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."

Comments

Jak II

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.