last second. They don’t
tell you about “Oh, in the
thirty-seventh cut-scene,
the guy on the right was
really cool because he had
spiky hair and a cool shirt
on. He was my fave.”
Even the plot twists; they
have that emotional
moment of “Oh wow, I
never would have
guessed,” and then they
forget about it because it’s
passive. And gaming’s an
active media.
I think moving for-
ward for the people who
care about systems-based work, we’ve got to figure out how to get some of the emo-
tional pacing and strong emotional reactions and so on that a scripted game has while
keeping the player freedom and player choice that a pure systems-based game has.
There’s a lot from the scripted and more pre-constructed experiences that the systems
people needs to think about and understand how you do. That said, personally I find the
systems stuff more interesting because I do think it’s more about the player and if you
want to write novels or movies, why do them in a game? There certainly is an appeal to
playing through the movie experience. Even just having a combat system that lets you
turn the pages of the book is kind of interesting and does make you invest a little more
and certainly brings something that either one by itself does not.Tekkenby itself or a
book by itself are different experiences than a book where you have to playTekken
every so often to turn the page, which is what a lot of story/fighting scripted games are.
There’s nothing wrong with those games, I think they’re fine, I like some of them. I just
think that in gaming we can do more than that.
So you think emotional pacing is the key to why pure systems-based games
haven’t been as commercially successful as more scripted games?
I don’t know if that’s the only key, but I think that’s certainly part of it. I think for us in
particular we’ve always built games that were a little harder to get into or we didn’t do a
good job on selling players on the fantasy and why they wanted it. We haven’t done a
great job on our ramp-up at the beginning of getting the players involved in an elegant
way in terms of telling them why they want it and in terms of telling them how to do it.
It’s one of those things: how do you show something where the interest is “Hey, after
you play it for a while you start developing your own style” and all of that? When you
have two or three minutes of someone’s time before they’re like “Yeah, whatever.”
And I think a big challenge for the games industry is that some of the coolest games
are games that take a while to get into. I think the people who are making those games
have to think about what to do to make them more accessible so that we don’t end up
with only games that are fun in the first second. It would be great if every game were
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 523
Thief