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CH: That was the disappointing thing about reading that giant book was that I didn't really detect any common theme. Explorers all seemed to explore for different reasons. They all have different drives. Some of them were motivated by money, some by patriotism or nationalism, some of them by more of a pure desire to go where people hadn’t been... in all these different kinds of exploration I didn't really find a common denominator, which disappointed me. That’s why I didn’t talk about it a lot in my lecture. You say you’re an explorer in games. So what about you? What makes you want to explore? CH: Well, I talked a lot about exploration games needing to provide ubiquitous, low-value rewards. Oblivion, like I said, does that really well with alchemical ingredients. But what I didn't talk about, and I intentionally left it off to the side, was this idea that one of the things I did in Oblivion was I went to places just to get beautiful panoramas. I went to the highest mountain I could find just to see how far I could see. I went all the way to the sea at the bottom of the world just to see the sunset. Literally, I left my controller there and drank a beer while the sun set. There is no reward for that. It was just wanting to see what the game did and how it worked. So there is this other kind of reward which is just the feeling of this openness and seeing how rich the simulation is, which is something you can’t usually do in games.
For your research, you turned to real-life explorers. But real-life explorers are exploring places no one has ever gone. In a game, you can only go places someone has already programmed. Doesn’t that change things? CH: One of the things though is that open-world games that have a lot of rich spatial exploration, while they’re built by someone, they're not hand-crafted in the same way a game like Splinter Cell is hand-crafted. Someone builds a room in Splinter Cell and you know exactly what that room looks like from every angle--not every single possible camera position, but what players see is very tightly controlled by artists and designers, even interesting compositions of flora and light and shadow and all these things. But in an open-world game, you just don't have the time to make sure with every single tree you have nice God rays shining through the leaves at 6:00 pm and a ship is sailing by or whatever. In a sense, while it is all created by someone, it's created in a much more painterly way, putting the stuff there and shaping it but not really even taking the time to check if it's right. It's the systems of the game and the game engine that have made this game beautiful. The player is kind of going into uncharted territory. No one ever took the time to stop and look in this direction from this rock in this forest at 6:00 in the afternoon and see the God rays. |
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