Ken Levine Interview

Next Generation has published the results of a one-hour interview they recently conducted with 2K Boston’s Ken Levine about “the nature of creativity.”

Next-Gen: Are you turned off game characters because they’re mostly so crappy and one-dimensional?

Levine: Spider-Man 2 as a piece of cult genre stuff is amazing because he’s going through this struggle with his enemies, but he’s really going through a struggle with himself, whether he wants to be a hero or not. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series of shows about her personal problems that is somehow tied into fighting vampires. Her personal life is mirrored in this large apocalyptic story.

The trouble with game characters, and quite often with movie characters too, is some guy just sort of wakes up one morning and goes ‘˜okay, what heroic thing am I doing today?’ One of the reasons I really liked God of War or the opening of God of War is, as much as it’s bombastic and muscle-headed, I thought it was beautiful the way they started with a guy who is at his lowest point. He’s going to commit suicide. It starts with a mystery. Who is this guy? Why is he committing suicide? What’s going on here?

So they took a very typical superhero muscle guy, and they filled him with complexity right from the beginning. Because big hero muscle guys aren’t usually about to kill themselves, right? They’re usually sitting at the bar and they get a call from star command and they go off to do their fucking job because what else are they going to do? They don’t have any lives outside of that, and I think that’s the problem with videogames. What’s their motivation, what’s driving them to do this, besides heroics?

Heroics are not something that comes naturally. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, you know. I don’t wake up every morning and say, what good can I do? I think ‘˜oh shit, I’ve got to have breakfast and then I’ve got to feed my family and then I’ve got to do all that other stuff’.
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Next-Gen: Now you’ve won all the awards. Luminaries are telling you how great you are. People are going to recognize you more at industry functions. People can become very critical. Does that put more pressure on you?

Levine: No. When you’re working in obscurity you can read all the things people are saying about you, you can get a sense of where you are and you feel like you know if somebody says something wrong, a lie about you or something wrong, you can do something about it. But look, when you become a little more public you’ve got to separate yourself from it.

People are going to be talking. Every day people are going to say something nasty about me. You have to be able to accept the fact that that’s just going to happen. You have to live with that and people are going to like what you do and people are going to hate what you do and the bigger you become, the more of a target you become.

But also, these guys are paying fifty, sixty dollars for our game, they have a right to fucking hate me if they’re not happy with that purchase. I think that’s reasonable. Well not hate me, that’s a little extreme, but you know, they have a right to be very disappointed.