Game Communities and Computer Graphics | Jani Penttinen | Negotiator 110

Summary

Jani Penttinen started at Bloodhouse sleeping in a sleeping bag on the office floor, made Supreme Snowboarding at Housemarque — one of the first games to use 3D cards and, as he recalls it, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies — and ended up at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas when his uncertain “let me think about it” was read as a negotiating tactic and the signing bonus doubled from about four to about eight thousand dollars. He worked on Command & Conquer: Renegade, Generals and Earth & Beyond until Electronic Arts closed the Vegas studio and split its 250 staff between three auditoriums. The second half is about communities: user-generated content will not last if the players make the content and the studio makes the money; NFTs are, for him, a technology for provenance and resale commission; the host tells how his own Clash of Clans suggestion went into Supercell’s production; and the generation raised on Roblox plays block graphics because realistic graphics are ordinary to it.

Why the new generation plays block graphics

It is the episode’s best counter-intuitive observation and Penttinen has an explanation for it. Children were born into a world where realistic graphics are the norm, so realism impresses nobody; they would rather play games that look like blocks. He will not predict whether people will eventually want a metaverse that looks like the real world. His own children learned to code because they played Roblox passionately.

Content the studio does not make

Penttinen has long argued for crowdsourcing, and in games it now goes by the name user-generated content. His condition is a marketplace: if the players make the content and the studio keeps the money, the model will not live long. That is where he sees a real use for NFTs — tracing an item back to its maker and paying them a commission each time it is resold.

The core community, in the host’s telling

The Supercell story here is the host’s own: he played for a year and a half in the Finlandia clan, which Supercell’s small team followed closely, and his suggestion to let players build with elixir went into Clash of Clans. Penttinen is more guarded about whether the company or the community understood it first, and puts it down to a culture of self-governing teams.

The negotiation nobody conducted

Unable to pay for flights to London interviews, Penttinen took a gig that sent him to Westwood in Las Vegas. Offered a job and a signing bonus of about four thousand dollars, he said he would think about it — and the offer doubled. Some years later Electronic Arts closed the Vegas studio, offering one group Los Angeles, another San Francisco and the third a pink slip.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Peliyhteisöt ja tietokonegrafiikka | Jani Penttinen | Neuvottelija 110. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.

In depth

The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.