This is just my personal "I'm
not a game designer. I just like games and I'm kind of bored right now,"
voice, but I don't see any reasons to stick to conventions, if you decide...
why have a health meter that works the way health meters have worked
for the last 20 years, if you're just going to find something that works
differently for you?
MS: We experimented with using facial
deformation, for example.
PO: We tried a lot of different things.
I used to write comic books in my secret past. When you write a comic
book, you get things that come with it being a comic book. People are
going to accept that a superhero flies around in long underwear. They're
going to accept that Clark Kent can put his glasses on and nobody's
going to recognize him as Superman.
They're going to accept those things
until you shine a light on it and say, "This is ridiculous."
And you can do that, too, if you're a really good writer. If you're
Alan Moore, you can do it. You can deconstruct a superhero story and
it's awesome.
But you attack those idioms and blow up those conventions
at your peril. You better be damn sure that you can replace those with
something that's better or at least as good as what you're destroying.
It's the same thing with a video game.
Players come into a video game, and they assume that they have a limited
resource that equates to health, lives, or time, and they understand
that it's going to be decrementing under a certain circumstance.
They
have to get through certain hoops, there's going to be certain reset
points... those things, they all accept. What happens sometimes in a
cinematic game that attempts to break the paradigm is they throw those
things out, but they don't replace them with anything. You just end
up being disoriented.
It's like the HUD discussion with
King Kong. Why did they throw it out? What would they get from that,
other than a screenshot that says, "I got no HUD?"
You've
got to look at those things really carefully, and if you can declaw
one or two of them... how many of those little rods can you pull out
before the Jenga tower falls down? Because they all support each other
in ways you may not recognize, and you're saying, "I'll be different!
I'll take this thing out."
That's why I think we can embrace certain
things and eschew other things, and if we move fast enough and deliver
it well enough against the things we embrace, that's where I trust the
player.
That's where I trust the player's going to look at it and say,
"You know, I'm not going to ding them because it doesn't have a
Tekken level of depth in the fighting commands. That's not what
they were aiming for. But look what they did do. It's got all this depth,
but it's triggered by this control scheme. And it's fun."
Another example of where that sort
of went wrong is... and this game is pretty old now, so I'm not harping
on it, but The Getaway was the big groundbreaking title as, "Let's
make it as realistic and..."
MS: And you're leaning against a cabinet.
Leaning against a cabinet and then
the blood will dry on your shirt. The thing that is even sillier to
me, almost, was the fact that when you're in the car,
you'd know where to go because the turn signal would turn itself on
for you. I thought that was kind of funny, more than anything. I think
when they decided to do this, they were definitely going at it from
artistic intentions, but it almost was sort of an anti-proof of concept
or something.
PO: You've got to be willing to make
hamburger out of the sacred cows, too. You can sit with the design session.
On the whiteboards, they've got all this stuff. But when you're playing
it and it's not working, maybe it's time to change your objective a
little bit.
You know, video games aren't reality. Duh. But fiction isn't
reality, either. The people talk in novels is not the way they talk
to each other in person. There's concision. There's summary. There's
things that drive conversations to climaxes and character transformation,
and where you get into a scene and out of a scene. They're different
than life, so why should video games be held to a different standard
when they're trying to show us action?
We have this marvelous legacy of cinematic
action that goes back to D.W. Griffith, so why would you try to go against
that grammar that's ingrained in everyone's head? For us, it was top-down.
We looked at the director on the second two pictures, and we looked
at the way he framed his action. His philosophy was basically, "There's
a cameraman in the room with you in all the fights, so when Bourne gets
hit, he flinches."
He's pulling the camera back. You can see this
in the second film, where Bourne's driving, and a car's coming in and
is going to smash. He's looking ahead and can't see the car coming this
way, and the camera flinches back, even thought Bourne hasn't seen it
because we're the cameraman in the passenger seat going, "Holy
shit!" and he gets hit and spun around.
So we grabbed all those elements and
built them into our camera system so that it feels like the film. But
those huge fights make that stuff happen, because that's normally the
way you do a video game.
We're breaking one of the idioms of a video
game, which is a reliable camera that the player can control. You can't
do that unless you give them a better experience, or at least a different
experience that holds together.