I used to make jokes about wanting to make you care enough about your pilots that you’d be devastated if they died, and I got a reputation for pilot-murder, but the truth is that I didn’t care if they died, specifically I just wanted you to care about them. I want to give you the tools to tell your own stories, with my game as the context for those stories. I want to give you an experience you can only get from games. I’m not looking to show you a cool movie or an exciting cinematic. So when I make games, I’m not looking to tell you a story. The art form of games is interactive experiences. The reasoning isn’t really important here, but the central thesis is: games become a distinct art form when they learn to leverage their unique properties, those elements that make them distinct from paintings or movies or novels or television. My conclusion was that they aren’t art, but they could be. I gave a talk many years ago at a game conference about whether games are art. Frankly, the Battletech IP was my least favorite part of the project, and I nearly turned down the job because of it. I didn’t want to make a game about robots. I’m far enough away from both Battletech and my frustrations and anger about it that I think I can start to explain why some of the things in the game are the way they are. This is frustrating for me, because it makes it hard to argue for what I know to be the right answer to a problem, and frustrating for the people I work with, who want more to go on than ‘Kiva feels it really strongly’. So it’s often not until well after the fact that I’m able to articulate the reasons for some of my ideas. I’ve just done that analysis well in advance, building a kind of foundation of good design practice, experience of game systems and mechanics, and conversations about what is and isn’t fun. In the moment, I can’t explain why something feels right or not, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of thought and analysis behind each design decision. I intuitively grasp whether something is going to be fun or not whether something is a good idea or not whether something is going to be worth the time to develop or not.
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