Warren Spector – 40 years and I'm still here
gamedeveloper.com
gamedeveloper.com
> One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that if your game doesn’t have a clear vision, and you can’t express and “sell” it and if you don’t hire people better than you are, you’re likely to fail.
…
> We’ve developed an entirely new art form. We’re the only medium in the history of humankind that can turn every consumer into a creator and, astonishingly, we do that through the power of play. Think about that!
I’m looking forward to the next game Warren is working on, whatever it may be, and I think System Shock did introduce environmental storytelling to video games, which reminds me I must play the recent remake.
EDIT: didn't read until the end of your comment before I posted my answer, and now I don't know how to change it, so I'll just leave it like it is...
Makes me wonder if it’s better to go solo than to hire people worse than you.
I mean, games are an incredible medium, but I think books can blur the line as well. I think "S." is probably the best example. It's not a traditional gamebook (which would be cheating since they're explicitly games), but it is a physical book which presents itself as an artifact of the story it's telling (it's produced to look like an old library book written by a fictional author with notes in the margins between fictional characters).
It's really three stories in one: the story of what happened to the fictional author, the story of two characters trying to unravel that mystery, leaving notes in the margins and clippings inserted into the book, and the story written in the book itself.
But in a sense it requires readers to become creators by connecting the clues linking the three stories and determining what happened, thus completing the story for themselves.
Another example I grew up with was "The Eleventh Hour" which is an illustrated children's book with ciphers and puzzles and a main mystery for the reader to unravel. This is a bit more traditionally "gamey" than "S.".
You could also argue religion is a form of this, especially Judeo-Christian religions which have sacred texts but also millenia of extra-textual canon and tradition.
I bought a paper copy of a book called The Ground Itself not long go and warmly recommend it:
> …a one-session storytelling game for 2-5 players, played with household materials (a coin, a six-sided die, and a deck of cards).
No idea if it is fun, but it is one of the permanently free games on GOG and somewhere in my too large pile of old games I want to try some day:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_worlds_of_adventure_2_mar...
Only knew it existed thanks to The Digital Antiquarian a few years ago: https://www.filfre.net/2018/02/the-worlds-of-ultima/
Make sure to play it with a Roland MT32 emulator, sounds much better that way.
I still go back to play it from time to time, although I always play the sneak-thief kind of character, it just seems so much more fun!
I don't know if I'd call it the best game of that era, but I think it's a strong contender for most influential. It goes beyond the obvious homages (e.g. the variety of games that put the code "0451" in a prominent place). Deus Ex blended actual agency with illusory agency in a way that almost every western narrative-driven game since then has tried to replicate, with varying degrees of success. It's one of the few games where I knew I didn't really have much control over the story, but it made me feel like a character in it anyway.
But yeah, a sneak-thief has the opportunity to enjoy the most of the game's writing, in the form of emails, data cubes and overheard conversations, and they just make the world so much richer and more alive. And all the allusions and pop culture references, the excerpts of the (real) novel The Man Who Was Thursday, exploring several themes common with the game, as well as the (fictional) thriller Jacob's Shadow, whose plot seems to reflect the player's progression in the game. No doubt Deus Ex is one of the most intellectual, literary video games of all time.
For a trip down the memory lane, I recommend Stephan Lavavej's¹ Deus Ex page which, among other things, contains an annotated copy of all the non-dialogue text in the game: https://nuwen.net/dx.html
¹ Some of us may also recognize his name as the principal maintainer of Microsoft's C++ Standard Library implementation.
Only because Quake III had just come out.
A few nuggets from his talk, as best as I can remember it a decade later:
- He's bought several houses on his street and he's filled them with lots of stuff from various games he's made. He describes it as a sort of living museum to himself and his work.
- He said you shouldn't expect games to be fun when you first get them working. He described making Deus Ex, and said they spent years on the game and the first time they played it it wasn't fun at all. He thinks you shouldn't worry about that, and just make something with content in it and then make it fun to play at the end of the process.
- He seemed very pro-crunch. Like, to him it felt like the most obvious thing in the world that people would "work super hard" near the end of a video game project to make it the best it could be.
Its interesting - after hearing him talk about that I kinda get why his games turn out how they do. I've played a lot of his games. I grew up on Wing Commander. System Shock 2 is of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. But take Deus Ex - There were about 8 different creative ways to finish deus ex's first level. But by halfway through the game, it was very samey and the levels had mostly linear paths. The team obviously didn't have time to finish it properly. The boss battles were even outsourced to another team and they didn't fit the rest of the game.
But having seen him speak, I doubt that would have particularly bothered Spector.
He's clearly successful by any measure, but I still came away from his talk somehow not respecting the guy as much as I thought I would. My impression was that he cares a lot more about financial success and his personal image than he does making great work. Apparently Hayao Miyazaki rewatched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind decades after making it and he was on the verge of tears, saying "Its still not done!". I can't imagine Warren Spector ever caring about his work like that. And thats fine - he can have whatever values he wants. But his values aren't my values.
I totally stand by my comment about the level design getting more linear the further into the game you get. It has a great, ambitious promise of playing however you like and then it just didn’t really carry that promise through to completion. It seemed like they just didn’t have the budget or time to retrofit later levels once they figured out what made their game special and they just left it like that. It’s still a great game, which is what makes it such a pity it didn’t feel finished.
I don't see how. That game really wasn't a FPS; firefights didn't last long before you were crippled in some way and then killed. Your arsenal was nothing but pellet guns with varying DPS. Realistic difficulty lived up to its name; the game really discouraged violence and Gunther's fight could be avoided altogether with a killphrase. I think there's even one or two bosses you can simply run away from?
> I totally stand by my comment about the level design getting more linear the further into the game you get.
I distinctly remember this being a thing for Deus Ex 2 especially. IIRC it wasn't even the same developer and everyone hated it. The first few areas were cool and sandboxy but by the end of that game it was basically Duke Nukem On Ice.
This seems to go counter to modern practices, which is to not bother with content at all at the start, and to "find the fun" in a gray box level first.
Figure out a fun mechanic and build a game around it. He even had a talk where he discussed several game prototypes that had mechanics he initially thought could be fun, but after implementing weren’t great so moved on to different projects [0].
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Deus ex is sort of that way. In deus ex it is the conversation engine. It was the first thing they made and is really the mechanic around which the game is built.
https://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/developer/sid-meier/
> From a game design perspective, we established an iterative process in which we create a basic prototype that’s fun to play, even without exciting graphics and fully implemented features. We have a system, we play and then improve, then again we play and improve, but this is done throughout the development process. We keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t. This approach ensures that we remain focused on the gameplay experience every step of the way and deliver a fun game.
FWIW, Deus Ex was made during the unlimited time/unlimited budget years of ION Storm. The later games had various problems (often due to constraints of making them work on consoles) but the first Deus Ex is almost perfect
The ACMI interview is here for anyone curious: https://youtu.be/U2VEY5o6VQc
Are you sure you’re talking about the right guy?
And that’s fine, I just personally find games made like that a bit less interesting. I end up playing games like Factorio and Braid a lot more than games like Diablo 4.
I think that was the 3rd entry in franchise,not the first one?
Well, that's not the way he sees himself, from the article,
> People have appreciated the work my teams and I have done and have expressed it loudly and affectionately. I may or may not deserve accolades, but I've been lucky enough to receive them and I'm grateful for all the kind words and well-wishes I've received. Maybe it's just my ego, but what I consider to be my successes have nothing to do with reviews, sales or revenue. Success for me is connection with players (and not in the data-collecting way some of you may be thinking). I've had people send me handmade plush toys based on characters in my games. I've had people send me artwork they were inspired to create. I've had people tell me a game I worked on helped get them through chemotherapy. Autism. Cerebral palsy. I ran into a young woman at Disneyland dressed as Ortensia, in a homemade costume, before the character was a star in the Disney firmament. “I started my company because of your game,” I’ve been told. And “I changed the way I thought about design because of a game you worked on.” Now those are success criteria that have kept me going, even when things got tough.
What he seems to care about the most is that his work has an impact on the players in some way - which I think is the goal of many artists.
Forget his fans. Does he like his games? Does he play them? It’s hard to tell from that passage, just as it was hard to tell from the talk of his I saw all those years ago. I don’t know if that’s something he really cares about. In contrast, I don’t think Jonathan blow or Hayao Miyazaki really think about their fans much at all when they look back on their work. They both seem much more focused on their own direct relationship to what they’re making.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But personally I find artists who make art for themselves, according to their own aesthetic to be more fascinating people to follow. I loved Deus Ex. But games like The Witness or even Stardew Valley somehow feel like they have more soul in them. It’s an oblique criticism though. I have made neither kind of game.
As you said, he is a creator that makes games for his audience rather than himself. As he himself has stated multiple times that his games are to let players tell their own personal stories hence his emphasis on player freedom and letting players have unique (as possible) paths through the game - as opposed to to the “players must experience everything we created” philosophy.
That doesn’t mean his work has no “soul”, frankly it has multiple souls in them as they are the collaborative work of an entire team.
(When I am completely unprepared I will usually stage a series of accidents in the very dangerous Alpha Complex before they even get to the briefing room and players will come back for more)
'scool!
Gaming would be poorer without him.