Passionnant tour d’horizon des problématiques du développement de jeux. Première partie, seconde, troisième, on attend la dernière. Par Warren "Deus" Spector, 20 ans de dev dans les pattes et quelques titres qui changèrent le futur.
Extraits et pensées:
"We have to make games with a consciousness of our social obligations as creators of mediated entertainment and with a consciousness of the dialogue between designers and players."
Word up ! This is true and so deep… 30 years of games and almost nothing has been done about this very important thing.
"We can show players the consequences of their choices, rather than just patting them on the back for solving meaningless puzzles."
Consequences ? Do you mean a gameplay with a kind of responsibility ? Man you go too far… I go with you.
"I want something more, something different from games now than I did when I started playing years ago. And, in the spirit of total honesty, I want to spend time with my family."
So I guess you’re designing a game for this audience, parents and kids entertainment ?..:) It’s something that always question me: why the guys who got me into the game industry (like Warren) are always there, making games for the same demographic target than 15 years ago ! I feel those veterans have a lot to say but maybe it’s time to move, widening audience… This is your responsibility.
"Given the lack of role models among developers and characters to relate to among our heroes and heroines, it’s no surprise we’re doing such a poor job of encouraging ethnic diversity."
Yeah. At first I thought it wasn’t really important in Deus Ex to have a black Denton. I was wrong, it really cares to see in-game something near of what you are (especially in mirrors, heh). White people don’t even notice that because the world is modeled around them. Ethnic, genre diversity in game development sounds like… Well we’ll see…
"Look, I love stories – in any medium. And there’s a reason why most stories have a single hero. Stories just work better that way. So, single player gaming is important to me because it seems important to give players the experience of being The Hero of their own, compelling story, rather than bit players in a story of random events told by thousands, even millions of people."
Good point. I do love stories (and love stories) too. And stories (books, movies, music album) are still the best to create complex feelings… Powering up do not and willing on the creative user content is pretty short term. People will just get bored at that.
"There just aren’t many companies that can afford more than a couple of $20 million bets a year. If even one of those bets failed (and given the "four out of five" game failure rate the received wisdom says we suffer now, you know most of those bets will fail), a lot of publishers are going down."
PS3 and his über 50 Go BR disc, ok that’s cool. Almost nobody can fill it up, but hey, that’s sooo cool…
"Those people would create concepts, shop them to funding and/or publishing partners and then form the core that shepherds the concepts to completion. These shops would have a consistent, on- staff, creative core, and a leads group to prototype and prove concepts, pipelines and so on. Those same folks could then coordinate and lead the efforts of outside resources who would generate the assets necessary to complete the game."
This is what’s going on in Europe for about 3-4 years. We are soon gonna see if it works that way. I’m pretty sure it does.
"And where are the Carmack equivalents willing to tackle problems like non-combat AI, virtual actors, conversation systems, collaborative storytelling questions?"
I totally dig that ! Where are they, I’m searching too ! Programmers seem to always want to be in the graphic part of the job (I only met one or two programmers with the "artistic feeling" in years). Where is the 06 equivalent of the iMuse system ? Where are benefits of a game like Facade ? All that horsepower for pixel shaders, anti-aliasing and 720p video output ? This is wack and now it almost makes me feel angry about the graphic field… Main work is for visual artists and graphic programmers and it’s going to be the same for the next few years… If we don’t disrupt this movement.
C’est la conclusion claire je crois…