cut-scenes are great or the explosions are extra-special. Not that those things aren’t
great; hopefully we’ll have all that stuff too, but hopefully we’ll also have a player that’s
a little more involved.
Despite your goal to make your games offer players choices, they’re almost all
focused on physical conflict and players killing something or avoiding getting
killed themselves. And certainly the rest of the industry is even more focused
on killing and not getting killed. How long to you think until games offer play-
ers really more meaningful verbs to work with?
Yeah, I think we’re still a ways off though we’re making slow, slow progress. Right now
the issues are just at some level those are the interactions that are easiest to explain to
people and easiest to implement. Those are the emotions that are easiest to be definite
about. People don’t necessarily want gray or detail, and as I said, the closure moment of
killing someone or knocking them off the cliff is pretty clear: “Yup, I got my score, OK
great, next.” Whereas when it’s more about negotiating a truce or whatever, it suddenly
gets a lot more vague, and I think that’s why games are like they are. Twenty years ago,
the question was whether the pixel was on or not. Hey, you have one bit, that bit is alive
or dead. It doesn’t seem like we’ve made as much progress as we should have in the last
twenty-plus years.
Are you fairly pessimistic about the state of the industry?
Oh yeah, definitely. I find the industry incredibly frustrating, but yet incredibly compel-
ling as well. There’s good and bad.
For the last couple of years you’ve been fairly involved with the Indie Game
Jam, where a bunch of programmer/designer types get together in a central
location and crank out a bunch of unique games in three days, without really
any regard for commercial viability. Do you see more hope for innovation in
game design coming from something independent like that?
It’s a couple of things. Part of it is just, hey, it’s fun. On one hand those things are cool
and do make a statement, but on the other hand it shouldn’t be overlooked that part of
their value is just a bunch of people getting together and having some fun. There’s no
real law against that. That said, there’s only so much interesting risky stuff one can do
in the industry, mysteriously, despite the fact that games now cost five or ten million
dollars or more. That seems to constrain us more than it helps us at times. And I think
as an industry we’ve got to learn how to deal with that. I don’t literally think that we’re
going to do Indie Game Jams and then some year it’s suddenly going to revolutionize
the industry, and Bing Gordon will go to an EA stock announcement and talk about how,
using the model of the Indie Game Jam, EA has restructured North American develop-
ment. That seems somewhat unlikely. I don’t think those things are there to say,
“Here’s exactly what the result was,” but I do think hopefully they at least get individu-
als in the industry thinking “Oh yeah, that’s cool,” or “That’s really crazy,” or “Boy, you
really could stay up all night for a couple of days in a row and write some crazy little
demo.” It can remind people about all the stuff that’s left to go explore and all the ways
you can play around and do little things. Even if they’re not shipping commercial
530 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church