Passion begets excellence. There is one problem and one problem only: games are too "produced" (which means the teams are too big and they take too long to develop). A random cog in the machine may kill themselves for 14 hours a day and invest as much "passion" as they possibly can, but it will almost never end up in the final product since everything is decided by consensus and market research. When you have small teams, passion translates directly into actionable ideas and adjustments. When you have huge teams full of remote workers and temps, passion means nothing.
In Stones of Venice, Ruskin talks about how we should not encourage the manufacture of cookie-cutter, mass-produced products of artistry (oh! Like a modern Ubisoft game?) because it devalues the worker and cheapens the art:
For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are copped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.
Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments. have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.
But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite intention; and if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say, for the beautiful form, or colour, or engraving, and not for mere finish or execution, we are doing good to humanity.
It's as if videogame developers are finally waking up to the uncaring reality of corporate work.
