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Warren Spector's Soapbox Thread

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014
Spector will be talking about Making of Deus Ex at Bubonicon 48, a New Mexico SF&F convention: https://bubonicon.com/

vme4Esn.png


Looks like he is accompanied by his wife and sci-fi writer Caroline Spector.
 

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Spector did a don't die interview: http://www.nodontdie.com/warren-spector/

He talked about his career, status of videogame as a medium, secrecy of the industry, how game developers being less attractive than movie stars affecting that, lack of innovation in gaming, how much he hating games as a service, thoughts about Bethesda games, how his career is about re-creating his D&D experience in 1978 (yeah, you hear this again), C&C, individual creativity and team management in modern AAA teams, no sense of history in the industry, and why game industry is still in the studio system.

The interview was done in November or December last year, so no mention of Otherside Austin or System Shock 3.

I quote the part about Fallout 4, the D&D experience and C&C:

Yeah. It sorta struck me -- I don't know how up you are on current big-budget games, but what has struck me as odd is just how similar, for example, Fallout 4 and Metal Gear Solid 5when they're both series sort of the same age and they could not have started out any more different.

I haven't played either of them yet, but based on what I've heard, it sounds likeFallout 4 is an expanded better version of what Bethesda's been doing for a while. And there's nothing wrong with that. I respect the kind of games they make. I mean, they're much more like the kinds of games that I like making than most other developers. And what I've heard about Metal Gear Solid V is that it's moving in a direction that I find really exciting of player empowerment and players telling their own story, being a little less puzzle-oriented and a little more problem-oriented. I mean, those are all good things and I'm excited to play Metal Gear Solid V in a way that I haven't been much excited about playing some earlier entries in that series.

One of the other things about Fallout 4, and this is revealed within the first hour, so it's not a spoiler --

I'm not worried about it.

[Laughs.] You're playing as a parent who is going to go kidnap your kidnapped child, but --

Wait, it's a "rescue the princess" game? I've never played one of those before.

[Laughs.] But imagine you wake up in the dystopia 200 years after a cryogenic sleep and the lastthing you decide to do is to rescue your child. You want to go off and do all these other things and collect tin cans and garbage in buildings. I don't think it's intentionally making a comment about parenting.

I hope they are because one of the things I tell my students and one of the things I do when I'm conceptualizing a game is I have a rule: Always ask what your game is really about. If all it's about is what's happening on the surface, I kind of think that's a waste of time.

Games can have thematic power and they can explore things that are beneath the surface. They can have subtext. The big difference for me between the treatment of theme and subtext in games and in other media is other media answer the questions they ask, and games allow players to answer the questions. Right?Disney Epic Mickey was about: How important are family and friends to you? And we let players explore that question and answer it for themselves. In Deus Ex -- by the way, there were three or four questions that I wanted players thinking about even subconsciously as they played Epic Mickey. Same thing for Deus Ex, but Deus Ex, one of those questions was, "What does it mean to be human?" You know? But you don't answer it. Games are a dialog between the developer and the player and that dialog is really interesting to me.

And so I hope that Fallout 4 really is a game about parenting. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.]

But the thing about Bethesda games that's really fantastic is they create these big open worlds and they let each player decide what's fun and what's not and what experience they wanna have. I mean, I find that really exciting. You don't have to care about the story in Fallout 4, I suspect, and you can still have a great time playing the game. I mean, I think that's a plus, not a minus.

Yeah, you just wouldn't be a great parent, is all.

Well, but that says something. I mean, if what they want to do is explore what is good parenting, then maybe you're really thinking about that as you play anyway.

I don't want to fixate on Fallout 4 too much, but given your board-game background -- they make these big, expansive worlds but then I at least feel this often in open-world games where I don't actually feel like I'm part of the world. Like,Fallout 4 does stuff where the way that they acknowledge you is they'll comment on your gender or the armor that you're wearing.

But when I was growing up playing D&D, that was never the most exciting thing or what made me feel like I was part of that world. Why is that so difficult for videogames to be able to do that in the way that a board game or a human storyteller might?


Well, it's because we don't have a virtual dungeon master. I should just give you my narrative in games talk. The problem is our non-combat AI is terrible and our conversation systems haven't made any progress since 1987 and our simulations of the world are constrained to the physical and not-so human interaction. And, you know, because human dungeon masters can adjust the game and the narrative to what the players say they're interested in through their virtual actions. And we can't do that. All we can do is respond to very simple things. And it'd be nice if someone really tried that problem but, dude, you haveno idea how hard it is to create a virtual dungeon master. If anybody knew how to do it, I suspect they'd do it.

So, it's just a really hard problem. I mean, that's why you don't see games responding more to different kinds of actions. But having said that, and not to pat myself on the back, but my teams have actually made an effort to deal with that problem. You know, in Deus Ex, you know, the response to your gender was, "Hey, you shouldn't have gone in the woman's bathroom." Which just, frankly, shows that the world is noticing what you're doing and responding to it. But we're constantly feeding back to the impact of your actions on a minute-to-minute basis. That's really fascinating to me, having the world notice what the player is doing and feed back a reasonable response to each player's choices. That's not just responding to gender and the damage you did. You know, "Hey, you shouldn't have killed those guys. There must have been another way to solve the problem." Or, "Good. All those terrorists deserved to be shot. That's the only way to deal with them." And then really giving the player the power to solve whatever problem you throw at them the way they want to and the world responding appropriately.

I mean, that's the only thing I try to do. I've said this before: My entire career -- this is pathetic, by the way -- but my entire career has been trying to recreate the feeling I had in 1978 when I played D&D for the first time and realized that I was telling a story with my friends. That we were all the storytellers. It wasn't just an author or director telling us a story and telling us, "Here's what I think about the world. What do you think?" It was us telling the story and telling the story of what we thought about the world. That's the power of games and I don't we're exploiting them.

Bonus: the interviewer revealing an astonishing fact about a young game academy student:

I've done some teaching in a couple of game academia programs as well, and I've run into this a little bit -- and I see this not only in academia but there is a poor sense of history about games. I think I've seen it said elsewhere that a lot of people coming up as a developer now are sort of not even aware of games that came out before the year 2000. I had a student who once thought Sonic the Hedgehog came out in 1945.
 

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https://www.facebook.com/warren.spector/posts/10210748508531706

Warren Spector

For years, people have asked me what I'd do if I were to make another Deus Ex game. I've always said I'd emphasize the military and terrorist aspects of human augmentation. I've said I'd downplay the conspiracy angle because it seemed so specific to the end of the last century. Now I'm not so sure. Conspiracy theories abound in this year's election season, with the media fueling the fire of wackiness. Maybe it's time for another conspiracy game...
 
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J1M

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https://www.facebook.com/warren.spector/posts/10210748508531706

Warren Spector

For years, people have asked me what I'd do if I were to make another Deus Ex game. I've always said I'd emphasize the military and terrorist aspects of human augmentation. I've said I'd downplay the conspiracy angle because it seemed so specific to the end of the last century. Now I'm not so sure. Conspiracy theories abound in this year's election season, with the media fueling the fire of wackiness. Maybe it's time for another conspiracy game...
It's cute how Warren goes out of his way these days to highlight just how much of his past success was from riding the coattails of others.
 

LESS T_T

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Report and record of Spector's talk: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...ldnt-care-less-about-maximising-profitability

Warren Spector: "I couldn't care less about maximising profitability"
OtherSide's resident genius gives his 4 criteria for success at Sweden Game Conference

If you're trying to condense a thirty year game career which has spanned Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock and Deus Ex into a thirty minute talk, you've got to be prepared to be blunt and honest, and Warren Spector is happy to be both. However, the veteran designer actually prefaced that headline quote with "Don't tell any publishers," so some of you should probably forget you ever read it. For the rest of us, there are some fascinating lessons to learn from the Deus Ex creator's year-a-minute presentation.

Spector was speaking at Sweden Game Conference in Skovde last week, as organised by Sweden Game Arena. Never one to filter himself too strenuously, Spector opened his talk with a strong message - sales do not necessarily mean success. But they might.

"When you make a game, you have to have a purpose, you have to have a reason to make the game you're making," Spector began. "There are lots of games which can be made. Why are you making this one? Why should your players care about what you're doing? Why should your team care? Only when you can answer questions about conflict and outcome and caring, only then can you define success.

"You need to know what you're doing, how you're going to do it, but you also need to know how you're going to know when you've done it well. You need a definition of success. Developers define success in different ways. Some value sales, revenue and profit. Don't tell any publishers, but I couldn't care less about that. My only obligation to a publisher is to sell one more copy of a game than is necessary for them to fund my next game. I couldn't care less about maximising profitability.

"For some people it's about pride, your team feeling like you've done something really great. That's a successful project. Some make games for the ego gratification or validation which comes from critical acclaim, recognition from outsiders that you'd done a good job. Some people define success by how fun a game is. I think fun is a useless word. I don't allow people to use it in my studio. It's meaningless and doesn't help anyone to make a game."

For Spector, it's none of those things, although he accepts that he enjoys the pleasures they all bring. Instead, his criteria for success is fourfold.

"The first is player power," he explained. " Are you epowering players to tell a new story in collaboration? Next, have I delivered one thing in the game that nobody has ever seen or done before? Thirdly, have I allowed the player to see the world through the eyes of someone different to themselves - have I let them walk in someone else's shoes? And have I made a game about something beyond what's on the surface? Have I made them think? These are the four things which define success for me."

That first point, telling a story in collaboration with a player, is something so unique to games that the medium has a "moral obligation" to fulfil its potential, says Spector. It's a theme he's tried to thread into every game he's ever made, encouraging players to see their choices as a part of the ongoing narrative of the experience, having a tangible effect on the outcome. It all began, he says, with a game of Dungeons and Dragons over 40 years ago. It probably helped that he had Bruce Sterling, one of the leading lights of modern science fiction, as his DM...

"He was a great storyteller," Spector says of Sterling, "but what made that experience special wasn't being told a story by Bruce, it was that my friends and I were telling a story with him. We had to use our wits to overcome the obstacles Bruce threw at us. It was like a great band, working together to create something none of us could do alone. If I told you how that campaign ended, I'd be crying on stage. My entire professional life has been about recreating that feeling I had playing D&D in 1978."

Spector was similarly bold in his presentation of the second criteria - that of innovating. If you're not breaking new ground in some way, he believes, you should probably find yourself a new career.

"Frankly if you're just copying other people's work, why bother? First of all, it's boring for developers, but games have been around for, what, 40 years? We're still a young medium. If you think games are a solved problem, you need to think harder. If you look at mainstream AAA games today, you'll see a lot of games that look and feel like each other. A lot of games that look like old games with prettier pictures. We're too young to assume we know everything."

Spector illustrated his third criteria, that of giving the player a new perspective, with an example from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who penned a thought experiment on vampirism. How, says Brooks, can a human ever decide whether they want to be a vampire? Sure, there's the immortality, the superhuman strength, the power to mesmerise and enthral, not to mention the sudden leap in sartorial elegance, but once you actually become a vampire, you'll be someone else entirely - how is the you now supposed to judge what that person would want?

Essentially, Brooks is saying that a shift in personality that big, to truly be in someone else's shoes, is so alien as to be impossible. Spector agrees that it's incredibly difficult, and admits that he's always struggled, but believes that games are the best medium to try and achieve it.

"Frankly I don't think I've ever come close to succeeding in this, but I'm committed to trying. Failing at this every time so far is part of the reason that I subject myself to the hell that is game development. You know there are great joys in development, but there's also great pain.

"I don't know if David Brooks plays games, but if he did then he'd know we've already provided an answer for this. Games offer the opportunity for players to try out behaviours which we wouldn't want them trying in real life. You don't just watch someone else, you become someone else when you're playing. No other medium can let you experience life choices and the consequences of their actions."

Finally, Spector finished on a contradiction. Make a statement. But make that statement a question. Returning to his first point about collaborative storytelling, Spector says that games should avoid the didactic positions more usually found in books or cinema.

"Do you have something important you want players to explore," he asked. "In my opinion, every developer should make sure they have something to say, before they start saying it, before they start working on a game. We're as capable of saying profound things as any other medium, but I think we have an inferiority complex.

"Actually, to contradict myself - games shouldn't make statements, they should ask questions, ask players to ponder situations. If you really want to make a statement, make a movie or write a book."

The full talk can be heard below, courtesy of Sweden Game Conference.

 

Ash

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"Some people define success by how fun a game is. I think fun is a useless word. I don't allow people to use it in my studio. It's meaningless and doesn't help anyone to make a game."

Eh? Shame he didn't elaborate in that. It makes it sound as if he doesn't value the entertainment value a game provides, but that can't be the case because System Shock, Deus Ex etc were highly entertaining and "fun", alongside their more profound elements. So what does he mean? Why does he strive for freedom, C&C, and high level interactivity with the environment? Is that not "fun" as well as immersive? You can have "fun" alongside making statements and making the player think, learn or question. It was probably the Immersive Sim that proved that most effectively, perhaps.

Warren Spector: "I couldn't care less about maximising profitability"

Invisible War weeps.
 
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agris

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"Some people define success by how fun a game is. I think fun is a useless word. I don't allow people to use it in my studio. It's meaningless and doesn't help anyone to make a game."

Eh? Shame he didn't elaborate in that. It makes it sound as if he doesn't value the entertainment value a game provides, but that can't be the case because System Shock, Deus Ex etc were highly entertaining and "fun", alongside their more profound elements. So what does he mean? What does he strive for freedom, and high level interaction with the environment? Is that not "fun"?

I take it that he doesn't allow the use of the word due to it's generality. Your own words are much more specific than just "fun", i.e. "high level interaction with the environment" which presumably make you feel entertained.

OTOH, not allowing a word in your studio speaks volumes about him as a micromanager. Maybe Ken Levine learned it from Spector?
 

Infinitron

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Two possible reasons why Warren might not allow people to say the word "fun" in his studio:

Reason #1: Because he doesn't value entertainment value and HATES FUN.

Reason #2: What he actually said:

It's meaningless and doesn't help anyone to make a game.
 

LESS T_T

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I think Spector likely meant the vagueness of the word, as Doug Church wrote in this old article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131764/formal_abstract_design_tools.php?print=1

The primary inhibitor of design evolution is the lack of a common design vocabulary. Most professional disciplines have a fairly evolved language for discussion. Athletes know the language of their sport and of general physical conditioning, engineers know the technical jargon of their field, doctors know Latin names for body parts and how to scribble illegible prescriptions. In contrast, game designers can discuss "fun" or "not fun," but often the analysis stops there. Whether or not a game is fun is a good place to start understanding, but as designers, our job demands we go deeper.

We should be able to play a side-scrolling shooter on a Game Boy, figure out one cool aspect of it, and apply that idea to the 3D simulation we're building. Or take a game we'd love if it weren't for one annoying part, understand why that part is annoying, and make sure we don't make a similar mistake in our own games. If we reach this understanding, evolution of design across all genres will accelerate. But understanding requires that designers be able to communicate precisely and effectively with one another. In short, we need a shared language of game design.

Our industry produces a wide variety of titles across a range of platforms for equally varied audiences. Any language we develop has to acknowledge this breadth and get at the common elements beneath seemingly disparate genres and products. We need to be able to put our lessons, innovations, and mistakes into a form we can all look at, remember, and benefit from.

A design vocabulary would allow us to do just that, as we could talk about the underlying components of a game. Instead of just saying, "That was fun," or "I don't know, that wasn't much fun," we could dissect a game into its components, and attempt to understand how these parts balance and fit together. A precise vocabulary would improve our understanding of and facility with game creation.
 

Ash

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I take it that he doesn't allow the use of the word due to it's generality. Your own words are much more specific than just "fun", i.e. "high level interaction with the environment" which presumably make you feel entertained.

this was more the elaboration I was after, not Infinitron's patronizing.

I still don't understand, though. "Fun" is as generic a term as "entertaining" or "immersive". Why would any of those be censored?

When you design a mechanic you must question whether it is fun, meaningful, entertaining or immersive, no? It must qualify for at least one of those things.
 

agris

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Two possible reasons why Warren might not allow people to say the word "fun" in his studio:

Reason #1: Because he doesn't value entertainment value and HATES FUN.

Reason #2: What he actually said:

It's meaningless and doesn't help anyone to make a game.
There's a lot of things his employees could talk about that don't help make a game. Should he ban all of them?
 

Ash

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In contrast, game designers can discuss "fun" or "not fun," but often the analysis stops there. Whether or not a game is fun is a good place to start understanding, but as designers, our job demands we go deeper.

Yes, deeper, while not abandoning the concept of "fun" or "entertaining" in the process. To use Spectors own words, If you want to do that, be a writer or a movie maker.

It's a generic term that is hard to measure or define how worthwhile an aspect of a game is, but it is still a baseline requirement to be met in most instances.
 
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Infinitron

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There's a lot of things his employees could talk about that don't help make a game. Should he ban all of them?

Only if they're often used misleadingly in the context of game development.

But seriously - I've noticed that WS often says things like this in his speeches and interviews. My impression is that he's read a lot of "grognard" feedback from CyberP-type fans over the years and he seems to delight in saying things that poke at their sensibilities. "Wait what, what do you mean cyberpunk is outdated?" "Wait what, what do you mean you're not allowed to say fun?" Or his speech at the PC Gaming Show at E3 this year where he sort of browbeated the audience for not liking Facebook games. It's kind of funny, but I'm not sure how much you can read into it.
 

Ash

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Yes, his efforts to stay relevant as a game designer, spread his opinions, ideas and principles, and keep doing what he sees as good for the medium are a ruse. Instead he just likes to troll his "grognard" fans. Never mind his audience he is addressing at a conference that are meant to be taking his words seriously. Very clever :roll:
 

Lyric Suite

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Yes, his efforts to stay relevant as a game designer

Spector is a producer, not a game designer. His talent lied in the ability to bring ambitious projects into fruition, not making them.
 

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Though the current glut of narrative-heavy action games like Gears and Uncharted 4 ensure that writers will continue to find a place set for them at the development table, this wasn't always the case. Just ask Warren Spector, the creative mind behind some of the earliest, most groundbreaking narrative-oriented games, and a tireless advocate for player choice and consequence. He directed and produced classics like Ultima Underworld and System Shock, though he's arguably best-known as the driving force behind the original Deus Ex.

"That was the big challenge with Deus Ex. We built three solutions to every problem, and we needed dialogue that would fit those pre-planned solutions." he says, laughing. "It was crazy."

Today, Spector is the 61-year-old studio director at OtherSide Entertainment – the developer working on System Shock 3 and Underworld Ascendant, distant successors to two of the games that put him on the map. Spector began his career at Origin Systems, the esteemed developers behind the Ultima series, and back then, a game's script was very much an afterthought.

"The writing process at Origin was pretty haphazard," Spector says. "Back then, typically, you didn't even have writers. You had programmers that were writing dialogue and text. There were no off-the-shelf tools to use. Excel didn't exist, so, on every project, in the same way that you had to recreate the camera, there would be new tools for writing dialogue."

(Hard as it may be to believe, the favorite software of bean-counters the world over represented one of the seismic shifts in games writing. To this day, many lines of dialogue are still written in those tiny cells, as it allows for easier processing into actual game code.)

"At Origin, we were writing branching tree structures – basically choose-your-own-adventure books – and eventually you would run out of branches," continues Spector. "Eventually, every one of the conversations would devolve into 'name,' 'job,' and 'bye.' And you would very quickly get to 'I don't know anything about that' with every NPC. It was pretty obvious what was happening."

Read these days, it's clear that the primitive conversations in the Ultima games essentially served a functional role. But all that changed with 1994's System Shock, the first-person "immersive sim" that established the blueprint for many of today's hits, including BioShock and Dishonored.

"On System Shock, I remember I was talking to Doug Church, who was the project lead, and we just looked at each other one day and said 'we have no idea how to do a believable conversation in a game. We just have no clue. So what do we do about that?' And that was when the decision was made to kill everybody on Citadel Station." Born of desperation and necessity, it ended being up one of the most radically influential decisions ever made by a game developer.

Like many game protagonists of the era, System Shock's main character is a faceless cipher; referred to simply as "The Hacker,” he has no backstory and no discernible personality. Rather than drive its story forward with the medium's conventional tools – in those days, stilted cutscenes with line after line of written dialogue – System Shock revealed its world and narrative through play. System Shock’s direct offspring inherited this sensibility, like 2007’s BioShock, but its influence is felt across genres, with even the likes of Dark Souls imitating its example.

"The story was communicated through video logs and emails and things scrawled on the walls, so players actually constructed the story based on what you found when you found it," says Spector. "It actually worked really well. It was really powerful for me."

By the time Spector was directing Deus Ex, he was looking for writers with more conventional experience. However, the exhausting pace of games development continued to take its toll on everyone they hired. At one point, one of the writers on Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, developed Carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands and couldn’t even physically type. But Spector was undeterred – they bought Pacotti text-to-speech software, and the injured writer began to recite every single word in the script. But even that wasn’t enough.

"We ended up having to bring in a team of writers," says Spector. "The final script for Deus Ex was a stack of paper three feet high. Game scripts are enormous. When you look at a screenwriter, it's a minute per page and a long movie is two hours, so, what 120 pages? You should be able to do that standing on your head. But a game script? You write a lot more words, that's for sure."

http://www.glixel.com/news/blood-sweat-and-dialogue-trees-how-games-writing-evolved-w452099

The article also features words from writers of Gears of War and Gone Home.
 

Zep Zepo

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God, I wish this useless blowhard would die already.

Zep--
 

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