Well, this strikes me as sadly typical:

[Eidos life president Ian]Livingstone said that the recent controversy about Tomb Raider’s E3 trailer was “quite extreme” and “blown out of proportion.” He went on to say that Rosenberg’s comments were the result of a “live interview that went slightly wrong. Quotes were misinterpreted and blown out of proportion,” Livingstone made the comments during an appearance at the Game Horizon conference in Newcastle, England.

He also said that, while rape may be a topic that can be covered in other mediums, it is a different beast in video games. “I think about my responsibility as a developer – films can deal with these themes, but it’s different in games when the user controls the action,” he said. “We should be celebrating what’s great about the game. I guarantee fans will be delighted with the new Tomb Raider.”

Now, clearly there’s an extent to which Tomb Raider’s president Ron Rosenberg mischaracterized his own game by saying that assailants would try to rape Lara Croft. What Lara Croft faces is not a penetrative rape, but, from what I understand from people who have seen the walkthrough, a sexualized assault that, if the player lets the scenario play through without acting, results in the character’s brutal murder. But people were reacting to the information that had been given to them. And give what they had been told was going to happen was a cliche and often ugly way of giving a female character a “dark” backstory or something to “overcome”, and given that Rosenberg suggested that players would be excited to rescue Lara rather than to embody here, a negative fan reaction seems reasonable. In this, as in so many other cases, telling people that they’re blowing something out of proportion or that their reaction is “extreme” is often just code for complaining that they reacted in a way someone hadn’t be prepared for or that discomfited them. It shouldn’t be that hard to admit you had a communications failure, say that you respect the concerns and feelings of people who found the news upsetting, and that you hope and expect fans will be excited by what they see, and to do all of that without blaming anyone for their reactions. But time and time again, that seems to be a real challenge. Maybe we need walkthrough videos that explain how to level up with an appropriate clarification or apology.

In my quest to educate myself more about video game design, I recently finished reading Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us. The book doesn’t touch on everything, and that’s not the point: it’s a slim one-volume guide to the people who had the key insights that created the video game industry, moved it forward, and brought it to where it is today. And if you want an understanding of which problems in the game industry have been there from the beginning, it’s an essential introduction.

Take the problem of profit-sharing and crediting. After turnover at Atari in 1979 Golberg writes, “They weren’t getting credit for the games the way the cast and crew did in each movie’s credits or the bands and their sidemen did in the liner notes of records. Nor did they receive a percentage of the profits, even though Atari was making hundreds upon hundreds of millions as one of the world’s fastest growing companies.” Similarly, when Tod Frye secured one of the first royalty deals, he only got 10-15 cents per game cartridge.

The same’s true of crash, which Goldberg describes as happening everywhere from Nintendo, where “the teams preferred to work late into the night during the increasingly brutal crunch times. They would go home past midnight and fall exhausted into bed, only to get to Nintendo again by eleven a.m. and do it all over again,” or at Naughty Dog when the company was developing Crash Bandicoot where one of the founders “was tired of holding the hands of game designers who would freak out and lose it during crunch time. Gavin understood that the tight schedule could lead to breakdowns. In video games, breakdown was the new black. But Naughty Dog was a team…’How dare anyone we brought in to work try to break up the team at deadline time?’ he thought…That’s just how it was. Long hours were what you signed up for.”

Those companies have very different artistic cultures — as Goldberg wrote me:

Electronic Arts was inspired by the passion of Charlie Chaplin and those who created United Artists. EA even today considers many of its workers artists, at least on some level. Nintendo’s culture is a Japanese culture, and by that, I mean it’s all about the company person and loyalty to the boss. That’s one reason why we only see the face of Shigeru Miyamoto promoting Nintendo games, when, in reality, hundreds of people make games at Nintendo. To a large extent, PopCap (recently purchased by EA for at least $750 million), likes to place its games on every device imaginable, so the culture is as much about, say, putting Plants Vs. Zombies on the upcoming Wii U or iPad 3 as it is about creating new games. Rockstar cares very much about American arts and popular culture, perhaps more than any other video game company. And Valve very much cares about its community and it downloadable games service, Steam.

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