South Park: The Stick of Truth Interview

GameTrailers has posted an interview with half of the South Park duo, Matt Stone and creative consultant Jordan Thomas, about the upcoming South Park RPG, subtitled The Stick of Truth. Here’s a snippet:

Spike: What has the game allowed you to do that the other mediums you’ve worked in hasn’t?

Stone: There’s a part of the game where you have to get your photo taken for a passport. It’s the simplest gameplay in the world. It’s barely, barely gameplay, but there is some interactivity you do have to press a button. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game, and there’s something about it. There’s South Park. It looks just like South Park. The timing is just like South Park. You’re pressing a button and you’re doing it, and the joke itself is a South Park like joke, and so that feels kind of new, that feels like a thing.

When the Xbox 360 and the PS3 came out, that’s how long ago we first started talking about this game, because that’s was the first time that it could do like 720p, and we were doing HD at the time. We were like “wow, you could do a game where you felt like you were in an episode of South Park.” You’re watching it on the same TV that you watch the show on. You just have a little black controller in your hand, and you’re running around in that classroom that we’re always in, or in that hallway that you see over and over and over. That felt like a really cool thing.

In the end I hope we pulled it off, and instead of watching an episode of South Park, you’ve kind of lived one. If we could pull that off, it would be really cool. That’s the new thing. A cutscene with Catman, it’s like we do those in the show.

Thomas: As a designer, for me, the most special qualities of the game are that there are moments where the game is strictly reacting things that you might do, kind of contingent humor. Where you chose to do this thing, but not every player will ever find that location, let alone ask themselves, “I wonder if I can.?” “What if I fart on this person, at this time,” when it’s supposed to be super dramatic, and everyone’s supposed to be taking the moment seriously.

Matt especially ran a high-pressure writers room, intended to generate meaningfully funny responses to all those things. A lot of other people bluntly, people that come out of linear media would not have even bothered. They would have said, “eh, not my thing. I’m going to stick to structure, because that’s what I care about.” But, reactivity; there aren’t many games that have gone there. There are old LucasArts adventure games where there are a few cases where experimental play turns into a punch line, but you didn’t have a lot of tools to experiment with. This game has a full suite of action tools, and growth choices, like which class you’re playing effects some of these jokes. That’s why I was attracted to the project, because they were willing to say, “yeah, okay, there’s going to be this narcissistic tornado in the middle of all of our jokes, and we’re going to account for that.”

Stone: The spread of the game. I know there are probably bigger, more sprawling games, like the Skyrims of the world, but when you listen to the dialog, you’re like this could have been written by . I mean I wont put anybody down, but this kind of dialog, it’s meant to be grandiose. It’s meant to be spread wide. It’s meant to feel this way, and ours isn’t. So it’s like somebody is supposed to walk into something and it’s like we can’t just go like, “well, I wrote a line here, and there’s a line here, and that’s what I did here, and now you experience it.”

Thomas: “How dare you question that line!”

Stone: Yeah, and there’s got to be something that’s like f*cking funny about it or something that’s different from the one thing we did in the other thing. The spread of it, the spider-web of contingent things that can happen I think we got it to a place where it’s going to be satisfying to run around. That said, somebody will run around and find something in the game and ask, “why doesn’t that do .” They’ll just find something. It’s just that big. Hopefully you get a good average where people feel like they get a payback for trying stuff, but it’s really hard to fill that world out that much.

Thomas: Maybe you know, is it [John] Cleese who talks about the root of comedy being a lack of self awareness?

Stone: Probably, that sounds right.

Thomas: The reason I bring this obscure reference up is because I think the problem with a game is that the lack of self awareness gets mapped on to the awareness of the space that the player occupies. So, the player is going to do a whole bunch of sh*t that you, the frame, can not contain.

Stone: Yes.

Thomas: And a lot of the funniest sh*t in games comes out of moments when the designer really wanted you to do the right thing, and you did something else. You dropped a grenade in mom’s backyard. Does the game bother to respond, or is it just the humor of her staring at you numbly while the explosion goes off behind her? We did our best to show you that we were watching, but people will find the edges.

Stone: Oh, they’ll find stuff where they’re like, “oh that doesn’t make any sense.” It’s impossible to get it all in line.

The fact that not even once was Obsidian Entertainment named in the interview strengthens my impression that the Irvine RPG developer’s creative contributions to the title are close to nil.