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Missing the 'Whole' Point in Game Development
An Anonymous Reader wrote to tell us about Walter Kim of the Ludonauts. He has an interesting argument about game design: "many videogame developers, particularly the Western ones, approach their craft with far too much of a hard-headed pragmatism, a nuts and bolts mentality about development that has, consciously or unconsciously, extended itself to design. What you end up with are a bunch of games that, while they may exhibit a great deal of cleverness on the level of individual level design, are stitched together with about as much finesse as duct tape."
First of all, John Carmack is right about his own games. I enjoy them, and in an FPS, it's generally true that you can have a good experience with very little plot.
Still, plot can work with the game. Here's my example: Jak II. There's some outstanding gameplay, the world is absolutely massive and very cohesive -- only three or four major areas, the rest of the levels are all seamlessly melded into the City. And I do mean seamless, and that is my impression of the entire game. Comments are made all the time, cinematic scenes are short and relatively infrequent. The plot is not incredibly complex, but it is very well tied to the gameplay.
The way games are going to absolutely leave movies in the dust is when AI gets so good that the designers mostly do a rough outline of the game, and spend most of their time in character design and AI. MMOs are sort of moving in that direction, but the advantage of local AI is that they are more expressive, never lag, never talk out-of-character, and can be saved and restored.
Think about how Half-Life 2 works (in the videos, anyway) -- the physics engine and wide-open level design allows you to be very creative and have a lot of freedom in how each battle goes. Half-Life was like that, only less so. Yet the experience was seamless and linear, so you got enough freedom to have fun with the game, but enough limitation and design that you can "lose yourself in the artist's world".
What I think Speilberg wants is for the character and plot to go the same way -- not like a choose-your-own-adventure book, not like write-your-own-book, but like life with fate.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Viewing user interaction in gaming as a portion of a story is succombing to linear design. Not only do you have "interaction," you have player choice, a world rich enough that every corner the player peeks around contains something, you have the systems of the world interacting with themselves and the player in interesting and frequently unpredictable ways.
I'm not convinced that emphasizing all areas is the way to go, with current budgets. As you point out most games which are successful are so ignoring certain aspects of the craft. Quake III has engendered a long following, yet has never had the slightest notion of a story. But what it did, it did very well... ID never lost sight of the fact that they were making an action multiplayer fragfest, and all of their efforts were expended on that goal. Part of the "big picture" was the focus on specific elements. Mario has always created a moment-to-moment sense of awe and wonder, yet has been sadly lax on character development. Final Fantasy has always had great stories wrapped around some of the most boring moment-to-moment gameplay imaginable. The Godfather was one of the greatest pictures of all time, yet it hadn't the slightest trace of comedy. The Lamborghini Diablo was one of the greatest cars of the 80's, yet had impossibly small trunk space. These are not weaknesses of things that could be greater, these are the tradeoffs that you must make in order to be great.
Don't be all things to all people: Down that road lies Daikatana. Know what your core strengths of your game will be, and emphasize those.
The ______ Agenda
Two words.... E.T.
A cogent argument could be made suggesting that Spielberg's 'game design intuition' was the single greatest cause of the great video game crash of 1983. The man may make some good movies, but I'll never listen to a DAMN thing he says regarding games, because he obviously has no clue what he's talking about. I'm surprised neither Walter nor Chris brought the great ET debacle up in their articles.
On another note - increased realism is not going to be and never was the driving force for good games. it's been a driving force for the industry, the millions of fanboys who eat up a few extra mole marks on their polygonal models and the graphics cards companies who happily sell us upgraded machinery every six months, but we've been seeing the same old, tired, incredibly conservative games and forms of gameplay for years now.
The first time I cried from playing a video game was playing WWF Wrestlemania (or something like that) for the SNES. I picked it out for my ninth or so birthday because I saw some screenshots in Nintendo Power, and they looked so photo-realistic that I wanted to play it. After taking it home and turning it on, I was appalled by the simplistic button mashing that grew tedious after only a few minutes. I cried all night for being so easily tricked by the lure of realism, and vowed never to give realism in games any thought again. I still have that cartridge today as a reminder.