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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."
Eh, cut them a little slack. Sure there are games like the Final Fantasy series that can already emotionally involve players in romance stories, but I think the whole point was to figure out if there was a way to do that without "gaming on rails." In terms of generating this kind of emotion while still allowing the players free will, games are in the very early, primitive stages still, since nobody in any other media has really ever done anything like that before. Looking at it like that, I think the Koster, Spector, and Wright came up with some pretty interesting concepts, and if they missed the mark, that's because it's probably going to be years before anybody even has a ballpark estimate of where the mark is.
I think you're being to harsh.
First, they're trying to write a game that will be acceptable to the current gaming world. The current gaming world plays and prefers games with lots of explosions and guns and violence and whatnot.
Second, what are you comparing this to? A romance movie? A book? Games just don't *work* the same as either medium. It's much harder to involve a gamer in a romance game than a romance movie because the gamer may stop at any time, and play in any-sized chunks. With a movie, viewers allocate two hours, and the movie director has a given undivided two hours in which he controls much of the viewers' environment to manipulate emotions. Compare this to, say, a computer, where viewers are probably not in a totally dark room with huge speakers and a vast screen. With a book or a movie, it is possible to write a carefully-crafted story that depends upon timing (Joe just misses the train with Mary) or precise actions, or whatnot. A game generally requires more flexibility, unless you're going to make it incredibly flat and consisting mostly of cutscenes. In most types of game, a player might spend an arbitrary amount of time stopped or trying to figure something out. It has to allow a player to make decisions.
Third, many of the elements in a romance are *very* difficult to reproduce in an interactive environment. Most romances place a good deal of emphasis on (often subtle) emotions and human relationships. Unless you entirely represent these elements with cutscenes, you need to provide some form of interactive "human". We do not have the technology to currently do this effectively or convincingly.
Ultimately, I could see romance games doing well. Middle-aged women are currently the most common demographic online. It turns out that the Internet beats the snot out of daytime soaps. I'm sure there will be a lot of false starts and failures, though. It won't be an easy problem -- but then again, if you took a programmer from 1980 and told him to produce Doom III, he'd probably be at a bit of a loss for words too. There's money in the romance market, and that means that someone will find out a way to take advantage of it.
May we never see th
As already stated, it's pretty disappointing how poorly our obvioulsy dysfunctional gaming giants performed with the love story. It shouldn't have been a surprise though, because none of these guys have every really done anything emotionally compelling (save the scariness of Spector's System Shock). That's not to say they're gaming losers, it's just that I doubt anyone will be shedding a tear over Everquest, Simcity, or Deus Ex. Unless it's because lag made them lose some huge loot, their city is in white flight, or their inventory system is unmanagable.
I suppose one possible reason for game publisher's ineptitude in creating decent love stories, either on the fly at a conference or with years of development, is that their product's recepients (us) don't care much for love stories. I have a hard time believing that, although I suppose it might be true. I think a better reason is the one proposed by Miyamoto. Violence is the easy way to incite an emotional response. Love and sadness take far more work on a narrative level than simply coding something like Battlefield Vietnam, or even Deus Ex. It's riskier, because it's very easy for a game to come across as insincere. With technology, you're safe. It's either good because it works, or it's bad because it doesn't. Love, well now, that's far more subjective, isn't it?
With that in mind, I will say this. The copout by Spector that the technology isn't up to par is the preposterous. With that statement he made yet another step downwards from the person I was envisioned him as. Obviously, he's of the mindset I just mentioned. For him, and apparently the others, love is a technical implementation, not a narrative one. It's a coded system, not the way a character talks or walks or reacts in the game(cf. ICO).
Shame on them. The reliance of the love story on narrative is why these guys not only missed the point, but are running the complete opposite direction. The connection of the Game Design Showdown to Iron Chief is appropriate. And if that's the case, these boobs tried to build a house instead of culinating a dish.
With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest.