

The gameplay is a few steps backwards from the original Doom/Doom 2..and that's saying quite a bit. The weapons have absolutly NO kick to them.

Carmack is a programmer. A really really good one. The Doom 3 ENGINE does kick ass. The auteurs, however, are the game designers, and level designers. Something that was kind of lacking in Doom 3. (Actually it's been kind of lacking for iD since the original Quake).

What makes guys like Wright, Sid Roberts (who I put far ahead of Molyneux) and Miyamoto so great is the focus on the gameplay of the game, instead of the graphics. Sure, you had the AI, but you had to have the right design to allow the AI to shine.

The devil is in the details, so to speak..

Well, it's certainly a matter of opinion as to precisely how much ass Doom 3 kicks, heh. I can understand why someone wouldn't like it. Many people have complained that it's too retro and simple -- not enough complex interactions, puzzles, and the like. Me, I'm a troglodyte: I just wanna rear up on my hind legs and spray some raw guts around the screen. I get quickly bored by games with overly obtuse puzzles, too many "innocent bystanders" to avoid shooting, etc. So for me, Doom 3 was very nicely designed indeed. It did have some design flaws, though -- most particularly the fact that you couldn't hold the flashlight at the same time as you held a gun. (Unless you got the sneaky online patch, of course.)

I think you missed what I meant:)

It's not that the game itself was too straight forward. I actually thought the PDA/screen elements were very engaging and pretty cool. It's that the combat itself, the weapons and the monster reactions to them, compared to other recent games, feel very sterile. I'm a person who likes to turn action gameplay into art.

For example, what is, IMO, a much better overall game, Painkiller (to me it even looks nicer, mainly because of much better architecture). Enter a room, 10 guys start running for me. Throw a grenade into the middle of them, pick off four of them, they go flying and splat into the wall with a dead thud. Use the stake launcher, shoot another few guys and pin them into the wall. Then pull out the shotgun, duck down and blast the remaining guys forcing them to fly back 30 feet.

Realistic? hell no. Fun as hell to play and watch? Hell yes.

And then there's the opposite end of the spectrum: NetHack - no graphics, designed and coded in a rather socialist group-oriented setting, so certainly no "auteur" per se - and still consistently voted one of the "best games ever" by various media outlets at various times.. (GameSpy, Salon, etc...)

And then there's the opposite end of the spectrum: NetHack - no graphics, designed and coded in a rather socialist group-oriented setting, so certainly no "auteur" per se - and still consistently voted one of the "best games ever" by various media outlets at various times.. (GameSpy, Salon, etc...)

Oops, crashy browser, thought it didn't submit. Sorry Clive. :-)

Finally got my hands on Doom 3. Looks great, even on my 20-month-old system that has a 2Ghz CPU, 768 Mb RAM, and a 128 Mb Radeon 9800 (just the plain vanilla one, not Pro or XT). I have to concur with Clive that the game, in fact, does kick all manner of boo-tay. It is unmistakeably Doom, and that's what makes it so fun. Now I just need to upgrade my speakers. My current ones are like dixie cups covered with wax paper...

I saw your Slate article and as a Game *Developer* (a more accurate term then Game Designer when describing the programmers, artists and audio engineers; design is its own job title), I felt compelled to chime in.

I believe gaming certainly does have auteurs, though as mentioned above, Carmack doesn't necessarily come up when gamers or developers talk about such people. In fact, there was on article on gamasutra (a popular developer site) a few months back about the need to create brands associating names as buzzwords like "American McGee's Alice", rather then plain ol' "Alice". Funny, because when that game came out, I don't think too many people even knew who he was. I sure didn't. But that game box sure makes him sound like someone important!

As for such articles showing up under arts instead of tech... I dream of this day (I'm a game artist, to be precise). But I don't think it'll happen for a long, long time. While games have made leaps and bounds towards the mainstream, I think the average person still thinks of even the most visually stunning games like Doom 3 as a supplement to comic books and role-playing games in teenage boy Geekdom. Until the day comes where games are 100% mainstream, these auteurs will be limited to their cult status.