Richard Lemarchand – ex-head of game design at Naughty Dog during the production of classics such as Jak 3 and the Uncharted franchise – presented a masterclass on game design at GCU, entitled ‘Infinity Play’.
As a strong advocate of experimental indie games and other creative endeavours, the aim of his talk was to encourage the making of infinite (or ‘open’) games and the utilisation of their mechanics. We were lucky enough to get a lovely little chat with him afterwards.
Having been a part of the AAA industry, do you think developers in that sector will ever have the freedom of expression that indie developers have? Ubisoft have recently announced that their teams can create low cost games without prior authorisation, will this have an effect? Even EA are taking chances with the likes of Unravel, which was possibly the most interesting of all their announcements at E3.
I do think that, at times, in the history of AAA games there has been a bit of a problem with creative people who work at studios not having quite enough control over their destinies in terms of the games they make. I’m a big believer that game design is an inexact science, you can have a pretty clear idea of some abstract properties of a new kind of game that you want to make but the details of that game aren’t really going to reveal themselves until you start making it, start implementing different game mechanics and trying stuff out in play tests and see what works and what doesn’t and so I think that, often, the best games result when game developers have freedom to pursue whatever it is that they are looking for in their game; often by following the fun of the game and it’s really exciting to see a studio like Ubisoft deliberately fostering that kind of independence and freedom among their developers.
It’s also very similar to the way Naughty Dog works, where we as individual developers at the studio would always be given a very large amount of creative freedom to explore what it was we were trying to make together and it’s something that is supported by Sony in their relationship with Naughty Dog. I think that it’s a very exciting trend to see and I think that it’s going to result in a lot of really cool, interesting games.
Do you think that the growth in popularity of VR technology will prompt more studios to give this same creative freedom, just to see what kind of new ideas will work with the new equipment?
Well certainly I think that for smart VR developers and publishers the freedom to explore and experiment is going to be crucially important. I think that, even though VR has been around for a long time, we’re still in the very early days of exploring what it means as an art form and what it can do and I feel quite sure, especially as new kinds of control interface emerge whether that is physical controllers or whether that might be biometric input that is supplied by something like a Kinect, we might see entirely new game genres that emerge as a result of it. If we don’t have the freedom to explore we may not discover the big smash hit VR games of the future.
With some very big names moving to Kickstarter to fund projects, will this trend continue and could the stage be set for a return to auteur game development?
I think you’re looking at a really interesting set of ideas and I can see things from both sides. On the one hand I know that video games, a lot like cinema before them, are a highly collaborative, highly technological art form in which very large numbers of people dozens, hundreds and on occasion even thousands have to figure out how to work together to realise a vision and that vision, in some sense, has to be shared by some, most or even all of those people.
On the other hand, I have always been very interested by the auteur theory; the French New Wave in which a very strong individualistic point of view creates an artwork that has a very fresh, new character. I’m a really big fan of film directors like Werner Herzog and David Lynch who put that into practice in the indie film world. I’m also a big fan of game creators like the Chinese Room, like Ed Key and David Kanaga who made Proteus, for creating a vision for an entirely new type of game but I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, you have to find a way of striking a balance of getting you’re unique vision, which might be yours alone as an individual or a result of collaboration with another person or a small group of people, and then working out how to get other people on board with that so you can do all the difficult things in order to create a contemporary video game.
In your talk you mentioned ‘emotional boundaries’ in experiential games. When exploring sensitive issues, in your opinion, should developers take more responsibility in their duty of care to the player? If you are familiar with Life is Strange, it had issues with throwing players into situations that may have caused undue stress.
I haven’t yet played Life is Strange but I’m familiar with the idea that you’re talking about. As a professor of game design I have had to think about content warnings and trigger warnings so as to not expose people to subject matter that they do not want to be unexpectedly exposed to. This idea has been very controversial and very polarising in the discussion of it during the last couple of years in the educational community and in online spaces and again I can see both sides of the coin.
I think that it can be taken too far but I agree that it’s very important to not surprise people with subject matter that might harm them, especially if they have been through some trauma themselves. I recommend, in my classes, that students do use content warnings and I see that not as a constraint to limit them but as a tool to liberate them so that they are then free to make work about any subject, no matter how difficult, and that they know they can bring it into class and show it but that they will, before showing it, warn their peers and me of what they are going to talk about in their work, allowing anyone who doesn’t want to experience it to leave the room.
Content warnings are a good idea and I’m sure that the creators of games and other kinds of artworks are going to continue to discover ways to warn people about what is in a particular experience without spoiling it for the player.
With these open and experiential games, do they necessarily have to be fun? One example that comes to mind was my time spent playing Papers Please as it wasn’t particularly joyful; it was at times harrowing and dealt with some fairly dark subject matter while still managing to be a worthwhile experience, of course.
I think that this is another very interesting subject. In the past I have often talked about the ‘tyranny of fun’. I feel that in the past, game designers have taken their games in certain directions that might not have been appropriate for what the game was trying to do, in pursuit of some conventional idea of what it means for a game to be fun. I actually think that it is good for us as game designers to really look at the concept of fun, to break it down, to try and understand what’s going on when we say, “I’m having fun, of course I’m having fun.” I believe that there several different kinds of fun and some of the things that we would recognise as fun, we wouldn’t necessarily think of when we think about having fun at a children’s party with balloons, cake and party games and all of the laughter that goes along with that.
I think that there are kinds of fun, like the kind of fun in Papers Please, which have more to do with engagement and attention and holding a player’s attention with interesting things to do that present ever greater challenges and ever deepening emotional responses on the part of the player that aren’t necessarily light or frivolous but reach into that same place that a really great novel or a really great film does, and that’s why I think that this is a really interesting question because I think that experiential games very often get to a place where they are less worried about having fun in a conventional way and more interested in how they can keep the player engaged and draw them into the experience of a world that is unlike anything they have ever seen before.
Finally, you were at Naughty Dog for some time, did they ever let you in on the secret location where Crash Bandicoot is buried?
I think that Crash Bandicoot is alive and well, living with the Vivendi Games folks. I entered Naughty Dog as a fan of all of their games, from Crash Bandicoot to Jak and Daxter, so I think that Crash is going to have a long and healthy life.
No office whisperings then?
I’m afraid my lips are sealed on that.
