ONE OF THE MORE unlikely side effects of the rise of computer gaming is the concomitant rise of the computer-game creator to celebrity status. They're seen as auteurs, creative geniuses, Zen coding monks with Lamborghinis, they have rock-star haircuts and girlfriends who appear in Playboy and kick ass at Quake. (All right, John Romero is in the last category all by himself, and he has an embarrassing eighties hair metal rock-star haircut and his last game, Daikatana, sucked. But the principle still holds true.) This is pretty amazing, when you think about it. In the natural order of things, game designers should just be pasty-faced guys who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons back in the eighties and now make their own games; instead, they're famous pasty-faced guys who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons back in the eighties and now make their own games.
Which brings us to Warren Spector, who gave up a life as an academic at the University of Texas in order to go work for TSR, the company that actually invented D&D. That career move, all by itself, would be enough to elevate Spector to some kind of über-geek pantheon forever. But then he abandoned the world of pen-and-paper games and went to the computer game company, Origin, where he was part of the teams that produced the now-classic Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Wing Commander 1. All four of these titles invariably show up on "Best Games Ever" lists, largely because of their commitment to telling a story, to using then-current cutting-edge technology not simply for fireworks, but to create a world you could believe in. And that's Warren's influence; again and again, he's been part of teams that manage the delicate balancing act between narrative and adrenaline rush better than anybody else.

Most recently, he worked on Deus Ex, which a lot of people feel is one of the definitive documents on fin de siècle paranoia, period, let alone in the realm of entertainment software. All the paranoid touchstones are there: the black helicopters, the Knights Templar, right-wing whackos, left-wing whackos, secret government agencies within secret government agencies within still other even more secret one-world-government agencies -- all of them conspiring like mad to who knows what nefarious ends. Deus Ex is so paranoid that it has three different endings. Which one you get to depends on who you kill and how you act while unraveling the all the various conspiracies you're confronted with during your time as J. C. Denton, cyborg. This is the kind of touch that makes Warren Spector the kind of geek that other geeks look up to.
We caught up with Warren recently and talked with him about the changing face of gaming as it moves from cottage industry to multibillion-dollar entertainment complex; the role of storytelling in his own games; and whether or not anybody has ever come up with anything better than Tetris, anyway. We also try to weasel some information out of him about the upcoming Deus Ex 2 and Thief III.


FEED: Most of the games you've done have been narrative-driven rather than "pure" action games. And, in a lot of ways, the ability to tell a story, to build a complex narrative in System Shock 1, Deus Ex, etc., has been one of the things that have separated your games from the pack. Can you talk a bit about the role of narrative in your games?
WARREN SPECTOR: I've always been into stories and storytelling, but until you asked this question I never stopped to think about the fact that I've never made a game that wasn't driven by narrative concerns. Actually, though, that's too simple a way to look at it. For me, the interesting thing has always been the tension between a story that we, the developers, create and the ways in which players participate in the telling of that story. The dialogue between creator and player is fascinating to me...
FEED: Do you see storytelling as the driving force in game design for you?
SPECTOR: I'm coming around to the idea that there are multiple levels to any narrative. There's the overall story arc -- the big events, accelerating tensions, major plot twists, character growth, and so on -- that have been the mainstay of traditional, linear narrative since the days of Aristotle. And then there are the myriad minute-to-minute events that weave together the elements of the overall story arc. If you listen to a description of the typical pen-and-paper D&D campaign or to a description of a player's magic moments while playing a computer game, you get none of the big story arc stuff and lots of events -- "We did this and then we did that and then something happened and I killed the evil bad guy..."

Do I really need to say that makes for a personally meaningful but ultimately uninteresting narrative? I suspect that's why even the best fiction based on roleplaying campaigns or computer games is invariably bad. Most people excel at minute-to-minute event-description but ninety-nine percent of them aren't very good at the Big Picture. That's why there are very few authors in the world, or filmmakers, and lots of readers and viewers. What I want to do, at least until someone comes up with a better idea, is to provide the skeleton of a story -- the powerful, traditional narrative arc -- while leaving players in complete control of the minute-to-minute. Players can and should own their highly personalized story, but the overall arc belongs to the developers. Put another way, it's possible -- and, I think, desirable -- to leave what players do in our hands while leaving the how of it in their hands. Confront players with problems, I say, but let them decide how to solve them. The what provides a rich emotional context for action; the how allows for maximum player expression and generates the kind of highly personal, event-driven story that only gaming can provide. I love the dialogue between players and creators this approach forces. But, then again, a lot of my friends and colleagues think I'm completely wrong about all this so who can say?
FEED: So how do you balance the competing demands of gameplay and narrative? Or are they really in conflict at all?
SPECTOR: There's a cliché among game developers about narrative and games being like two ends of a teeter-totter -- the more you emphasize narrative, the more you tip over toward one side of the teeter-totter, the less game-like your work becomes. Conversely, the more game-like you make your work, the less relevant traditional narrative concerns become. There's certainly some truth to that, but what the cliché doesn't get at is the fact that a teeter-totter isn't a binary thing -- it's not an on/off switch. It's a dynamic system and so, I think, should narrative games be. Something doesn't have to be all game or all narrative. And there's no reason why the teeter-totter can't shift back and forth, the balance shifting to meet players' needs -- and to satisfy developers' creative urges.
FEED: You were working on a Ph.D. in film theory before you got into games. Has that shaped your approach to doing game design?
SPECTOR: Yeah. I was working on my doctorate in radio-TV-film and did a lot of work in history, theory, and criticism. I don't know that my background shaped my approach to gaming, really. I mean, I certainly had a lot of things to unlearn, coming from a well-established, linear medium to one defined by its nonlinearity and still trying to find its own conventions! I guess it never hurts to know something about traditional narrative forms and aesthetics and semiotics and all. But, really, the most valuable thing anyone gets out of grad school is something that would stand you in good stead in any field -- you learn how to think. As an undergrad, you get your head filled with lots of facts and, if you're lucky, you find a prof or two who force you to take a step further. Grad school, at least in my experience, was all about "further steps." You pick up on analytical tools that can be applied to just about anything. I also learned that there was value in applying analytical tools to things that most people consider beneath analysis -- I mean, try telling your mother you're writing your dissertation on television melodrama and see what happens. It ain't pretty.
Anyway, I think grad school gave me a way of looking at the world that clearly affects the way I approach everything in my life, not just game development. I'm not sure there's any one-to-one correlation between studying film and making games.
FEED: 3-D gaming is only a few years old, still in it's infancy, really, and lots of people in the field say that you should think how far it's already come compared to film in its early days. But it seems like gaming is already running on a late-capitalist-culture-industry economic model the drive toward blockbusters (and the attendant huge production budgets), the emphasis on sequels, the iron control of publisher's marketing departments, etc. Gaming, in a way, went from being a garage craft (like video in its early, utopian days) to being a Hollywood-style system in nothing flat. And you've been able to watch that transformation from the inside. What's that been like for you? Has that change affected the kinds of games you think about making? Or the kinds of creative decisions you make?
SPECTOR: Ouch. Tough question! Like all things in this computer-driven age, gaming is developing at a far faster rate than earlier media. It's partly a result of constantly and rapidly changing technology, you know, when hardware doubles in power every six months, you adapt and change, quickly, or you don't survive. But the business developments you're talking about may also stem from the fact that we have business models to crib from TV and movies, as you correctly point out, where the earlier media had no models. We (or, I should say, the publishers) can look at how Hollywood does business and say, "Hey, why don't we try that?" So they give it a shot.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure I see any alternative. I mean, once someone spends five million dollars or ten million dollars or more on a game and succeeds in the marketplace, it's tough to get players to accept lower quality graphics or sound or acting or whatever. We all have to follow along, to some extent.
Business practices don't just arrive fully formed from the brow of some clueless executive somewhere (evidence to the contrary notwithstanding!). Businesses follow the money and the money follows player expectations. And what players expect right now is high production values and lots of content, which costs a lot of money. So, here we are in an era of increasing development costs, ridiculous marketing costs, and relatively stagnant sales. You have a couple of whopper hits, a handful of successes and a bunch (a BUNCH) of failures. That leads to consolidation, fewer and fewer independent developers, less innovation, more sequels, etc., etc., etc. Kind of ugly, really.


FEED: So do you feel like the change has been for the better or worse?
SPECTOR: For me, personally, it's been a little frustrating, as you might expect. I look back fondly on the day when you could make a game for $250,000, in a year, with a team of ten people. Trust me, it ain't like that any more! But it'd be naive to look back with rose-tinted glasses. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that came out of that utopian era of video and out of the indie film movement wasn't very good, you know? A lot of the games that came out of those early days of lower-budget, creator-centered game development were pretty bad. Big budgets and a blockbuster mentality aren't all bad! Whenever I get nostalgic, I try to remind myself how tenuous our existence was back at ORIGIN in the late eighties. And I remind myself how much luckier I am than a lot of folks in that I've found a publisher, in Eidos, that supports the work I want to do -- a lot of folks have it far worse. Heck, I've had it worse! I haven't had to change the kinds of games I make, in any significant ways yet. I mean, you always want to have commercial realities in the back of your mind when you make creative decisions, but that's always been true in every medium. I've never had a marketing guy tell me I had to do something and I've never told a team to make a change to increase sales -- creativity still rules the day. As for whether the changes have been good or bad for gaming, heck, change is inevitable. It just is. You deal with it. You make games. You hope someone buys them. And you really hope someone agrees to fund your next one. That's the way it's always been. We've just added a bunch of zeroes to the budget.
FEED: On the flip side, with games it's possible, and now, pretty much expected, for companies to release source code and editors to the community, thus creating (ideally) a flurry of mods and user-created levels. Has this impacted your own design process? Thief 3 comes to mind here: There's a huge community and mythology already in place from the first two games. What do you think about the mod community? Do you have a favorite mod for a game?
SPECTOR: I think the growth of the mods community is one of the best things to happen to gaming in a long time. Earlier, we were talking about the escalating costs of development and the demise of independent developers. Well, the mods guys are diving right in there and filling any gap that might have been left. They're keeping game series alive in the years between "official" entries. They're acting as a kind of minor league where wanna-be developers can show their stuff, which makes the hiring decision a lot easier for folks like me, lowering our risk dramatically. The best of them (can you say "Counter Strike"?) are even introducing new gameplay styles. The mod guys are awesome. More power to them.
FEED: Tetris is still one of the best video games ever made and you could easily run it on an Atari 2600. Has improved technology improved games?
SPECTOR: Yes and no. A game like Tetris clearly doesn't benefit from improved technology, but that doesn't mean no game benefits from more powerful tech. Just look at what's out there today. There are plenty of games that wouldn't even be possible without more powerful machines and more powerful developers to take advantage of them. A game like Thief or Deus Ex just wasn't possible ten years ago. And while my favorite Miyamoto game is still Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past for the SNES, Mr. Miyamoto couldn't even have thought of making a game like Zelda 64 until technology caught up with his vision. Making games is a technologically based medium but the limitations of the medium are creative, not technical. Creative people and teams will find ways to take maximum advantage of whatever level of technology is available to them.
FEED: It's commonly agreed that Half-Life raised the bar for FPS games (just like System Shock did for RPGs). What games have really pushed you in terms of your own game design?
SPECTOR: Well, I'd have to say I've learned from just about every game I play and just about everyone I've worked with. Ultima IV changed pretty much everything I thought about computer gaming -- hey, we really can be about more than aimless wandering and random monster killing! And working with Richard on Ultima VI was a revelation. Working with Chris Roberts on Wing Commander, in particular, taught me the value of production values and the power of games to create powerful emotional responses. We don't have time to get into all that I've learned from Doug Church over the years, working together on the Underworlds, System Shock, and a bunch of other stuff has been a highlight of my professional life. And if I want a lesson in game design, I don't have to look much further than Harvey Smith and Randy Smith, the project directors on Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3, respectively. They're not shy about teaching me lessons!
Games that have particularly inspired me recently include Half-Life and Mario 64. Talking about the former with Gabe Newell really brought into focus the importance of a truly responsive world. Half-Life totally renewed my faith in the power of narrative-based immersive sims at a time when I was dealing with some doubts. And Mario 64 is just a textbook example of how to give players a limited set of tools and the power to exploit them in remarkable and personal ways as they explore an internally consistent world.
Sometimes, though, I think I learn more from the games I don't like than the ones I do. In a lot of ways, it's easier to see what someone's doing wrong than it is to do the hard work of analyzing what they're doing right. I'd give you some examples, but I want to continue working in this business for a while and I'd just alienate my peers unnecessarily!
FEED: One of the myriad things that makes the film/game analogy fall apart ultimately is that in games (and in yours in particular), the quality of open-endedness is a virtue, whereas film is always a discrete entity -- it's got a specific length, a set ending, etc. What is it about that quality of openness that appeals to you so strongly, especially given the extra work entailed in doing a game that way?
SPECTOR: Hey, an easy question! Cool. I love movies and absolutely believe that audiences participate in the story as it unfolds in ways that are more dynamic than one might suspect. However, the simple fact of the matter is that a movie plays itself out the same way every time the film runs through the projector. The film has an existence independent of the viewer. Same for books and plays and operas and concertos. The one thing that makes games different from all other media is that they stop dead until and unless there's a player there to keep things going. Nothing happens unless I, as the player, do something to make it happen. Even the lamest, most linear game depends on the player's presence for its existence. The word "interactivity" isn't just about giving players choices; it pretty much completely defines the games medium: Without the player, the game doesn't exist. I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: Games can put players in places they couldn't go any other way -- a jet fighter's cockpit, a space station under alien attack, you name it. Games offer us the opportunity to create personal stories -- those minute-to-minute events I was talking about before -- in collaboration with the folks who created the gameworld. That's what makes gaming unique. And if we're not exploiting the unique characteristics of our medium, what's the point? Developers have a moral obligation to do that or we're just going to stagnate and remain some kind of adolescent niche market forever. We can and must do better than that. That's why the extra work of open-endedness and player control are so important to me. Without that extra work, we're dead in the water.

Mark Van de Walle is a contributing editor at FEED. His book on trailer park disasters, Magnets for Misery, will be available soon from RE-Search/Juno Books.

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