|
|
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
 | | | | | | | |
 |
 |
||||
|
GDC 2002: Deep Thoughts By Wright, McCloud What's it like to be a fly on the wall listening to a conversation between Will Wright and comic book author Scott McCloud? That was the basis for an hour-long session today, which covered a wide range of deep subjects including the impact of time, addiction, and user interpretation on their respective media. Naturally, with only an hour at their disposal, Wright and McCloud faced their own temporal challenge to compress these dense subjects into the allotted schedule.
The conversation touched upon the impact of time and interactivity on different forms of entertainment, comparing painting, television, prose, comics and games. Wright explained the difference been "agency" and "ownership" in different mediums. In movies, he explained, you see a character get killed and you may feel sorry that something has happened to someone else (agency). In an RPG, when your character dies, you say to yourself, "Damn - I died!" (ownership). Wright touched on the "phase space" of games, which could also be described as the size of the game universe, or how free a player is to go off track and explore. Decades ago, most games were linear, driving players from goal A to goal B and onward, constraining the player to a single course of conduct along the way. Games have evolved to include branching storylines, or to make use of disposable storylines. An example of the latter would be Grand Theft Auto 3, which lets you progress from challenge to challenge in the game, or bypass the story and go off and explore, steal cars, beat people up, get arrested, and cause mayhem. That game, Wright noted, had a large phase space which impressed him with its potential. Communication between the game designer and the player was a recurring conversation topic between McCloud and Wright, and elicited questions from the audience. The two talked about how the brain processes information, distilling tons of information into a simple message that the individual can process, and then re-expanding that message in the brain by interpreting it and attaching meaning. Metaphors, they explained, are effective ways of communicating, because a single image can contain a wealth of meaning already understood by the player beyond the object itself. The drawback, one audience member commented, was that metaphors vary from culture to culture, and need to be "localized". A whimsical observation McCloud made concerned the fractal nature of The Sims. He said he found himself laughing at his Sims family as they sat around laughing at their daughter's dollhouse. The notion of his Sims playing with their own "sims" struck a chord in him. The two speakers discussed the nature of game addiction, and tried to determine what level of game addiction is appropriate or desirable - and those aren't necessarily compatible. McCloud pointed out that from a business perspective, you want your product to be as addictive as possible. But there's a line, he said, separating "earned addiction" (desirable) from "compulsion" (not necessarily good). For instance, there are people who are sick of Everquest, but feel compelled to continue playing to explore just a little bit more, or achieve that next character level. Wright said that he had attended a roundtable earlier in which a mother expressed concern that her son was spending too much time playing games. Wright said that others asked the woman whether she would have objected if her son had spent all that time reading instead. The perception of an activity determines whether a given "addiction" is good or bad. Unlike many
sessions at the conference, this session didn't attempt to solve any predetermined
problem or promise to answer a given question. It was a free-flow gab
session, and while the lack of focus was at times frustrating, it was
definitely interesting to get two of the premier deep thinkers in these
two mediums together. |
|
|
Features
For
those of you who aren't familiar with McCloud's work, he's the author
of two phenomenal comic books about the comic industry itself: Understanding
Comics, and its sequel, Reinventing Comics. Like Wright, he's
spent a great deal of time thinking about the nature of his medium, so
pairing the two was bound to spark interesting discussion. There wasn't
a clear agenda for the session; the goal was to see where the world of
games and comics intersect, and consider topics of mutual interest to
Wright and McCloud. 