So I'm glad to see that something good came out of E3.
MTV hosted The Game Designer's Roundtable which they now have hosted here.
It's a roundtable style discussion of some hot topics in the industry featuring Harvey Smith, Will Wright, David Jaffe and Cliff Blezinski. Every one of these guys is something of a hero of mine.
Harvey is also a friend, but his work on Deus Ex is one of the reasons I wanted to make games in the first place.
Cliff has been working at Epic ever since I was making my first levels using the Unreal Engine - levels which ended up being my calling card into the industry.
I've not played God of War, but I spent many hours blowing up friends in Twisted Metal and his games have always surprised me with their addictiveness and an elegant richness that manages to avoid seeming complex. Anyone who can make a game about an Ancient Greek God and have it be successful is a genius in my books.
Will - well Will has the capacity to make the impossible seem obvious - players can't create their own content, animation and texturing requires artists and can't be done procedurally, no one wants to play a game about a doll house and you can't sack Rome by marching elephants over the Alps either. Will keeps the rest of us honest.
The questions put to the panel are good ones. High level questions that we in the industry are sadly not used to getting from the gaming press. And the responses are varied and engaging. I personally come from the same 'school' of design as Harvey and it's pretty easy for me to agree with most of his points - but there were two things that I really found the most interesting.
First was that Cliff seems also to be of that mindset. He's big on immersion, rich simulation, agency and affordance. He's also interested in finding ways to build emotional bonds between the player and other agents in the world. He's been saying for a long time that graphics are important, and I only half agreed with that sentiment - but now it seems like he thinks graphics are 'mostly there', and are capable of holding up their side of the deal... I get the feeling his emphasis on having a compelling and meaningful interactive space now stretches significantly beyond the need for good graphics. In short - what seemed to me like a never-ending battle between 'graphics and design' only 5 years ago is going to become less relevant now and smart guys like Cliff are going to carry the flag into other realms of design. Maybe this absurd explosion of increasingly powerful technology was a good thing after all.
The other thing that surprised me was that David Jaffe was able to make so many points that I would instinctively disagree with but then say them well and in ways that make me realize - once again - that my own ideas about design are not a priori valid (he says something like 'I don't want to think when I play a game - I just want to relax and be entertained'). I do want players to think when they play my games - but of course, there are some trade-offs here, and David seems to see them. Similar to the 'graphics versus design' battle - it's starting to look like the next one might be between games-as-nutrition versus games-as-candy. There is going to be something of a middle-ground there, for sure, but I hope that five years from now designers have been able to elevate their art in the same way graphics programmers have in the last 5 years, and that guys like David will be migrating over to 'my side' and saying 'yeah - we have the entertaining part figured out and all games can be entertaining - now let's make them meaningful'.
And Will - well Will is like Yoda... when he starts speaking, the rest of the Jedi Council just shuts up and listens.
Anyway - it's broken into half-a-dozen 3-4 minute segments, and definitely worth watching.
Recent Comments