Will Wright

Untapped Talent

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First a confession. Last night I watched Project Runway. Girlfriends often force you into doing things you wouldn’t normally do (like shower) and this was no exception. I don’t like fashion and it doesn’t like me so we stay 50 yards apart at all times. I could go on and on about the lush tapestries and… nevermind, I’ve already run out of words to describe fashion, but I do have a point in all of this. A designer was dismissed because he didn’t do a great job sewing the garment he designed.

Who cares if he can’t sew, if his designs are good then he will have a team or sewers, or better yet, a sweat shop. To penalize and dismiss him from the field for something as trivial as sewing ability is to only deprive the fashion world of his talent. →  One must imagine video games happy.

Idol Worship: Bo and Ippo

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An extension of the Best Game Ever column, this new space allows me to not just love and gush over my favorite games, but caress and manhandle some of the people who made my favorite games. An obvious first choice would be someone like Shigeru Miyamoto, Yuji Naka, Sid Meier, or Will Wright, but that wouldn’t be very exciting and where’s the elitism and snobbery in picking someone everyone already knows? Their days may still yet come in the pages of Idol Worship, but for now we will examine two little known composers who worked for Sega in their golden age, Tokuhiko Uwabo and Izuho Takeuchi, better known as Bo and Ippo (well, to me at least).

Sega, like Atari, refused to give credit to their staff well into the 90’s. →  Ratchet & Read

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Shortcomings of the Emerging Plot

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Will Wright bores an audience at the Game Developers Conference.

We have probably all heard the complaint that a game felt like a movie instead of a video game. Echoing this sentiment, a handful of successful developers (Will Wright, for example) has criticized traditional linear story telling in games. Randy Smith, in an interview in “Game Creation and Careers,” describes the difference between embedded narrative and emergent narrative. In the first Thief game, for example, Looking Glass wrote an overarching plot that was presented to the player by cut scenes. This immutable narrative is the embedded part of the story. The emergent narrative is the low level plot, the specifics of what happens throughout each individual mission. By presenting the player with game mechanics that allow him to overcome challenges in multiple ways, Smith argues he is allowing the player to, on some level, write his own story. →  OutRun 2006: Post to Post