It’s interesting you used the game minute technique, since that lays out just
one way events can take place in a given location. With a game that tries to be
as non-linear and player-choice oriented asSystem Shock, how do you make sure
the game minutes don’t lead to a very linear experience?
I think you have two things you can do. One is, you do a couple of them, to illustrate
some different possibilities, not necessarily for the same room. Actually on the project
I’m working on now one of the things we’re doing is taking a specific scenario and we’re
doing two or three walk-throughs of it, specifically for that reason. But, even back then,
I think the main thing we would do is write it so you would have your character check
out the other options in some sense. Your minute of gameplay says, “She thought of
running for the door, but realized it would be a hard fight. Instead...” And youhint at
the systems and you hint at the sorts of things that matter. And then you count on set-
ting up a development culture that’s all about “What else could I do?” not “Let’s go
implement this.” But I think it’s a good point. We’re a non-linear medium — at least I
think the best examples of us are usually non-linear — and yet much as I’m sure hyper-
text is the most wonderful thing ever, it really isn’t the solution. A linear medium isn’t
the solution really either, and so what do you do to express gameplay in a sys-
tems-based world? The reason it’s interesting is because it is a simulation and it is open
ended, but it’s hard to write down that simulation in a doc file. So a lot of it is expressing
possibilities and what the player decided to do and making it very clear that they had
choices. And a lot of it is doing different examples to express different types of things.
But yeah, it’s easy to do it wrong, like so many things.
It seems like you designedSystem Shockaround how you could tell a story better
than inUltima Underworld. Was improving your storytelling one of your primary
goals?
I think we obviously
always cared about story
— we were definitely
interested in fantasy/sci-fi
possibilities. On some
level I think we stumbled
into a nice villain, in the
fact that the villain could
speak to you from any-
where and set these
ambushes up and actually
affect your game. One
thing that worked really
well that we didn’t under-
stand at the beginning but
that we learned to some-
what take advantage of by
the end was that having the computer and the station be the enemy meant that on some
level you could interact with your nemesis fairly regularly and fairly often in non-final
ways. You had a recurring, consistent, palpable enemy, who mattered to you because
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 509
System Shock