Complexity and outputs (Hollywood Animal)
The other day Brendan and I streamed Hollywood Animal, a film studio management game set in the 1930s. I think it is a game that is far more interesting than it is good. It has an, uh, eager manner in which it simulates the prejudices of the time period. That aside, over the course of our three hour stream I felt a little underwhelmed by the actual making of films, and without interest in seeing more of the game.
Reflecting on this further I feel the primary reason for this is the imbalance of complexity and specificity in the inputs and outputs of 'a film', the primary activity you're doing in the game.
As in real life, making a film has many, many steps and variables. Aside from building your studio lot of over a dozen buildings and staffed by over a dozen people, you first write a script. I think the script writing is easily the most fun process of making a movie, it has a charming appeal of slotting in broad ideas into genre structures, and there is a lot of room for expression (and complexity). A script also needs a screenwriter, who like everyone else has a salary, happiness, and skill level.
Once a script is written you go into preproduction. You'll choose a director, producer, cast, decide which elements of the movie are shot on location or the stage, and even the camera technology and film stock. At this point the movie is out of your hands unless some mid-production events crop up. In the course of our three playtime we made about three or four movies, and each movie had about one event within its production. I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity for narrative, I'd want a 'calm' movie to have three or four events and a 'difficult' to reach nearly a dozen. It should feel like a slow motion disaster!
Anyways, once the film is complete you hire an editor, composer, and sound mixer, then send the negatives to be printed, then choose how many (and which owner of) theaters to send it to for how many weeks and the amount and kind of advertising campaign.
Whew! That is a lot of steps, each one with meaningful decisions on salary, quality, and other intangibles like casting the mayor's daughter. You can see the movie's potential quality shift up and down throughout, presumably based on your decisions. This quality is two numbers, a critic score and an audience score. Once all that is done, the movie comes out. You receive your final critical reaction and how much money it makes per week in the theater.
When I describe Hollywood Animal as overly complex, it is not because of the actual complexity within it. I have played and enjoyed (and not enjoyed) games that are probably an order of magnitude more complex than it. However, this complexity is all on the inputs and nowhere on the outputs. It is hard to understand what all of your micro-decisions are doing because each one is a sliver of one single variable at the end – was a 9.5 producer worth getting over that 5.8, do I really care if there were 10 extras or 100, etc. This inverted pyramid asks you to make a lot of decisions but does not show you the outcomes of them. Now, we only played a few hours that was mostly introduction and it seems the game does have a whole crimelord side of things, but I am evaluating primarily the movie production fantasy itself.
A very similar game I've played a lot of is Motorsport Manager, a game with probably similar levels of represented people and complexity of 'thing', being car racing. However in MM the outcomes of your work is very wide. You want to make money, but you also need to win races. Winning a race is not about making the fastest car, but a car that adapts to the tracks on the calendar and the drivers you have. Perhaps success is not improving the car but finding a better driver, or putting money into a part that won't see use until a more suitable track. On top of that you're also building next year's car, playing politics to influence next year's rules, and evaluating a dozen other team's behaviors for any potential weaknesses.
This 'wide in, wide out' method is much more satisfying for the complexity. When I hire a person to be the on front-right wheel station of a pitstop, it's not feeding into one giant number but specifically pit-stop times, an important aspect to a race but with a limited impact overall. Enough of these important-but-limited variables assemble themselves into the fantasy of running a race team.
I don't know what I'd change about Hollywood Animal exactly, but the complexity imbalance is why I found it unsatisfying.