where the player only does a limited number of things with the environment and you
can do that fairly robustly in third-person, I think in that case you can immerse almost
as well if not better in different ways. I personally still think that first-person is pretty
exciting and pretty compelling in a way that other modes often aren’t. But I don’t think
it’s the only way to get a player fully involved. It’s just always hard when you’re looking
at a character to be the character at the same time. Are you puppeteering or are you the
character? And I think that’s a weird thing. That’s not yet at the point where we under-
stand it so well that we have an answer.
Despite all your first-person games, you’ve always deliberately stayed away
from making a shooter, which many seem to find to be the most obvious thing
to do with that particular viewpoint. What are your motivations for avoiding
it?
I don’t dislike them. Personally it’s just not all that interesting to me. I don’t really play
FPSs very much, I mean I do, every couple of years I play something. I playedCall of
Dutylast year, I’m sure I’ll playHalo 2andHalf-Life 2this year, assuming they come
out. It’s not that I dislike them, it’s just that they’re not what gets me most excited as a
creator. It just feels to me that there’s a lot of interesting stuff to do that isn’t that. In
some sense, shooters have ultimate player choice, because they’re all about sys-
tems-based damage dealing and damage avoiding. They’re incredibly choice based. But
on the other hand, that choice is incredibly limited. A role-playing game where I get to
decide whether I’m the guy who kills people with axes or the guy who kills people with
fireballs, that is a choice, but it’s just not that compelling to me. So I guess for me I
always feel that I’ve always tried to think about what can we let the player do that’s cool
and different and more about their own choices. And it just seems like FPSs are a
slightly limited palette for that.
I’ve seen you discuss the concept of game developers abdicating authorship to
the player. What exactly do you mean by that?
It’s basically the same player stuff, in that we’re the media where the player can be on
stage, and the consumer of the media can be the one that’s at the center of the experi-
ence. It’s not like in a painting you don’t bring yourself to the painting, but that’s a
slightly different experience than being the person moving around. And so when you
think about the unique DNA of gaming and the unique things that we can do that other
media can’t, that idea of empowering the player and making the player the center of the
experience is really pretty compelling to me. As I said, when players remember things,
a lot of the stuff they remember is the stuff they did, not the stuff they read about. You
talk to Miyamoto and he talks about “Hey, I started with the controller.” And a lot of
designers talk about verbs and the interactions and what are we going to let the player
do. It’s not that you’re not authoring an experience — you’re very clearly authoring an
experience — but you’re authoring a set of systems which generate an experience with
the player. My hope would be that fifteen or twenty years from now that idea of
player-centric mechanics is going to be in more of our games. I hope more of our stuff
will be clearly a game that wants to be a game and is empowering the player to show off,
and less games that are cool because they’ve got someone from a movie or the
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 529