Just to clarify for the record... (Destiny)

by Coaxkez, Wednesday, May 02, 2018, 19:19 (2474 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Coaxkez, Wednesday, May 02, 2018, 19:27

In consideration of the current climate of negativity surrounding this game, I feel it necessary to make this clear. I was never under the impression that Cody was writing a "gotcha" book and I have little interest in reading something like that. That's not really what I look for in behind-the-scenes histories. To me, the appeal of books like these is to expose the truth of the creative process in all its unvarnished glory. That doesn't always mean revealing sordid secrets, although it sometimes does if and when they are relevant to demystifying the creative process.

The main goal of a behind-the-scenes book is to chronicle how a creative idea was developed and refined into the final product that we know and love today. Most of that involves an exploration of how the key creative minds who worked on the project think so that we may better understand how they came up with the final product, as well as how they worked (or didn't work) with each other and how the important creative decisions were made. The outstanding "Making of Star Wars" books by J. W. Rinzler are a good example of what I'm talking about here.

The benefit of writing such a book without interference from Bungie, or more accurately without an attempt from Bungie to control the narrative, is that Cody can record that chronicle more accurately. It's more work for him, of course, but he should be able to develop a more objective narrative by piecing it together on his own. Anything Bungie could give him in an official capacity would be inevitably biased. That's not a knock against Bungie; it's just the way these things work. When Rinzler was writing his Making of Star Wars books, he had access to the man himself, the one and only George Lucas, but he did not rely upon Lucas's accounting of events and was not afraid to contradict it if he felt that he was... shall we say... misremembering the way things really happened.

That re-writing of history is a natural phenomenon and it doesn't have to be malicious. Many times, creators simply forget what really happened, or their memories of the creative process become twisted over time. They aren't necessarily lying. This is why historians interview as many witnesses as possible when chronicling an event.