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."

Comments

Well, it's a fairly bizzare concept.

[Eevee]

It almost makes me want to try Battlefield 1942 just to see if there are love-sick civilians wandering around dodging shrapnel.

Re:wow

[NedR]

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.

Leave it to the little names then

[SmallFurryCreature]

Try these reviews of a certain game.

There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A. Better to kill then fuck. The Sims are a notable exception but they don't really have emotion just stats.

Of course a super game would be one that manages emotion without violence or sex. Or with. I am not sure on that one.

Re:No John Romero . . .

[Nasarius]

No, he'd want to make everyone else his bitch.

Re:wow

[0x0d0a]

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.

ICO ?

[polyp2000]

Has anyone here played ICO? Its a very romantic sort of game; and kinda spiritual too. The basic premise of the game is , young lad gets trapped in castle, meets strange but beautiful ethereal girl caught between life and death. Strange asphyx like creatures hound the girl, and try to drag her into another world. ICO, must solve puzzles, some of which require the ethereal powers of the girl in order to solve.

Although not strictly billed as a love story, I felt that the young lad and the girl had quite an interaction with each other, the animation silky smooth. The characters would hold hands, if ICO runs too far away he can call the girl and she will come running, or if she cannot make her way to ICO will yell back. To be honest im waffling and not doing the game much justice.

I just wanted to mention it because despite being a great game, its the first game ive really ever played where central characters have a significant relationship / interplay from which feelings seem to emanate from the screen and into your thoughts.

nick ...