Geniuses at Play

GAME DESIGNERS EXPLAIN THE LAWS OF ADRENALINE AND THE SCIENCE OF FUN

At this point in the 21st century it's clear that video games constitute a medium unto themselves. It's an art form and an industry awash in possibility, with rules and boundaries that have only begun to be explored. When you play a game, whether it's Madden, Tetris or Halo, you create your own unique path through it. We may take video games' multiple narratives for granted, but they are precisely what separates games from other story­telling media. The player is as much the author of the experience as the game's creator.

To discern what makes the medium of video games dif­ferent from other forms that preceded it, we spoke with some of the foremost minds in the industry. They told us where games have been, where they're headed and what it all means. Some are cynical, some are stressed, others starry-eyed. All are passionate about what they do.

THE BIG PICTURE

Industry legend WARREN SPECTOR on the birth of a new medium and its breakneck evolution

We are maturing rapidly, but we're still an infant medium trying to figure out how we do what we do. Leaving out the early pioneering stuff, we're about 25 years old. We're like moviemakers in 1920: They had figured out a lot techni­cally but hadn't mastered the craft. What's different is that we have amazing advances in hardware every three to five years. In film, the position of the sprocket holes hasn't

changed in almost a century. We constantly have to rein­vent the camera, as it were, before we can even begin to think about what to do with it.

We need to start looking at using our technology not just to create prettier pictures for old gameplay styles but to pro-

vide deeper stories, richer characters and more complex interactions within our game worlds. That is the real fron­tier. What passes for mature or adult in the game business has nothing to do with maturity or being an adult.

In the late 1950s university film programs became more widespread, and all of a sudden we had guys like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scor-

sese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who had studied history, aesthetics and theory. They came from an environ­ment that didn't need to make money and supported raw creativity. They hit the Hollywood system with a different sensibility. Now hundreds of universities offer game courses or degrees in game development and game studies. Our Spielberg is out there; so is our Quentin Tarantino. We're ready for that kind of change. We're ready for people who take this medium seriously, who believe in its potential. And frankly, its potential hasn't even been scratched.

Play is a creative process, and every game is a dialogue between the game maker and the player. The player's

involvement in shaping the experience makes him a creator. No other medium has been able to do that. And we're making some headway now. We're a cultural force: Our audience is aging with us, universities are catching on, and the mainstream media are catching up. Where we are now is remarkable, and where we'll be in five years—holy cow, I can't wait to see it.

FUTURE PERFECT

Strategy-game pioneer SID MEIER on how play gets under your skin

With other media, you have to say, "How does this apply to me?" You have to identify with some aspect of a character or some part of a story. But in a computer game the whole story is about you. There's more of a feeling of ownership than in other forms of entertainment. If you're a lousy story­teller, maybe you would rather have Spielberg tell you a story. But I think people like to do things their own wav.

Games allow that. Reading a good book is different from playing a good computer game. But I think they're equally satisfying experi­ences. Gaming is a new art form, not necessarily a better one. But I am convinced that, in how viv­idly you remem-

ber the experience and how long it stays with you, games are on a par with the other arts.

When you make a movie, you write a script, compose a storyboard and shoot, but you don't really experience the film until about a month before it's finished. We spend as much time playing a game as we do designing it. Early on, usually within a week or two of starting, we have built something we can actually play. Then we have a variety of people play the game, and we build on that experience. We add new things and take out things that aren't working. It's an interactive, evo­lutionary process, a different one from most in terms of creativity. We are big believers in incremental design.

Game makers may talk about the good old days, but I think these are the good old days. There are so many good games out there, and we've got powerful con­soles and PCs. There is very little we can complain about at this point. The only thing I miss is being able to make a game in six to nine months, as opposed to two years. But games are light-years better than when I started. We're living in a golden age of gaming.

PLAYING FOR MONEY

Cod of War 2 director CORY BARLOG on the brutal economics of fun

Making games is not just physically and mentally challenging; it's fiscally challenging, because you're gam­bling. As confident as anybody feels about their game, it can go either way. Plenty of brilliant games are a joy to play and adored by the critics, and everyone thinks they'll be huge,

but their sales are pitiful.

Games don't cost anywhere near as much as movies to make, but movies have more ways to recoup expenses. Even Waterworld broke even. We could make 16 big-budget games for the price of Waterworld, but we don't have DVDs or TV to fall back on. And the higher the budgets get, the fewer risks people take, which is a terrible direction for the industry to take. Games like Unreal and Quake sell well because it's hard to eet

people to try something different. As much as people tell you they want to watch PBS or David Lynch, they actually watch the USA Network.

Then again, being the same isn't safe either. Many games don't do very well, because the makers backed into the idea: "We know urban is good, and we know

open-world games are good. Let's have an urban open-world game." Those games don't come out well, because they don't start from a strong core idea.

BUILDING CHARACTER

Mass Effect maestro RAY MUZYKA on new frontiers in virtual acting

Each new generation of technology has an exponentially greater impact on storytelling. This generation has empowered us to convey emotion. We can finally include all the nuances that are important to showing emotion. Vir­tual, computer-generated acting is being

pushed to the point where what is not said can be more powerful than what is said—such as a small gesture, a tilt of the head, a raised eyebrow.

All the exploration, combat, progression and characters are designed to make the players feel something, to make them truly care about the environment and the characters. We can do things in real time that we used to do with pre-rendered cut scenes. And that takes nonlinear storytelling to another level. Instead of watch­ing a movie, you're playing through a cinematic moment. You're interacting, and you're part of something emotional. It's like reading a great book or watching a great movie: A chill goes up your spine, and you feel something important.

THE TAO OF VIOLENCE

BioShock creator KEN LEVINE

on the Fight Club school of bare-knuckle philosophy

For something to resonate, it has to deliver on two levels. The Lord of the Rings works well because it's both a parable about power and a story about

ores and goblins. The Matrix is a philosophy class wrapped up in a cooi action movie. Of course you always want to hide your philosophy a bit. You don't say, "How'd you like to play a game about an underwater objectivist Utopia?" If we did that, we would never have gotten BioShock out of focus testing.

Fight Club and 12 Monkeys ask the audience to look at them in a nonlinear way. You're used to linear narrative and believing that the screen always tells you the truth. Both those films are great examples for video-game developers because they change the interface for movies. And remember, at the end of the day, Fight Club is still a movie about a bunch of dudes beating the shit

out of each other in an intense way. And that is what good games have to be: interesting fight clubs. If you are turned on to something intellectually while playing a game, that's fantastic, but it still has to be fun as a game.

BioShock is about the messiness of ideology. What tears the city in the game apart is what tears every city apart, not alien invaders but greed, money, sex and ambition— the stuff that makes us human. We're trying to examine all those things from a philosophical standpoint. And then we have the big fucking guns. It's about blowing people

up in amazing new ways and empowering the player to use every aspect or his environment as a weapon. We get to have our cake and eat it, too. My parents are happy because I'm using my college education; gamers are happy because they get to blow stuff up in ways they never thought about before.

HOOKED ON A FEELING

Fable 2 creator PETER MOLYNEUX on making players feel loved

I have done some of the most ridicu­lous, farcical stories in computer-game history. I have done stories about gods, stories about cities controlled by the chips in people's heads and stories about the most horrendous bad guys. But I recently realized the way I've been telling stories is all wrong. Rather than starting with the story, I should be ask­ing, How do I want you, the player, to feel? If I can get you to feel different from ways you've felt before, that's going to make a great story.

In Fable 2 I want players to experi­ence what it's like to feel loved. I've felt horror while playing games. I've felt terror, revulsion and fear. But I've never felt love. And if you feel loved by a character, you're more inclined to like that character, to get involved with him and care about what happens to him. If you care about something or someone in the story, then I've got you, because then you're going to care about how the story turns out.

THE GRAND ILLUSION

Cod of War creator DAVID JAFFE on why cheap tricks offer the most fun

The innovation in God of War was that we never set out to be innovative. We set out to entertain the crap out of the player, and we didn't care if we used sleight of hand or less robust game sys­tems. Our game-design colleagues might have pooh-poohed our systems because

they weren't very deep. And they were right. That's because we set out from the beginning to try to be the video-game equivalent of Jerry Bruckheimer. We wanted to produce something totally mainstream that was entertaining from the get-go. We were absolute slaves to making the audience happy, and nothing

else mattered. I don't cringe at that. I think it's noble. I'm proud to have worked on a series that lots of people actually play all the way to the end.

The top-tier designers who are good at game systems don't need a lot of bells and whistles to keep you engaged.

Strategy games like Civilization IV, or even simple games like Uno or Poker, are so well designed they don't need a lot of the kinetic energy we put into games like God of War. But I'm not that kind of designer, so I have to rely on sleight of hand and misdirection.

During a focus test, if I sense a player is getting bored, my first impulse is to throw something else at him to keep him occu­pied. Of course, we spend a lot of time tuning and polishing, so we still end up making compel­ling games. In an ideal world, I would like the game's central system to be what keeps the player engaged, rather than just throw a bunch of simple systems

at the player one after the other. That's the direction I was trying to take when we made Calling All Cars! I've attended too many meetings in which somebody—including myself— has seen a deep, emotional movie over the weekend and he comes in on Monday morning full of piss and vin­egar, ready to take the medium to the next level. I've read articles with all this hyperbole about how games will be the next great entertainment medium and how this is more power­ful because bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. At the end of the day, you're walking around a place that looks like World War II, trying to find a fucking key to open a door. I actually think all these grand prophecies will come to pass. I think the interactivity in what we call video games today will ultimately be called something different and will

affect the mainstream much more powerfully than film does. But right now it feels like a bunch of people wanting to convince themselves they're doing important work. I believe the most important stuff we're doing today is about having fun.

FUTURE SHOCK

Too Human creator DENIS DYACK says better technology is an empty goal

We're reaching a perceptual threshold at which the average consumer will have a harder time telling when leaps in technology occur. There is a differ-

ence between 480p resolution and 720p or 1080p, but it's not a massive one. In the next generation the differ­ence will be even smaller, and the num­ber of pixels won't matter that much. Frame rate will improve, but once you go beyond 60 frames a second, that doesn't get you much.

It's going to come down to content, storytelling and how you choose to enter­tain. In the early days of film the people who could do all the fancy cutting and wire tricks dominated the industry. But once the camera became standardized and technology became less important, those who told the best stories domi­nated. They were the ones who devel­oped the true language of film. We're going to be in a better place once the endless march of technology ceases to matter. At that point it becomes all about art and entertainment.

PLAYING DEAD

Halo 3 head developer Frank O'Connor on what makes game stories different

There are two big differences between video games and other media. First, in games you are almost always the pro­tagonist. You have the power to funda­mentally change the outcome of events. The second difference—and for some weird reason everyone just accepts this—is that you can die. Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise don't die, but as the hero in the game, you die all the time.

I don't think we'll ever see heavy drama from a video-game story, because nobody cares. They want to be enabled, and they want to have fun. They want to do stuff they can't do in the real world. The one thing you want out of your experience as a protagonist is power. If you're playing a Mario game, it's the power to jump high or kick turtles. If it's Halo, it's the power to be a seven-foot-tall killing machine. People gen­erally don't want to be themselves in

a video game. Even in something like Second Life, people never really play themselves. They may look like them­selves, but they have a nice mansion. You want to alter and improve your lot when you're in a video game. Heavy drama works great when it's filmed, because you're an observer; you don't have to take on those problems.

From a writing perspective, if you watch a two-hour film, there's a linear narrative. There is a start, a middle, an end and a credit roll. It's easy to

remember everything that just hap­pened and put it in context. Writing for video games is different because you may play for an hour, see 15 min­utes of cinematic-style storytelling, not play for a week, then come back and pick up where you left off. We have to accommodate that without using TV-show devices like recaps. You have to infuse the story into the world. That way the player understands his goals even if he skips the cut scenes. Halo 3

has 40,000 lines of combat dialogue alone. That's just for how people react when they're shot, when you stare at them or when you shove them off a hill. They have multiple natural reactions to what's going on. So when you're the player in the heat of battle and people are screaming things, you create the story by playing through it. Basically our job is to write the overriding narrative, and then the players create the mini-narratives themselves—both through playing and by unconsciously backfill­ing the story using their imagination.

ROLE WITH IT

Serial innovator Richard Carriott on fantasy and self-actualization

I think role-play games have a special role to play in society. If we look at how kids learn, it's often through role-playing. Whether it's a role-play tea party or army men, you're exploring those boundaries of social interaction with other real people—and you're finding that when you knock Johnny down, he cries and goes home. In the same way, I think role-playing in a computer game definitely has the capacity to make a positive effect. As a game developer,

you can weave par­ables into the story to provoke real thought in your players; you can give them mental challenges, as well as ramifications for their choices that they actually have

to live with, it tnose are reasonaDiy good reflections of reality, video games can play an extremely positive role. When we make games, we try to hold a mirror up to people and say, "This is a way to examine yourself." The more thought-provoking you make the sub­ject, the better. We're just looking for the most interesting mirrors.

WHAT PASSES FOR MATURE IN THE GAME BUSI­NESS HAS NOTH­ING TO DO WITH MATURITY OR BEING AN ADULT.

> CG ACTING

IS BEING PUSHED TO THE POINT WHERE THINGS NOT SAID ARE AS IMPORTANT AS

> THINGS THAT ARE.

BIOSHOCK IS ABOUT THE MESSINESS OF IOEOLOGY-AND BLOWING PEOPLE UP IN AMAZING NEW WAYS.

> HARRISON FORD DOESN'T DIE, TOM CRUISE DOESN'T DIE, BUT AS THE HERO YOU DIE

> ALL THE TIME.