Slashdot Mirror
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.