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Game Design Showdown Leads To Collateral Romance
Thanks to GameSpy for its article covering the "Iron Chef"-like Game Designer's Challenge at last week's GDC 2004 in San Jose, in which "three famous game gurus were pitted against one another to tackle one of the thorniest of game design problems: creating a love story." According to the piece: "The three 'contestants' were Will Wright from Maxis (creator of The Sims and Sim City), Warren Spector from Ion Storm (visionary behind Deus Ex and Thief), and Raph Koster the Creative Director of Sony Online Entertainment (who was instrumental in creating Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.)" The eventual winner was Will Wright, who "created a war-time romance game that he called a 'First-Person Kisser'", in which "...a man and a woman, chosen by the computer for having similar interests and romantic possibilities, would start on opposite ends of a raging battlefield. They'd have to arrange for a place to meet and they'd try to get there without being killed."
If you'd RTFA (unconventional idea I know) you'd have discovered that only Wright came up with the idea of the FPK, and it was basically a joke. Spector bottled it, and Koster came up with something somewhat original, kind of an open-ended acting game which actually sounded interesting. Wright won because of his amusing presentation.
Sorry to break it to you, but Kana Little Sister was horribly boring and filled with ridiculous plot contrivances, not even good as an interactive novel. That's what you get when you take a hentai "game" and remove most of the hentai from it.
Rob
I was at the Game Developers Conference; during Warren Spector's talk, he mentioned that ICO was the one example he could think of where a game really made him feel something for an computer-controlled (NPC) character.