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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Game Design Showdown Leads To Collateral Romance 58

Posted by simoniker from the i-heart-you dept.
Thanks to GameSpy for its article covering the "Iron Chef"-like Game Designer's Challenge at last week's GDC 2004 in San Jose, in which "three famous game gurus were pitted against one another to tackle one of the thorniest of game design problems: creating a love story." According to the piece: "The three 'contestants' were Will Wright from Maxis (creator of The Sims and Sim City), Warren Spector from Ion Storm (visionary behind Deus Ex and Thief), and Raph Koster the Creative Director of Sony Online Entertainment (who was instrumental in creating Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.)" The eventual winner was Will Wright, who "created a war-time romance game that he called a 'First-Person Kisser'", in which "...a man and a woman, chosen by the computer for having similar interests and romantic possibilities, would start on opposite ends of a raging battlefield. They'd have to arrange for a place to meet and they'd try to get there without being killed."
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Game Design Showdown Leads To Collateral Romance More

Game Design Showdown Leads To Collateral Romance

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  • Well, it's a fairly bizzare concept. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eevee ( 535658 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @06:44PM (#8698715)
    It almost makes me want to try Battlefield 1942 just to see if there are love-sick civilians wandering around dodging shrapnel.

  • wow (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The big names in game design have no idea how to involve players emotionally or write games that don't involve weaponry somehow. That's sad.

    • Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NedR ( 701006 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @06:53PM (#8698764) Journal
      Eh, cut them a little slack. Sure there are games like the Final Fantasy series that can already emotionally involve players in romance stories, but I think the whole point was to figure out if there was a way to do that without "gaming on rails." In terms of generating this kind of emotion while still allowing the players free will, games are in the very early, primitive stages still, since nobody in any other media has really ever done anything like that before. Looking at it like that, I think the Koster, Spector, and Wright came up with some pretty interesting concepts, and if they missed the mark, that's because it's probably going to be years before anybody even has a ballpark estimate of where the mark is.

      • Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MBCook ( 132727 )
        I think that one of them (Koster?) was right when he basically said that it can't be done right now. We just don't know enough for have good enough technology to do much better than the FF style things. There really aren't any games that have that kind of thing unless it was put into the game specifically and written by a human (like in FF); or it was "interpreted" and basically added by the individual (like the the Sims). There aren't any games that actually create real attachments unless the designers spe

    • Leave it to the little names then (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @07:10PM (#8698879) Journal
      Try these reviews [gamefaqs.com] of a certain game.

      There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A. Better to kill then fuck. The Sims are a notable exception but they don't really have emotion just stats.

      Of course a super game would be one that manages emotion without violence or sex. Or with. I am not sure on that one.

      • Sorry to break it to you, but Kana Little Sister was horribly boring and filled with ridiculous plot contrivances, not even good as an interactive novel. That's what you get when you take a hentai "game" and remove most of the hentai from it.

        Rob

      • Re:Leave it to the little names then (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Better to kill then fuck

        You want to kill someone, then fuck them?

        Or did you mean better to kill than fuck.

      • There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A.

        Well, I'm sure that it's legal to play an animated hentai game. But I can't see a socially acceptable reason to to play an imouto ga suki na game here without being label some sort of nth degree perv. Just think if that game's icon was on your desktop. There's no way in hell you could convince your wife, girlfriend, parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, teacher, boss, colleages, cleaning lady, land l

      • Or Private Nurse? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by chendo ( 678767 )
        Y'know, the second I glanced at the title, my perverted mind immediately thought "INCEST!". But that's just me.

        On a more serious note, I hear that the PC version of Private Nurse [gamefaqs.com] has been ported to PS2. Although the PC version is an adult game (read, not for children ;p), I hear the PS2 port is a PG-rated version of the PC game. Since I have somewhat played the English translation of the game before, I can say a little bit on the basic plot.

        Basically, you're this guy, whose name I forgot, and you're
      • There are "emotion" games out there but emotion leads to sex and that is forbidden in the US of A. Better to kill then fuck. The Sims are a notable exception but they don't really have emotion just stats.

        Then why haven't these [konamityo.com] games made it to the US? Plenty of emotion, no sex, very little violence - and stats, too.

        Love stories are a solved problem. It's not that it's hard to make games like that, it's just that nobody thinks Americans are interested... well, not enough to make them commercially viable
        • Current Japanese dating games that I can think of are all non-real-time adventure-class games. This genre has not fared very well in the United States for something like a decade now.

          There is one interesting thing about adventure games -- generally, they're easy to put down at any time and do not require a powerful platform. This makes adventure games an appealing possibility for the console. The sole exception is storage space -- many adventure games require a fair bit of storage. It may be necessary
        • Very true. Non-hentai "romance/dating" games have been popular in Japan for years, yet not even the highly successful Tokimeki Memorial has ever seen a US port. The closest we've come, I think, is the "marriage" aspect of the Harvest Moon games.

    • Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pentagram ( 40862 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @07:40PM (#8699058) Homepage
      If you'd RTFA (unconventional idea I know) you'd have discovered that only Wright came up with the idea of the FPK, and it was basically a joke. Spector bottled it, and Koster came up with something somewhat original, kind of an open-ended acting game which actually sounded interesting. Wright won because of his amusing presentation.
      • Wright's idea actually seemed kind of interesting to me, and I'm not convinced it was "basically a joke." I'm curious to see what he'd do with the idea if given the resources. A game that combines real-life match-making with a virtual world with some sort of story or gameplay objective could make a lot of money if done right, I think. Koster's idea sounded really boring to me, though... I think Wright would've won even without the humourous presentation.
        • I bet a group of people would try that out. Personally I'd like to see it happen, kinda half match.com and half MMO??? (FPS? FPK? shrug).
      • What the heck are you talking about? Koster didn't come up with something original! He just made Star Wars Galaxies again. Re-read his suggestion, it's just to make a romance-based MMO where the players respond to content that's automatically generated from a template but given a subset of variables.

        My first reaction upon seeing this headline was, "Oh, Koster didn't win, huh? Now that's a big shocker." Then I read the article, and it made me sad because he was actually pathetic enough to do exactly wh

    • Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @07:50PM (#8699138) Journal
      I think you're being to harsh.

      First, they're trying to write a game that will be acceptable to the current gaming world. The current gaming world plays and prefers games with lots of explosions and guns and violence and whatnot.

      Second, what are you comparing this to? A romance movie? A book? Games just don't *work* the same as either medium. It's much harder to involve a gamer in a romance game than a romance movie because the gamer may stop at any time, and play in any-sized chunks. With a movie, viewers allocate two hours, and the movie director has a given undivided two hours in which he controls much of the viewers' environment to manipulate emotions. Compare this to, say, a computer, where viewers are probably not in a totally dark room with huge speakers and a vast screen. With a book or a movie, it is possible to write a carefully-crafted story that depends upon timing (Joe just misses the train with Mary) or precise actions, or whatnot. A game generally requires more flexibility, unless you're going to make it incredibly flat and consisting mostly of cutscenes. In most types of game, a player might spend an arbitrary amount of time stopped or trying to figure something out. It has to allow a player to make decisions.

      Third, many of the elements in a romance are *very* difficult to reproduce in an interactive environment. Most romances place a good deal of emphasis on (often subtle) emotions and human relationships. Unless you entirely represent these elements with cutscenes, you need to provide some form of interactive "human". We do not have the technology to currently do this effectively or convincingly.

      Ultimately, I could see romance games doing well. Middle-aged women are currently the most common demographic online. It turns out that the Internet beats the snot out of daytime soaps. I'm sure there will be a lot of false starts and failures, though. It won't be an easy problem -- but then again, if you took a programmer from 1980 and told him to produce Doom III, he'd probably be at a bit of a loss for words too. There's money in the romance market, and that means that someone will find out a way to take advantage of it.

    • Hang on a minute (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe this article doesn't paint the picture well enough. I was at this session and saw the talk in person. Spector and Wright were the two main draws for me, and I remember little of Kosters speech. To get to my point though, this was by far the most fantastic display of genius that Will Wright has shown to this day. You must understand that this question was asked on the spot (by "topic moderator" Erik Zimmerman) with no prior preperation by the three speakers.
      Wright first broke down the issue at hand
      • You must understand that this question was asked on the spot (by "topic moderator" Erik Zimmerman) with no prior preperation by the three speakers.
        Um...I don't know if the article is off, or maybe they just didn't mention this at the talk, but the article says that they were told about the topic and had a couple of months to prepare for their presentations. Hence Will Wright having screenshots of lovers superimposed on Battlefield 1942.

  • No John Romero . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by zeenixus ( 571630 ) <zeenixus AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday March 28, 2004 @07:06PM (#8698853)
    he'd probably just come up with something about being in love with yourself.
  • I know this is cliche, but seriously now, how many gamers would buy a game whose parallel they consistently fail in real life?
    • Everybody, actually.

      I've never succeeded in anything I do in a game. I've never kidnapped a man from CIA HQ, or escaped a reasearch facility infested with mutants and aliens...

      • Re:Know your audience- (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You've never gotten the chance. I have, and trust me, I couldn't have done it without Half Life. That crowbar saved my ass so many times. I would never have expected it
    • Well, what are the current big sellers? Games where you're an expert marksman taking out aliens? A large scale military commander? A fireball flinging mage? I kind of fail those parallels in real life too, you know.
    • Consider it something good for their self-esteem. If someone fails in romance IRL, it might make that person feel better about himself/herself if he/she can succeed in virtual romance.
      I know when I was younger I didn't succeed in making friends IRL, but online I had a ton of friends and that always made me feel better about myself.
  • What a poorly designed "contest". According to the article, the only requirement was to "create a love story". What is this challenge supposed to mean?

    - Is it supposed to be a game about two characters who fall in love? That's already been done, dozens of times, in many genres, probably most notably in the Final Fantasy series (as stated above).

    - Does it mean that the player is supposed to fall in love with an in-game character? That's probably happened more times than avid players of Tomb Raider or

    • Re:Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dehumanizer ( 31435 )

      Does it mean that the player is supposed to fall in love with an in-game character? That's probably happened more times than avid players of Tomb Raider or Dead or Alive might want to admit.

      Uh... that's sexual attraction, not love.

      Characters I *could* fall in love with, if they existed, and which actually made me feel *something* while playing the game, would be:

      - Annah from Planescape: Torment
      - Fall-from-Grace from Planescape: Torment
      - Kana from Kana: Little Sister (spoiler: she isn't your biologi

      • Re:Pointless (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Kana from Kana: Little Sister (spoiler: she isn't your biological sister, stop calling me a pervert! :) )

        It's strange, but judging from the bishoujo games I've played, nobody in Japan is biologically related to their sister...

    • Pure Research (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cgenman ( 325138 )
      How to create a love story has been a sticky issue in videogaming for many years now. The "contest" part is entirely trappings... You're taking some of the greatest minds in gaming, and having them attack a fundamental problem of gaming. To say that it is an invalid exercise because the structure was loose is to miss the point. A sense of heroism is easy to create in a videogame, but love? Creepy asian body pillows aside, game designers are still struggling with how to emotionally involve players in lov

      • Wright's solution is both practical and might survive a publisher's funding challenge. Nothing pulls people together emotionally like adversity.

        I hate to say it, but...Darmok and Gilad at Tenagra.

        The problem with 'love' is that, of all the human emotions, it's probably the most personalized. The average member of a given society is going to have an idea of what's heroic, what's scary, what's frightening, what's injust, and so on. Love, however, is differnet for everybody.

        That and the fact that love

        • An explanation of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" can be found here [startrek.com].

          And yes, perfect reference. Leave it to Will Wright to create an interpretation of Love based upon Star Trek.

        • That and the fact that love is one of the few emotions that requires interactivity. You can invoke amusement, anger, lust, contentment, joy, all sorts of emotions, in a passive viewer. Love, however, requires as much giving as receiving.

          What? That's grade school "I like her, but only if she likes me!" bullshit. You're describing a very selfish kind of Love; one conditional on getting something in return. I grant you that even that is difficult to make happen in a game, but maybe we'd have a better

          • I don't think you understand.

            In this case, I'd be referring to the 'she' in your example; if she feels nothing in return, has nothing to give in return, she's not going to love the fellow in question.

            If you're watching a television show, and the TV show consists of an actor/actress of the appropriate gender looking right at you and saying 'I love you,' you're not going to be able to love her back, as you can't give of yourself to her. You can hate her, lust after her, be happy for her, cry for her, all

            • I don't think you understand.

              Nah, you're the one confused.

              In this case, I'd be referring to the 'she' in your example; if she feels nothing in return, has nothing to give in return, she's not going to love the fellow in question.

              Again, you're talking about returns. That is a selfish love, if it is even love at all.

              If you're watching a television show, and the TV show consists of an actor/actress of the appropriate gender looking right at you and saying 'I love you,' you're not going to be

  • ICO ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @07:55PM (#8699166) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone here played ICO? Its a very romantic sort of game; and kinda spiritual too. The basic premise of the game is , young lad gets trapped in castle, meets strange but beautiful ethereal girl caught between life and death. Strange asphyx [stomptokyo.com] like creatures hound the girl, and try to drag her into another world. ICO, must solve puzzles, some of which require the ethereal powers of the girl in order to solve.

    Although not strictly billed as a love story, I felt that the young lad and the girl had quite an interaction with each other, the animation silky smooth. The characters would hold hands, if ICO runs too far away he can call the girl and she will come running, or if she cannot make her way to ICO will yell back. To be honest im waffling and not doing the game much justice.

    I just wanted to mention it because despite being a great game, its the first game ive really ever played where central characters have a significant relationship / interplay from which feelings seem to emanate from the screen and into your thoughts.

    nick ...

    • Love Parade of Acronyms: ZWW, PoP, KOTOR (Score:4, Interesting)

      by superultra ( 670002 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @11:43PM (#8700468) Homepage
      Following in ICO's steps are Wind Waker and Prince of Persia, which both borrow heavily from ICO. There were a few times in Zelda when I almost cried from parts of a very scaled down love story, but I admit they were fairly non-interactive. The snapy princess in PoP was very much Ubisoft Montreal's iteration of the girl in ICO.

      I felt that the relationship between the gamer and Bastila in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic was perhaps the best conversational and interactive relationship I'd ever "played." Instead of sketching up complicated systems like Spector and Wright tried, Bioware just hit the player with the old standard of branching conversations, but did it over and over and over again. The characters change through conversation and time, and it's this transformation in their character that makes it so interesting, and ultimately, worthy of caring for.

      However, I agree with you. ICO does it best. The final scene in ICO is ranks among the best in gaming, and is without question the best demonstration of a love story in video gaming.

      Grim Fandango, though, makes a pretty damn close second. It's nowhere near as "serious" as ICO, but in the way that it exercises its love story, it does it very well.

    • Re:ICO ? (Score:2, Informative)

      by DaFlusha ( 224762 )
      I was at the Game Developers Conference; during Warren Spector's talk, he mentioned that ICO was the one example he could think of where a game really made him feel something for an computer-controlled (NPC) character.
  • ...and in third place was Warren Specter who, in an attempt to redefine the topic to be marketable on both PC and console platforms, debuted a rather monochromatic story full of unified weapons... (it's a JOKE for cripes sake...)

  • heh. (Score:1)

    by flynns ( 639641 )
    --==insert "love is a battlefield" joke here==--

  • My take on this.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Sunday March 28, 2004 @10:04PM (#8699903)
    Romance as a subject for video games, believe it or not, is not a tricky one. It's not as tricky as it makes it seem, at least if the end goal is to be the equivilent of the movie or the book. If you're looking to transcend that level, then it's a lot more difficult.

    What makes a good book/movie romance? There are two possibilties. Either you can relate to the relationship, or you desire the relationship. This really is a matter of taste. Unfortunately, very few games actually have enough romantic tension in them to really even have a chance. What do you have?

    Ok, you have the Final Fantasy games. That's obvious. (And some of the best, if you ask me). What else is there? One of the problems is that games with a "love interest" usually use the love interest as the motivation..the damsel in distress syndrome, so to speak. If you do this, it takes the tension out of the whole story. Mainly, because it cuts out most of the chance for the dialogue. Why are the FF good games for romance? Because for the most part, the characters are together for most if not all of the game.

    About Wright's idea, I think it's a good one, but not for the romance angle. I like the idea of being able to try to balance multiple objectives within a larger game. One of the problmes of this, and the other given idea, is the human problem. Namely, the number of griefers that only try to ruin the game for other people and get a kick out of it. That's the big problem for any game that relies on human interaction.

  • Love? Love is for the living, Sal. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Monday March 29, 2004 @12:06AM (#8700593) Homepage
    As already stated, it's pretty disappointing how poorly our obvioulsy dysfunctional gaming giants performed with the love story. It shouldn't have been a surprise though, because none of these guys have every really done anything emotionally compelling (save the scariness of Spector's System Shock). That's not to say they're gaming losers, it's just that I doubt anyone will be shedding a tear over Everquest, Simcity, or Deus Ex. Unless it's because lag made them lose some huge loot, their city is in white flight, or their inventory system is unmanagable.

    I suppose one possible reason for game publisher's ineptitude in creating decent love stories, either on the fly at a conference or with years of development, is that their product's recepients (us) don't care much for love stories. I have a hard time believing that, although I suppose it might be true. I think a better reason is the one proposed by Miyamoto. Violence is the easy way to incite an emotional response. Love and sadness take far more work on a narrative level than simply coding something like Battlefield Vietnam, or even Deus Ex. It's riskier, because it's very easy for a game to come across as insincere. With technology, you're safe. It's either good because it works, or it's bad because it doesn't. Love, well now, that's far more subjective, isn't it?

    With that in mind, I will say this. The copout by Spector that the technology isn't up to par is the preposterous. With that statement he made yet another step downwards from the person I was envisioned him as. Obviously, he's of the mindset I just mentioned. For him, and apparently the others, love is a technical implementation, not a narrative one. It's a coded system, not the way a character talks or walks or reacts in the game(cf. ICO).

    Shame on them. The reliance of the love story on narrative is why these guys not only missed the point, but are running the complete opposite direction. The connection of the Game Design Showdown to Iron Chief is appropriate. And if that's the case, these boobs tried to build a house instead of culinating a dish.

    With bony hands I hold my partner
    On soulless feet we cross the floor
    The music stops as if to answer
    An empty knocking at the door
    It seems his skin was sweet as mango
    When last I held him to my breast
    But now we dance this grim fandango
    And will four years before we rest.
    • With that in mind, I will say this. The copout by Spector that the technology isn't up to par is the preposterous. With that statement he made yet another step downwards from the person I was envisioned him as. Obviously, he's of the mindset I just mentioned. For him, and apparently the others, love is a technical implementation, not a narrative one. It's a coded system, not the way a character talks or walks or reacts in the game(cf. ICO).

      Wow, and my view of Spector's "cop-out" was entirely different. To

  • PS2 (Score:2)

    by miyako ( 632510 )
    The only really good love-story esque games are for PS2, because everyone knows that they are so much easier thanks to it's Emotion Engine

    On a serious note, I think the reason love stories are avoided in games is that they are HARD to do well. Look at romance movies, for ever one really touching romance or romantic comedy there are 15 or 20 (and I'm being generous here) reels of crap that come out. Combine this with the fact that games are still largely targeted at the insecure socially inept teenage ma
  • Too bad they didn't have Hironobu Sakaguchi or Hideo Kojima involved. They probably could have come up with a decent love story, considering their game experience and all.

  • Fun? (Score:1)

    by qoa ( 704941 )
    Am I the only one that thought the idea of Collateral Romance was a fun one? Not to hide out in a building and chat, but to sneak to meet somebody and then try to sneak elsewhere. All while an online war is happening?

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