IGDA Credits and Awards Committee
International Game Developers Association
Crediting in games has become a hot topic in recent years. As development teams grow bigger and outsourcing becomes more prevalent, the informal crediting procedures used in the past become increasingly insufficient to describe each developer’s exact role within the development process. Additionally, the non-standard naming procedures for job titles that have thus far characterized the free spirit of the gaming industry have now become a liability for those who wish to prove their skills when moving from one company to another. A movement to standardize crediting procedures and titles has never been more needed.
The IGDA Crediting and Standards Committee is a group of volunteers who have come together to study, document and propose voluntary game industry crediting practices that properly recognize those responsible for the creation of games.
This wiki page is the central hub where you can find links to the various job titles we discovered while developing the Crediting Snapshot Whitepaper.
Contents |
Game Crediting Guide, Draft 8-5 Beta, April 2007
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
- RULESETS
Studios are encouraged to adopt rulesets for crediting to govern topics of inclusion (who gets credit), attribution (what credit people get), usage (how they get credit), and methodology (procedures for collecting credits).
The following rules represent proposed standards (“must†rules) and proposed guidelines (optional/suggested rules, reasoning, or methodology). Some guiding principles in the development of these rules are:
1. Credits are to reflect the role served, not the condition in which the role was served. In addition, rather than reflect how well a person performed his or her role, credits should reflect only the position held on the team.
2. In deciding between two strongly supported but opposing points of view pertaining to a particular rule, an attempt is made to weigh the potential size of groups that could be harmed and the degree of potential damage from that harm in either case.
APPENDIX
Other Crediting Projects
Take A Survey
- Planner vs. Designer
- Contractors vs. Employees
- No Credit vs. Special Thanks
- Title Screen vs. Manual Credits
- Management of Credits
- Suggest a Survey
- Debate Specific Rules in Forums
Debate Topics
Use these wiki pages to collectively hone a particular argument for or against an issue. The collective editing is meant to limit the amount of material that needs to be read in order to grasp all sides of an issue. If you don't want the world to be able to hone your argument for you, you can broadcast your permanent message to the world in the Public Forums.
- Legacy Credit
- Alphabetical Crediting
- Auteurism: The Controversial "Creator" Credit
- Headhunters and Awards Recognition
- Team Proportions: Programmers vs. Designers
- Comparing to Television Credits
- How Crunch Affects Credit
- Creative vs. Technical Disciplines
- Discipline Hierarchies and Orders
- Leads, Seniors, and Additionals, oh my!!!
- Traps to Avoid
- Should The Credits Rules Be Drastically Shortened
- Debate Specific Rules in Forums
PDF Version
This wiki is used to build consensus for proposed standards and changes to the IGDA template for crediting procedures. The wiki format also enables studios to transport the material into its own wiki separate from this one, for easy studio customization. For those who wish to use the IGDA template in its current state (not necessarily including open forum wiki activity), a PDF document is available here:
