Warren Spector Q&A, Part One

Developmag has kicked up the first installment of a new Q&A with Junction Point Studios’ Warren Spector about his decision to join Disney, lackluster stories in video games, and more.

You’re a big believer in interactive narrative in games, and there’s been a lot of movement towards valuing the story element of games over the past few years years where you’ve been out of the public eye. Do you worry that you’re going to have to re-emerge and say ‘˜I’m still here, this is what I’ve been working on!’

No, I’ve never cared about my reputation, I don’t care if people like me. But it’s interesting you should mention that because I looked at the schedule at this year’s GDC and all of a sudden there are all these panels and lectures about game story. The way I look at is, well, on the one hand the more people making story-based games like that, the more choice I’m going to find stuff I want to play as a player. So that’s all good we’ve had some lean years where there wasn’t much I wanted to play.

Also, the more people that tackle a problem, the more likely we are to solve it I don’t have a monopoly on the truth, I can barely figure out how to tie my own shoelaces sometimes. So the more people thinking about game narrative the more likely we are to solve the really hard problems that are still there left to be solved.

What do you think those problems are?

After 20 years of saying this it’s still sadly true, but there’s the whole teeter-totter model of stories in games the more game-like you make something the less traditionally story-like it becomes and the more story-like you make it the less game-like it becomes. That’s still true and I don’t see anybody having solved that yet.
Also, there are still a bunch of boring story communication issues, like I’m just really not satisfied that have ‘˜OK, now you’re in the game part, now you’re in the story part’ interaction, movie, interaction, movie. That’s just not good enough.

I’m still not satisfied, again as a player, with the quality of our actors or our interactive conversation systems which I think are required for telling stories. I think Mass Effect made some progress on that, I think Half Life 2 made some progress on that, but we still have a long way to go.

My big current soapbox is ‘˜Hey game writers, get over yourselves and learn something from screenwriters!’ For the past couple of years I’ve been reading a lot of scripts, and what I’ve noticed is that they can communicate really complex emotions in very few words. Less is more and I’m the worst offender by the way, let me say that up front. But game writers really need to learn to scale back a bit. It’s almost like it’s a badge of honour that you have 250,000 lines of dialogue. How about we try to communicate the same emotions in a lot less?

It’s true that we’re not movies and Hollywood scriptwriters don’t understand the problems, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a thing we can’t learn from them to make ourselves better. That’s my point not to hire Hollywood writers, my gosh that’s not the answer but read some movie scripts. They’re not like game dialogue, not even the best game dialogue.

And that’s just on the single-player side the big grail for many people in the business, maybe even me, is how to solve the multi-player storytelling problem. And I don’t mean how to tell a story in the context of a ten million user MMO, but just how can you get three, four, five, six players together and get them to collaboratively tell a story together. That’s going to be pretty powerful, and no one’s nailed that yet.

So, to go back to your question, yeah, the more people that are trying to tackle this problem the better. I think I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.