Warren Spector Interview

One of the early tangible results of Warren Spector’s return to game development is the increased amount of interviews with the veteran developer, who worked on titles such as System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief: The Dark Project and Epic Mickey. The latest comes our way via GamesBeat and tackles the usual subjects: Spector’s interest in emergent narrative and gameplay, the unanswered questions of System Shock, the reasons that led him to go back to game development, and his work in academia for the past three years.

A couple of interesting snippets:

GamesBeat: Who do you feel the System Shock fans were? What drew them to it way back when?

Spector: System Shock, the original, is a pretty hardcore gamer’s game. Everything we did was for hardcore gamers back then. I look back on the UI now in fact, I tried to play the game about a year and a half ago. The UI is like, what were we thinking? It’s a good idea to use every key on the keyboard, right? My god.

What they got out of it, though, was the then-state of the art in what we call immersive simulations. The idea, at Origin and then later at Looking Glass and Ion Storm and Junction Point, was allowing players to solve problems the way they wanted to solve them, and in that way create unique experiences for themselves. The idea of sharing authorship with your players is what games can do that no other medium can. Making a game where every player experiences the same thing sounds what’s worse than boring? We allowed them to express themselves and show off their creativity.

…

GamesBeat: How do you feel about some of the other extremes that could be taken along that spectrum, like open worlds as opposed to very directed stories?

Spector: There are other media that tell linear stories better than we do. So why do it? Movies tell linear stories better than games. There’s a kind of moral imperative to do what make a medium unique. What makes us unique is that we can have a dialogue with our players. We can empower them in ways that no other medium can. I have to do that. If publishers and partners don’t want that, I can retire. It’s what I think is important.

GamesBeat: So you’re a crusader with this idea.

Spector: Oh, yeah. I’m a total nutty advocate for a particular kind of game. The funny thing is, back in the day when we were working on games like Underworld and System Shock, we’d sit around saying, (Why doesn’t everybody make games like this?) Now there are a lot of places doing it. Arkane, with Dishonored, is doing the same sort of thing. A lot of people point to the Bethesda games and the Rockstar games and the Irrational games. But we’re all just sort of cousins. We’re all doing player empowerment in different ways.

What I really like doing is there are a lot of games, open world games in particular, that are an inch deep in terms of their simulation and their player empowerment, but they’re miles wide. What I try to do is make a game that’s hopefully more than an inch wide, but inches wide and miles deep. There are a lot of people making games that are sort of like what I like to do, but nobody’s doing it quite the way I like to do it. That’s a reason to keep making games.