Warren Spector's Soapbox Thread

[CyberP]

The game looks pretty cool. Why no player hand model though (holding the weapons)? You'd think since it is something you are seeing on the screen at all times it'd be a priority. I am aware it is only a school project but I can see this being very irritating when playing...unless the player character is meant to be a ghost or something.

"Hey, Warren, did you played Shenmue back in the days? This game provided experience and immersion similar to Deus Ex in some cases."

QTE: the game that featured a little bit more dynamic storytelling and interactivity than usual is comparable to Deus Ex? What is this guy on? QTE: The Game with those things is still QTE: The Game and therefore not even worthy of comparison.

 

[Crooked Bee]

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/WarrenSp...May_Not_Make_Games_But_They_Do_Make_Magic.php

Warren Spector ruminating on what makes a game.

Games like The Walking Dead certainly offer story, challenges, goals and solutions. Isn’t that enough to call them games and put all this seemingly nit-picky labeling behind us? Obviously, I don’t think so or I’d just stop right here and say “Oops. Never mind.” So what is it about Telltale’s work that makes it hard for me to say they’re games?

For starters, they basically have no mechanics (or when they do introduce simple mechanics — shooting while backing up stairs and such -- they seem out of place and unnecessary). There's no character progression to speak of. And there's no real player control of the minute-to-minute. That last point is key.

Without meaning to disparage anything or anyone in any way, I often describe the Telltale (or David Cage) approach as jamming several movie scripts together and, then, refining those scripts so they intertwine with one another to give the illusion of player choice, rather than the reality of it. [...] No matter how convincing the illusion is, I’m pretty sure no one at Telltale has ever been or will ever be surprised by any choice any player makes.

Funny how he feels he needs to pander to Telltale, though.

 

[J1M]

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/WarrenSp...May_Not_Make_Games_But_They_Do_Make_Magic.php

Warren Spector ruminating on what makes a game.

Games like The Walking Dead certainly offer story, challenges, goals and solutions. Isn’t that enough to call them games and put all this seemingly nit-picky labeling behind us? Obviously, I don’t think so or I’d just stop right here and say “Oops. Never mind.” So what is it about Telltale’s work that makes it hard for me to say they’re games?

For starters, they basically have no mechanics (or when they do introduce simple mechanics — shooting while backing up stairs and such -- they seem out of place and unnecessary). There's no character progression to speak of. And there's no real player control of the minute-to-minute. That last point is key.

Without meaning to disparage anything or anyone in any way, I often describe the Telltale (or David Cage) approach as jamming several movie scripts together and, then, refining those scripts so they intertwine with one another to give the illusion of player choice, rather than the reality of it. [...] No matter how convincing the illusion is, I’m pretty sure no one at Telltale has ever been or will ever be surprised by any choice any player makes.

Funny how he feels he needs to pander to Telltale, though.

Maybe he wants a job adding "real player choice" to their next licensed choose your own adventure film.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Maybe he wants a job adding "real player choice" to their next licensed choose your own adventure film.

Point is, the entire blog post is essentially anti-Telltale, but he feels like he needs to sugar-coat it to an unbearable degree. All because he's part of the industry himself, of course.

Anyway, new short post on player freedom and narrative: https://warrenspector.wordpress.com/

Lots of people – even game developers who specialize in narrative games – fall into a couple of common traps when they think about games and stories, and about the roles of players and developers in the telling of those stories.

First is that any series of events, with setup, complication, resolution and denouement constitutes a narrative, in any medium, linear or interactive. By the letter of the law, I suppose that’s correct. But before you plot out your magnum opus, I’d contend that the characteristics I just listed, must be in support of something – something deeper, a meta-narrative. There has to be a subtext (or, to be just a tad judgmental, you’re just making crap and you can stop wasting my time and yours).

Put another way, before you start crafting your magnum opus, make sure you have something to say. You’d think this would be self-evident, but I’m not sure it is, given the quality of most game stories. Frankly, for me, the statement I want to make is of paramount importance. Actually, that isn’t quite true. If I wanted to make a statement, I’d write a novel or make a movie. What’s of true importance to me is the issue I want players to grapple with.

Here’s the key for me when I think about game narrative as opposed to traditional narrative forms:

Linear media answer questions; games ask them and allow players to answer them.

Note that the word “interactivity” is nowhere to be found in this formulation of the defining characteristic of game narrative. That word is overused, ill-defined and really kind of useless. Think back to the narrative games you’ve played and see if you can identify the questions they ask you to answer… see if the game empowered you to answer them yourself, as opposed to just divining the answer the developer predetermined for you. It’s an interesting exercise.

Let me give you some examples from two games I worked on.

For me, Deus Ex is “about” four interrelated questions:

1. What happens when you take a guy who believes the world is black and white and throw him into a world that – like our own – is all shades of gray?
2. What would the world – our world, the real world – be like if every conspiracy theory people believed to be true were, in fact, true?
3. What’s the nature of humanity – at what point in the world of human augmentation do we stop being human and start being… something else?
4. What’s the most desirable “end state” for the world? Are we better off in a technological dark age in which people have genuine free will? Are we better off in a world where an all-seeing AI can gift us with total connectivity and, one hopes, the empathy that arises from universal connection, at the cost of giving up our freedom? Or are we simply better off as we are today (IF conspiracies are real), ruled by a shadowy elite, not knowing it, and going about our daily lives none the wiser?

Two things to note:

First, answering these questions doesn’t involve defeating anything or solving anything puzzly or being told anything by an author. Yes, you play a character named J.C. Denton and, yes, there’s an overarching plot that allows these questions to bubble up so players can interact with them. Yes, that’s true, but those questions can only be answered by YOU, the player, not by a PC puppet. At the end of the day, the character you play is of secondary and, basically, irrelevant in narrative terms.

Second, I don’t really care whether anyone knows the game is “about” your personal answer to those four questions. No author wants his/her/their themes expressed obviously and unsubtly. Frankly, I doubt most of the Deus Ex team even know what the game was about for me. All that mattered – to me – was that the game allowed players to answer those questions through their choices during play.

Another example. Disney Epic Mickey asked a few questions, too. Frankly, it pains me that a lot of players didn’t see how similar in intent and philosophy Epic Mickey was to the other games I’ve worked on, but that’s another story… Anyway,Epic Mickey asked a completely different set of questions than Deus Ex:

1. How important are family and friends to you?
2. Is it better to be less powerful, but have friends who will help you do what you need to do; or is it better to be more individually powerful, but alone in the world?
3. Is it better to do the easy thing to solve a local problem, when the fate of the entire world is in your hands; or is it better to do the hard thing in solving local problems, because the small things we do add up to far bigger things?

Again, players may not realize it, but they’re answering these questions through every step they take and through every interaction with the gameworld, with the characters and with the developer-generated situations they find themselves in.

Yes, even a cartoon mouse can be the vehicle for asking big questions…

I like the emphasis on the player and I do believe that Spector's heart is still in the right place. LOL about Epic Mickey though.

 

[buzz]

I'm just super happy because I realized from a quick glance that it's a whole load of bullshit so I don't have to read the text anymore

Imagine if Crooked Bee posted the title of this article though (A Narrative Fallacy: It's All About Aristotle), I would've achieved some world record on how fast I can drown-out Warren Spector's pretentious overcompensating voice.

 

[felipepepe]

He made a new one, now talking about how choices are overrated: https://warrenspector.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/another-narrative-fallacy-its-all-about-choice/

If there’s one thing that comes up in all discussions of game narrative, it’s the desirability of player choice.

Sometimes, if a game is built on a branching story structure, choices may be offered independent of game systems or mechanics. (See Telltale, Quantic Dream and others.)

Sometimes, in a game with a more open structure, choices may be expressed through a player’s interaction with simulation elements, systems and mechanics. (See Bethesda, Bioware and — finally… thankfully… – many more).

Happily, finally, everyone involved in games – especially narrative games – gets all that.

However, even with nearly everyone agreeing on the importance of choice as a defining characteristic of gameplay, there’s a trap waiting to ensnare the unwitting:

Simply put, games aren’t, and shouldn’t be, about choice.

To expand on that a bit, it’s important, I think, to get past two widely held beliefs:

First is the idea that choices are of paramount importance, in and of themselves, and by virtue of the nature of the medium.

Second is the idea that choice implies, even requires us to think in terms of, reward and punishment… better and worse… right and wrong… light and dark… good and evil.

I simply don’t get this kind of thinking. I don’t get the exclusive focus on choice. I don’t get the seeming obsession, in choice-driven games, with binary opposition.

Choice. Doesn’t. Matter.

Binary oppositions are boring.

Choices without consequences are meaningless. If they don’t lead to different outcomes – preferably radically different outcomes – what’s the point?

And games that encourage players to think in terms of right and wrong ultimately encourage players to, as I put it, “play the meter” – “Ooh, I’m evil and now I have horns and a bunch of demon tattoos!” or “Ooh, I’m good – see? I have angel wings and a halo.” It’s just ridiculous.

“But wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Aren’t you one of the guys who’s been screaming about player choice for a couple of decades?”

No. I’m not. If you look closely at what I’ve been saying, choice isn’t the be all, end all. Not at all. And it isn’t the key to what some of us have been calling “shared authorship” all these years.

So what the hell have I been screaming about?

Here it is: The interesting aspect of player choice isn’t the choice itself. The interesting thing – the only interesting thing, really – is the revelation of consequences. Choice without consequence is a waste of time, effort and money.

But wait, you say. Doesn’t the word “consequence” imply punishment, which sends us right back to better/worse, good/evil, right/wrong? Doesn’t consequence require designers to impose a value judgment and maybe even provide a good/evil meter so players know where they stand?

Not at all.

One of the hard and fast rules I lay out for my teams is “Never judge the player.” Never. Players should never know what you think about a question or its answer. (See, this is where last week’s blog post about about questions comes in.) You’re not there to answer the questions your game asks players to consider. You’re most assuredly not there, I tell my designers, to say to players “this is right and that is wrong.” Designers exist to provide opportunities for players to test behaviors and then see the consequences of those behaviors. Given the chance, players will judge for themselves whether the benefits gained by making a particular choice were worth the cost of making it.

It may just be me, but in my experience, there are few, if any, questions or situations that lend themselves to clearly defined, universally agreed upon right or wrong answers or solutions. In most real world cases, there are only shades of gray. Even if you disagree (as extremists and believers of all stripes might) I’m comfortable saying that the most interesting situations are the ones where right and wrong are not readily apparent. I don’t understand why more game developers don’t acknowledge that and revel in our medium’s unique ability to reflect the wondrous, complex lack of clarity of the world in which we live.

FULL CIRCLE

Okay, so let me try to bring the two parts of this trip down narrative lane full circle. Let me close by saying this about questions, choices and the nature of game narrative:

A successful game narrative isn’t one that tells a great story (though that’s obviously desirable!).
A successful game narrative is one that asks questions.
A successful game narrative gives players the tools to answer those questions both locally (in the moment) and globally (in how the entire story plays out).
A successful game narrative is one that shows shows players the consequences of their local and global decisions, without judging players for making those decisions.

There are only shades of gray and, that being the case, all decisions have costs as well as benefits. There is no absolute right or absolute wrong. (And, yes, I’m a moral relativist at heart…) Even if you disagree, games that reflect that will get players thinking in ways no other medium can match.

A successful game narrative is one that engenders conversations not only about how each player solved a game problem, but also why. Most of the dialogue we hear around games is about optimal strategies or about how moving a cutscene was. How limited and dull that is.

What I want – and hope you want – is to hear players debating the rightness or wrongness of their decisions. I want to hear one player say, “How could you have stolen that?” and another player describing her thought process… I want to hear one player ask, “Why did you leave that guy alive after what he did?” and another make a case for Ghandi-like pacifism… I want to hear players who reach an endgame driven by their choices ask one another, “How could you think that solution was appropriate or right or ethical?”

“Appropriate,” “right” and “ethical” are magic words. Other media can make the claim that they deal with those concepts, too – and they do – but in those media, the words belong to authors while in games, those words can and should belong to players.

Wrap your mind around all this, and we’re on our way to realizing the potential of games as a unique narrative form. Clearly, we owe something to earlier narrative models, but we can and must build on their teachings, maybe even leave those teachings behind to create something more collaborative, more moving and more compelling than any other medium can be.

Embracing choice means we’re halfway there. What do you say we go the rest of the way?

It's most a "BioWarian Good/Evil choices are silly" rant, but it reads like he had a good idea in his head, but couldn't transcribe it to paper well...

 

[Crooked Bee]

Yeah, it's a bit of a mess.

 

[J1M]

He made a new one, now talking about how choices are overrated: https://warrenspector.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/another-narrative-fallacy-its-all-about-choice/


It's most a "BioWarian Good/Evil choices are silly" rant, but it reads like he had a good idea in his head, but couldn't transcribe it to paper well...

Fixed.

 

[Infinitron]

It kind of sounds like he's trying to say what MrBTongue said on Youtube a couple years back. Which was itself not transcribed that well. I guess it's a hard thing to conceptualize.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I don't think it's that hard to conceptualize, at least not if you want to express some fairly basic things about C&C that Warren Spector's blog post seems to be about. Warren's post comes off as such a conceptual mess solely because he doesn't care to draw even the most basic of distinctions before he begins his analysis.

I think it's just a rush job, pure and simple.

 

[buzz]

The article is a conceptual mess because the writer is a motherfucking genuine hack.

Seriously, I have no idea why you (or I) are even following this thread and the person associated with it. Who gives a shit about Warren fucking Spector? All can he do is post an occasional irrelevant bullshit article where he tries to be all smug and scholarly while either not getting the full picture, or talking about some uber-simplistic shit that the Internet has covered far too many times already.


OH FUCK, Choices should have consequences, and should strive being more than binary bad/right choices? THANKS WARREN, WE DIDN'T SAY WE WANT THAT IN THE LAST FUCKING DECADE OF GAMING.

Seriously, the fucker is giving you Fable, an 11 years old game, as an example of the "trend". That's how out of fucking touch he is with video games.

I mean, take this:

Sometimes, in a game with a more open structure, choices may be expressed through a player’s interaction with simulation elements, systems and mechanics. (See Bethesda, Bioware and — finally… thankfully… – many more).

since when is Bioware associated with open structures and gameplay-related choices?



It's a "fascinating" insight provided by a frozen caveman who still believes himself to live in 2001/2002. Deus Ex had recently been made and his discussions about narrative and choices sounds edgy and interesting. Or at least that seems to be going in his head.


I just don't understand how can you people give Warren Spector your undivided attention. How can you not imagine Warren masturbating furiously while re-reading his articles or how can you not see his desperate attempts at relevance by posting meaningless, incoherent messes or blog-posts that mean nothing to any rational human being?


At the very least, I'd look at his team of academics and the game they did. Did anyone even play that? The trailer has like 1000 views, no one gives a shit. I swear, here we have to closest thing to a new Warren Spector game and no one is even touching it, because no one probably gives a shit deep down about this guy's opinions and/or life.

Seriously guys, if you want brofists, I'll give you all of mine. Stop pestering me with articles where this moron self-fellates and leave the thread to exist for that glorious moment when someone will report on Warren Spector's eventual suicide. That's really all I want from him.

 

[Ninjerk]

"Warren Spector's Soapbox Thread"

 

[buzz]

At least in the past it used to create discussions and people trying to defend his points.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamestm.co.uk/interviews/15-years-of-deus-ex-with-warren-spector/

15 years of Deus Ex with Warren Spector
The innovation that Deus Ex brought with it 15 years ago permeates through the industry to this day, a fact that director/producer Warren Spector can hardly believe…

YOU HAD WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT WITH DEUS EX, WHAT DROVE THIS AMBITION?
The reason I wanted to make Troubleshooter and, later, Deus Ex, was because I was sick to death of space marines and knights in armour, super soldiers, orcs, elves. I just felt stifled by sci-fi and fantasy, which dominated roleplaying and first-person shooters at the time. I felt like I’d scream if I had to make another game like that. So I set out to make the “real-world roleplaying game”.

WHAT WERE SOME OF THE CORE DESIGN DECISIONS YOU DECIDED ON FOR DEUS EX?
There were three core fictional tenets that survived from day one. 1) What happens when you have a guy who believes in good and evil and throw him into a world that’s all shades of gray? 2) What would the world be like if every conspiracy people believe to be true is in fact true? 3) And what does it mean to be human (and what does that say about how the world should relate to machines)? I think all of those are pretty well expressed. In addition, there was one core gameplay tenet that never changed: what if players could solve problems however they wanted to and see the consequences? Could we share authorship with players in the telling a story where no two players have the same experience? I think we did a pretty good job of that, too.

THE SETTING WAS ONE OF THE STAND-OUT FEATURES; WHAT WAS THAT DESIGN PROCESS LIKE?
The initial impetus was mine (the world of conspiracies) but the world itself was a team effort. I remember having long discussions with designers like Steve Powers and Kraig Count early on. And later, guys like Harvey Smith and Bob White came along and contributed a bunch. And, of course, Sheldon Pacotti, our lead writer contributed a ton to the setting. Obviously, we were influenced by the movie Blade Runner. But we were also totally into the pre-millennial madness of conspiracy theories. You wouldn’t believe some of the things people believe! And, finally, there was a real commitment to making the game as realistic as possible. I got blueprints for the Statue of Liberty… took a bunch of reference photos of the catacombs in Paris. Everything was as realistic as possible. I even got maps of the layout of Area 51!

WERE THERE MANY CHANGES TO THE SETTING AND TONE THROUGHOUT DEVELOPMENT?
Well, we were originally going to set a mission in the White House. And there were some missions set in the space between the Mexican border and Austin, TX. And we knew what was happening in China and Africa and even the asteroid belt. None of that made it into the game. The tone of the game was the work of everyone on the team kind of rallying behind the Blade Runner look and feel. Total cliché now but I like to think we were there before it became cliché! The team really committed to that and nailed it, I think.

YOU WANTED TO MAKE A GAME THAT PLAYED DIFFERENTLY TO ANYTHING ELSE; WHAT WAS THE PROCESS OF DESIGNING SOMETHING SO PURPOSEFULLY INNOVATIVE?
I mean, it’s not like we were the first RPG, or the first FPS, or the first stealth game. We just wanted to be the first game to combine all three genres into one package. And we were committed to the idea of choice and consequence, of letting players tell their own minute-to-minute story in the context of a narrative arc created by us, the developers. Very few developers were doing that back then. Put that together and you have something we all recognised would be new and fresh and, yes, innovative.

SO HOW DID THE COMBINATION OF RPG AND FPS MECHANICS COME ABOUT?
I think that combination was a direct result of working at Origin and Looking Glass. I mean, Underworld kind of did something similar. And System Shock. And Thief. We just took the RPG aspects further. At some level, you could say that’s all we did. Man, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so innovative, does it. I should shut up now!

WITH COMPLETE FREEDOM OF PLAYER CONTROL SO NOVEL AT THE TIME, WHAT KIND OF NEW CHALLENGES DID YOU ENCOUNTER IMPLEMENTING THE FEATURE?
Freedom over how you tackle a situation was the core part of the game’s design. At some level, nothing else mattered, at least not to me. Deus Ex may be the clearest example, but every game I’ve worked on has been an attempt to empower players to direct their own experience. Did player choice impact the way environments and missions were designed? Oh, man, yes. I used to tell interviewees that what we did at Ion Storm was harder than anything they’d ever done before – it’s tough to put your creativity on the back burner so players can express their creativity. Most potential hires thought I was nuts. I got used to seeing that knowing, indulgent nod that said, “Sure, what you do is harder… whatever”. The ones who got hired often came back to me later and said “You were right!” To get some real insight into this, talk to some of the designers on the team and they’ll tell you just how hard it was!

WERE THESE CHOICES DIFFICULT TO IMPLEMENT?
A lot of people think Deus Ex is a game about choices. It is, sort of, but the important bit isn’t the choices, it’s the consequences of those choices. The game had to notice what you were doing and respond appropriately. If you’re not showing the consequences, choices are irrelevant. If the choices don’t matter, you might as well not go to the trouble of offering them. That’s just a waste of time and money. There are dozens of challenges associated with choice and consequence gameplay, not least of which is containing what could very easily turn into a traditional branching narrative. We did not want to do that, so we structured the game in a way that constrained the problem. Basically, Deus Ex is a completely linear storyline but the story is told by traversing a series of self-contained sandboxes. Within a given story element, or sandbox, all we needed to know was where the player started and where the player ended – which we determined. How they got where we needed them to go was up to them.

THE GAME’S STORY WAS HEAVILY PRAISED AT THE TIME. HOW WAS IT GUIDED DURING DEVELOPMENT?
Several of us worked on the original story. I sort of took over after a while and took all the elements we’d come up with and put them together into a completely unimplementable kitchen sink of ideas. Two things happened to fix that: first, Harvey Smith, the lead designer, and Steve Powers, one of my favourite designers on the planet, came to me and said, “Warren, we can’t tell this story.” They took me out to lunch and laid out a smaller, more constrained, more do-able version, which is pretty much what we built.

The second thing that happened was I found Sheldon Pacotti, who became our lead writer – and for much of the game’s development, our only writer. Much of the game’s thematic depth and what people think of as the story’s “intelligence” came right out of his imagination. We all contributed, but the game would have been radically different without Sheldon’s contributions. A real unsung hero. The weird thing was he had carpal tunnel syndrome so we got Dragon Naturally Speaking [voice recognition software] and he spoke all the dialogue and books and such in the game. It was entertaining walking by his office sometimes!

AND HOW ABOUT THE MUSIC? HOW DID THE TEAM SETTLE ON WHAT WOULD FIT THE GAME’S STYLE?
I don’t know what more I can say beyond the fact that Alexander Brandon did a great job on the music and sound. He created the distinctive Deus Ex ‘sound’. One of the things I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution did right was capturing that sound. I was pretty psyched about that. One other thing, audio-wise: not a lot of people remember that there were three or four tunes written by Reeves Gabrels – a guitar god who used to play with David Bowie. One of the big thrills for me on Deus Ex was getting to hang out with him at his New York studio. I even got a guitar from him – a bubblegum pink ‘57 Les Paul Junior! Of course, Alex had to take those tunes and get them working with the Deus Ex audio system, so his fingerprints are all over Reeves’ stuff, too.

WHAT SORTS OF PROBLEMS DID YOU ENCOUNTER DURING DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU DIDN’T ANTICIPATE?
It might be better to ask what problems we didn’t encounter during development! I made mistakes in team structure, for sure. There were running issues with the folks paying the bills about why we weren’t “just making a shooter”. There were game systems and story elements I came up with that the team and testers had to tell me were unimplementable or just plain bad. I wanted everything in the game and the team had to talk me down from some pretty crazy stuff a few times. And despite that, the game was so ambitious and we were doing so many things no one had ever done before, it was just plain nuts. How did we handle things? I changed the team structure; the team beat me into submission; we worked really hard… it was game development, you know?

LOOKING BACK, IS THERE ANYTHING THAT YOU WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY?
You know, I don’t really think I’d change anything (as long as there are the same technical limitations in the equation!). The game was of its time, technically, and in terms of its UI and its graphics. And, though every detail changed – thanks to a team that was way smarter than I was – the game played pretty much exactly the way I imagined and hoped it would when I first started thinking about it in 1994, long before we shipped.

DID YOU GET A SENSE THAT DEUS EX WAS DESTINED TO BE THE SUCCESS IT WAS, PRIOR TO ITS RELEASE?
Yes and no. I mean, the positive response we got – from testers, folks at trade shows, journalists – gave us some hope. But I remember sitting at my desk when we gold mastered, putting my head in my hands on my desk thinking to myself, “If people compare our combat to Half-Life, we’re dead; if people compare our stealth to Thief, we’re dead; if people compare our role-playing elements to what BioWare does, we’re dead. But if people get that they can do anything they want, we’re going to rule the world.” Things worked out okay.

 

[buzz]

you fucking spambot

 

[Crooked Bee]

So Warren Spector played Deus Ex with Dan Hindes and some other guy at PAX Australia recently:

 

[Abhay]

Warren Spector spent 10 years playing
Dungeons & Dragons with science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who was a brilliantly improvisational Dungeon Master. The players were free to do whatever they wanted, an experience so powerful that Spector spent decades trying to recreate it on a computer. He got his start working alongside visionary game designers Richard Garriottand Chris Robertsat Origin.

“There was this real sense—it was tangible, you could feel it—that we were going to change the world,” Spector says in Episode 193 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxypodcast. “And that is a pretty powerful thing to believe.”
Spector didn’t care for the Dungeons & Dragons computer games, which focused almost exclusively on combat. Instead he was drawn to Garriott’s Ultimaseries, with its focus on character and story.

"He wasn’t just making what we called ‘Monty Haul’ dungeons,” Spector says, “where you would break down a door, fight the monster in the room, grab the treasure, and then break down the next door and fight the next monster and grab the next treasure. He was really telling stories that were about something."

In recent years Spector, Garriott, and Roberts all drifted away from game design, wary of the restrictions imposed by an increasingly large and corporate game industry. But the advent of crowdfunding allowed them to return to the field with projects like Underworld Ascendant, Shroud of the Avatar, and Star Citizen. Spector warns that
crowdfunding is no panacea, but he says it does present options for game designers.

"We're seeing variety in games now that we haven’t seen in decades,” he says. “So it’s a pretty exciting time.”
He hopes more game designers will focus on creating characters who can respond intelligently to anything that players say, which is the only way that video games will ever be able to replicate the experience of a tabletop RPG.
“I have confidence that we’ll get there,” he says. “Someone’s going to figure out how to do—not perfect characters—but
emotionally compelling characters that can contribute to a player’s story instead of a writer’s story."

Warren Spector on cyberpunk:

"Guys like William Gibsonand a bunch of the other cyberpunk writers would come to town. Austin was a pretty happening place in the cyberpunk science fiction scene at that time, in the late ’70s, early
’80s. So it was a pretty cool time to be here. … There was this real sense that—they certainly felt it, and all of us around certainly felt it, that they were changing the world. They were rebellious and fighting against the orthodoxy of science fiction. I don’t know if they ever put it in these terms, but I certainly thought, ‘Hey, they’re out there to destroy the Asimovs and Heinleins of the world, and show the world of science fiction that there was a new sheriff in town.’ And I think they pretty much succeeded at that"

Warren Spector on Origin"

"One of the most important lessons I
learned from [Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts] when I first started working at Origin was the power of a clear, compelling vision. … They always have a vision, and they are uncompromising in the realization of that vision. … There was some magic to being part of Origin, and one of my minor regrets is—when I was working there, I think I was the 26th person hired by the company, and I really thought I was going to retire from Origin and get a gold watch and all that. And that’s just not the way this business works. … But it was a very special place, there’s no doubt. And the fact that it was a special place helped us create special games."

Warren Spector on dialogue:

"It's very easy for us to simulate the pulling of a virtual trigger, and it’s very, very hard for us to simulate a conversation. I defy anybody to show me a conversation system in a game today that isn’t identical to the conversation systems that Richard Garriott was using in the ’80s. The big innovation in conversation systems now is that there’s a timer on your choice on the branching tree. And I just don’t think that’s good enough. But again, if I knew how to solve that problem I would. I’m not disparaging everybody in the game business. What I am saying is, I wish we
would spend a little bit less time on combat AI and a little bit more on non-combat AI—on creating characters you can bond with on an emotional level."

Warren Spector on game design:

"I actually have a mission statement that I’ve carried with me for the last 15 years, from one studio to another, that’s all about player empowerment, and players telling their own story, and sharing authorship with players. I’ve got a 12-page version that no one would read, and an eight-page version that no one would read, and a four-page version that no one would read, and a two-page
version that no one would read, and a one-page, and a paragraph. Finally I got so sick and tired of [no one reading it] that I boiled it down to two words: playstyle matters. How the player decides to interact with your game and your game world is the only thing that matters, and the world should notice and respond appropriately to that".

Source

 

[Old Hans]

yea man, it's like totally the combat AI that makes all the games lame. How about the fact devs are obsessed with every line of dialog being voice acted, which limits EVERYTHING.

"well we cant change it, Ted Danson already recorded the dialog"

 

[Infinitron]

Kinda crappy web design on that site. The actual podcast looks like an interstitial ad at first glance.

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect...ontent/uploads/2016/03/geeksguide193final.mp3

 

[Dorateen]

Spector didn’t care for the Dungeons & Dragons computer games

Who is Spector, and why should I care.

 

[Lyric Suite]

A producer who gets credit for design work he didn't do.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

A producer who gets credit for design work he didn't do.

You mean Ken Levine.

 

[Lyric Suite]

No i mean Warren Spector. Kudos to him for supporting Looking Glass when nobody believed in them and the fact he went out of his way to support such innovative projects is great. But is that enough to make him an authority in game design? Maybe the reason he keeps failing is that people are expecting too much from him.

 

[Immortal]

A producer who gets credit for design work he didn't do.

You mean Ken Levine.