This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from race politics of The Witcher 3 to a philosophy of local level design.
The Things We Don't Talk About Enough
Over on Gamasutra's Member Blogs, Felipe Pepe raises a good point: for every lost game like P.T., there are countless other game histories that are being lost without apparent outcry. In particular, Pepe calls out the dead archives on game sites of days gone by as well as a lack of interest in interviewing some of development history's smaller (but no less significant) names.
As if in answer, David Wolinsky's audience- and developer-focused Don't Die has just released an interview with Purple Moon founder Brenda Laurel which is as enlightening as it is bracing:
I remember when we showed our website to [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen he said, "Oh, this is cool. Can you make this for boys?" Now this is after $4 million and four years' worth of research on girls he says this. I don't think they ever got it, honestly. And that was true of Atari, as well. Investors in those days, they rarely understood what they were doing. And those of us who were doing the work were trying to do stuff that mattered.
Turning from developer histories to the current state of the industry, Brendan Sinclair has been doing some important legwork following up on game hardware manufacturers' use of conflict minerals -- another aspect of the business which could benefit from more active discussion.
Design Notes
At his Radiator Blog, Robert "Cobra Club" Yang has adapted his recent GDC presentation on level design and architecture to point to a philosophical disconnect in how large studios approach matters of design, instead advocating for what he calls "local level design":
The idea here is that these gray boxes ARE the soul of the level, and art assets and detail are just "ornament" -- and according to the high modernist architects of the early 20th century, ornament is not "real" architecture. This is VERY different from ideas of early level design [...] Industrial level design views every design problem as a problem of production time, dependent on the ability to scope and plan and manage human labor.
In contrast, local level design views every design problem as a problem of dialog and methodology, it is a "compassionate formalism" that tries to collaborate on conceptual frameworks rather than imposing them. I hope these already existing examples of locally-oriented practice across architecture and level design demonstrate that it is something possible, important, and real.
Also from a past GDC, the good folks at Gamasutra have revived this 2012 design talk by Timothy Cain (video) about the development of the first Fallout.
Meanwhile, at Play the Past, Gilles Roy has published an interesting two part interview with developer Jos Hoebe, developer on the recently released World War I-themed game Verdun. From the interview's first half:
Hoebe: All the studios were mainly driven by a commercial agenda. [You] just take the biggest subject, like World War 2, with a clear narrative of Good versus Evil, which doesn't exist in World War 1. There are reasons why there have not been World War 1 games made, especially from a first person perspective, which at bottom is the lack of Good versus Evil narrative, which is better for selling games to a broader audience, etc. [...] [There] are other titles which have something to do with World War 1, like time travel, and zombies, etc. But we wanted to take a realistic approach, in a similar fashion how the Red Orchestra series -- and to some extent the earlier Call of Dutys -- went about it.
The Play's the Thing (Or Sometimes, Isn't)
Gamasutra columnist Katherine Cross sings the praises of Darkest Dungeons' minimalist characterization, which acts on the player's tendency to create closure out of the elements presented to them. And over at The AV Club's Gameological Society, Jake Muncy takes a turn at Republique and muses on the omnipresent voyeurism of games.
Paste's Maddy Myers wonders why so few women protagonists are given love interests and interrogates a few of the reasons developers have offered in the past. And on his Worldmaker blog, Max Battcher challenges the idea that a "skip combat" feature is either novel or, in any sense of the word, "cheating."
It's Not About The Witcher 3
Much has been written in the last few weeks concerning the dispropor
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