GDC interview of me on Gamasutra.com
Bonnie Ruberg cornered me for an interview at the tables on the third floor of GDC. It wasn’t necessarily the clearest place for an interview, and it was near the end of the day and I was a little scatterbrained. The result is this interview on Gamasutra, where some of the transcript makes it sound like I was either contradicting myself or mumbling. Probably both. 🙂
A lot of the content will be familiar to folks who follow the blog regularly, I suspect. Nonetheless, there are probably a few things I say that will tick off someone somewhere, particularly on page 3.
One note, though — as usual, I got credited for a game that I don’t really regard as being mine at all. In this case, it was Field Commander, in the lead-in blurb article. It’s not fair to the folks who worked hard on that game to give me any credit — I didn’t do a lick of design or code on that game.
8 Responses to “GDC interview of me on Gamasutra.com”
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Oop, sorry, Raph – I think that was an overzealous MobyGames grab on our editor’s part, because they don’t differentiate ‘special thanks’ or exec roles very well in their credits DB:
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,19434/
It happens to me all the time, Simon. 🙂 I get credit for all sorts of SOE titles that I didn’t really influence. The thing is, there’s no way to tell which games I did have an impact on. For example, I DID do work on Untold Legends, mostly on writing and story (I still wouldn’t call it “my game” though… I was just one contributor among many).
You gave away the password! Z0MG!
After the party was over, yeah. 🙂
I can attest that Raph had nothing to do with Field Commander. But I did. 🙂
wrt comics and manga, Western product to plug the vacuum you speak of has existed for a long time, but hasn’t had much in the way of viable distribution.
There’s a comic shop here in Nottingham (UK) that based itself on the premise that superhero comics readers weren’t really the “mainstream”, and that the “real mainstream” in fact have very diverse tastes.
They built a comic shop to cater to it; decorating it like a bookshop, giving tailored recommendations beyond their own preferences, letting people browse, nurturing culture rather than stamping it out, putting superheroes at the back of the shop and more varied work at the front, and, instead of filling it with giant cutouts of comic cliches, making whimsical installations for the window.
They’ve been increasingly profitable year on year for the decade they’ve been operating, manga and SH are only a fraction of their sales, and their customer base is around 50% female.
It may be different in the states, but I just wanted to point out that it wasn’t a dearth of Western cultural production that created such a vacuum in the UK: there was product and an audience for it, but mostly the publishers, distributors, and retailers haven’t been deft enough to take that opportunity.
Another interview that stirs creative juices and provokes thought; kudos to you.
A former co-worker is dreaming big dreams about creating a line of somewhat-demented games for download onto people’s cell phones. Sounds like he’s typical of the young bucks you’re predicting will drive the market in the near future. Wouldn’t surprise me. He may be onto something.
On the issue of “content” for computer/video games/MMORPGs, you almost sound like you’re running up the white flag. Like when you said:
Okay, I’m a layperson, so maybe I’m naive. But the question that leaps into my mind on this is, WHY is the computer-game industry as a whole weak at storytelling?
I don’t think it’s a question of nuts-and-bolts technical limitations or budgets. It comes down (as always) to priorities.
The computer-game medium has one enormous advantage not shared by any other medium, and I keep wondering when someone will come up with a killer app that really exploits that advantage. You’ve heard it a zillion times, no doubt: Movies, books, TV, music — they are all essentially linear, or even unilinear in their execution. By contrast, a computer game involves the consumer to at least some degree in the process of developing the story and the character. In other words, the computer environment offers the possibility for a nonlinear story.
At least, the technology theoretically offers that possibility. It’s still largely unrealized, but still….
I predict that one day, someone will come up with a setting that showcases a truly nonlinear storytelling subsystem, in which players take their character down a grid-like progression of story-embedded choices, each of which offers the player a point of variation on his character’s development, and which, when the player chooses “Option A,” it precludes other options. It seems so far that pretty much everything that’s come out to date (be it Planescape: Torment or Lord of the Rings Online) wind up being relatively unilinear in the final analysis, simply because developers don’t want to “waste” their effort on options and avenues of action that might not wind up being consumed.
If the gaming industry ever manages to perfect THIS kind of storytelling, it would be an advancement beyond the capabilities of conventional (linear) media to ever duplicate. Would it not be like, the ultimate cool to have two players take their toons down opposing plot lines, with each character developing different strengths and weaknesses as a result of their interaction with the in-game environment, and following different stories, and then square their characters off in battle with one another?
I can hear the jaded professionals in the background thinking to themselves, “Suuuure…”. But I ask you and the others perusing this thread: Why not?
I don’t know; maybe that patch of ice will need to be broken by some courageous small, independent development house somewhere.
At any rate, I know there are still a lot of gamers who appreciate you, Raph, for trying to give us a tool to jump the rail and let us run the train where we think we want it to go.