I just read this interview with the Lost executive producers, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, and it’s got some pretty interesting comments in it that relate to some of my current thoughts about game design.
This first quote speaks to a concept Jonathan Blow and I talk about all the time when discussing game design and development, namely, bottom-up versus top-down game design, and listening to your game as you develop it and being able to react to what it’s telling you:
Lindelof: I think one of the most profound lessons I’ve learned over time as a show runner is that the more you listen to the show, the better your show.
I was struck that Lindelof used the exact same phrase when talking about developing Lost. I’m being a bit hyperbolic here, but I think there’s a general belief in the game industry that you can top-down design games, that if your design document is good enough, you can just type it in, that making a game becomes predictable, but I really don’t think this is true if you’re going for greatness. This is not to say you just start typing without any idea of what you’re going for, you definitely have to have aesthetic goals, but you need to have the freedom to listen to the game.
I also think this is why hybrid developers, like programmer-designers, and artist-designers, and artist-programmers are more effective, because the game speaks to you at many levels of detail and in many languages, and you’ll miss some of them if there’s a tin-can-and-string telephone between you and the game…sometimes late at night the game whispers something to the programmer about design or to the artist about programming, and he or she needs to be able to react to it.
This is also related to the rant I gave at GDC this year; you need more than a few days of development for your game to start saying important things to you.
The Lost guys also talk about how much they knew when they were creating the early episodes, and this relates to the ability to react to how the show itself is coming together:
Lindelof: We have to have the answers to the mysteries so that there is something to work towards, but what we don’t have are the stories. J.K. Rowling can sit down and say, here’s how Harry Potter’s parents were killed, and here’s who killed them, but how am I going to reveal that information to the audience in the most emotionally impactful way? So we know what we want to do, but we have very little idea of how and when we’re going to do it.
There’s a really great Bill Moyers interview with David Simon about The Wire that touches on this topic in a very similar way:
Simon: And, you know, I’m not suggesting we have everything planned to the nth degree. But we knew, for example when we wrote that scene in the beginning of the first season, that by the end of the run those three characters would have been treated as pawns in a chess game.
And we knew that character that cited what was ailing post-industrial America, he happened to be a union captain and one of the longshoreman. That he would be speaking to, at the time, what we were reacting to with Enron and things like– and WorldCom and the first sort of– first shots across our bow, economically. That people were trading crap and calling it gold. And that’s what THE WIRE was about. It was about that which is– has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is– has genuine meaning, being given low regard.
The part at the end of this also speaks to me, because I’m constantly thinking about how games can have deeper meaning. The talk I gave last year at the IGDA Leadership Forum asked,” Why are we making games?” It’s really clear, listening to these guys talk, that they have meaningful things they’re trying to say with their art.
Carroll: Do you still see that as the central issue, man of faith versus man of science?
Lindelof: The paradigm has shifted from that to, were we brought here for a very specific reason, and what is that reason?
They’re even thinking about how their audience is thinking about their work:
Lindelof: Locke is now the voice of a very large subset of the audience who believes that when Lost is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were making it up as we went along, and that there’s really no purpose.
I think games occasionally try to do some self-referential things like this, like the protagonist in Uncharted 2 saying things like “I’m so sick of climbing stuff”, but it’s happening at a much more surface level, and it’s not directly speaking through the interactivity, the way we need to be doing to come into our own as an art and entertainment form.
On the topic of actually answering questions, and making the meaning plain, they understand the perils:
Carroll: Is there a worry that there exists questions for which any possible answer is not as interesting as the question would be before you knew the answer?
Lindelof: Absolutely.
This is something Brian Moriarty has lectured on in the past. He’s a gifted presenter, and his lectures The Secret of Psalm 46 and Who Buried Paul? are master classes on the topic. J.J. Abrams gave a TED talk about his “mystery box”, which is a fine talk, but not as good as Moriarty’s.
Finally, I think this is something Jonathan did really well in Braid. Iroqouis Pliskin gave an excellent talk at GDC about his interpretation of the meaning behind Braid.
I’ll relate all of this back to SpyParty in a future post. Or maybe I won’t. :)
