During the Game Developers Conference, Firaxis Director of Creative Development Sid Meier gave a fascinating keynote speech in which he described the impact that player psychology has on his game design process, and how other developers can learn from that. Following the keynote, IndustryGamers had the privilege of sitting down with Meier for an in-depth talk. We discussed psychology, morals in video games, the Civilization Network, the booming social games sector and more. Here's the full Q&A.
IndustryGamers: I'm curious, since your keynote was so psychology focused, has psychology been something that you’ve studied or has always been interesting to you, or did it come along mid-way through your career?
Sid Meier: It’s definitely not something that I started off with. My background was in programming and math and science, and so that was always the way that I started to approach game design, to try and create a model, try and create a world. But I realized in doing that and playing games, that without including the psychology, what’s going on in the player’s head, you’re missing out on a real important part of the gameplay experience. So it became a matter of necessity. If we were going to make games, to include that part was just as important as all the other pieces.
IG: I find it kind of interesting, because you’ve talked about how you don’t want games to be too difficult, but looking at reward versus punishment and looking back at the old games, whether on Atari or the NES, some of those games were brutally hard. If you were at the end of the game and you died, you might have to start from the very beginning. In your view, were those games not designed optimally?
SM: Well, we learn as we go along. We were a heartier breed back then. We thought this was cool. We bought this game, we’re going to see it to the end. I remember Doom. If you got killed, you were back to the beginning of the level. That was a hardcore game. That was a different experience. Today we have so many choices, whether we’re going to play a game or watch a DVD. There are so many different things we can do, that I think we have to be a little more sensitive to the player, get him involved much quicker, make sure that there are not that many opportunities for them to say, “OK, now I gotta stop.” You want to keep them playing. So we have more competition, we know more, and I think the expectations are higher, so we need to live up to those.
IG: During the Q&A you said something about how you’re not a fan of morally gray choices in games. I was thinking that having game designers present that gray area... isn’t that a sign of the maturation of gaming as a medium? If you look at movies, not everything is black and white in a movie. The director will deliberately have something be in that gray area and you’re saying you’re not a fan of it, but you could almost look at it as a necessity for games to go in that direction.
SM: I guess I don’t see it that way. I think that if you’re watching a movie or reading a book, you are following somebody else’s story; you’re trusting them to take you to a satisfactory conclusion. You understand that somebody is guiding that journey and that you’re just along for the ride. My concern about these morally ambiguous choices is that I think as a player you’re constantly evaluating, ”How much more am I going to play? Am I going to continue to play or move on to something else?” I think if you’re faced with these things where you’re not sure if you’re going in the right direction - “Have I made a bad decision? Am I going to end up playing a few more hours and find out I’m in some sort of dead end because I made that decision?” - I think that plants the seed in the player’s mind of, “Maybe I should stop. Maybe I shouldn’t go much further.”
The whole question of games as art and subtlety and making people cry and all that stuff is an interesting one, but I think it starts to more and more focus the attention on the game designer and it becomes more about story and less about the player. Our focus is always to allow the player to be the hero, the star, the driving force in the games, and so we’re not really about telling our story; it’s about telling the player’s story. I think a lot of times these morally ambiguous artsy choices are more about the designer stepping up and saying, “Hey, I’m going to do something cool. Just watch me here.” The player is left out of that process and has to try to pick up the pieces because the designers come in and blur the picture for them. That’s just not my style of game design.
IG: Is it such a bad thing, though, for the designer to be the focus in certain cases? Obviously for you, you have the recognition, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto have the recognition, but then there are a lot of very hard working video game developers in this industry who don’t get that recognition. The publisher takes the spotlight; the developer takes a backseat. In Hollywood at least, you have the brand name that’s out there, whether it’s Spielberg or Peter Jackson or James Cameron or any of the big names. So the actual filmmakers seem to get credit while the game makers I think are struggling to get that recognition. If you put the designer at front at times, maybe that helps...
SM: I certainly think that the designers ought to be recognized for their efforts. What I’m talking about is more like in the middle of a game, the designer popping up and saying, “Hey, didn’t I design a cool game here?” At the end of the game, hopefully you say, “That was really cool. I wonder who designed that. I want to play another one of their games.” But by popping up in the middle of the game, you disrupt that suspension, that disbelief, and the player in their mind says, “Oh, yeah, there’s this designer and I’m not really in control here. It’s not really about me; it’s about the designer. What is he going to do next? When is going to pop up next?” I don’t think to get recognition a designer needs to be in your face, because at the end of the day that detracts from the overall experience and you’re probably going to say, “Now I know who that designer is and I don’t want to play any more of that person’s games because it‘s not allowing me to do what I want to do. It‘s kind of forcing me to follow the path that this designer is laying out for me.”
IG: Let’s talk a little bit about the Civ Network. What was the main attraction to you for going in that direction and what are you hoping to achieve?
SM: What happened really was that two or three years ago we talked about bringing Civilization to the console, and we realized we had to make some pretty interesting changes to the game to do that; we weren’t really sure whether or not it would work. So that was a neat journey, a neat adventure for me, to take Civilization and its core concepts and make them work in a console world. That’s been pretty cool and has allowed us to do some new things and achieve some things in a new way, and for me it was almost a homecoming to the Civilization world. When we thought about the world of Facebook and the new possibilities that that brings, it was the same sort of challenge for me: to keep all the core, cool things of Civilization, but take advantage of what this new technology offers - the idea of playing together with friends, having a variety of play schedules where people are playing a little bit, a lot, different times. How do you make that work? How do you give people opportunities to play together cooperatively? When you’re in the world with your friends, you want a different kind of gameplay experience potentially than if you’re playing against people you don’t know or if you’re playing by yourself. To allow all these different things in the world of Civilization - competitive play, cooperative play, individual play, or synchronous and asynchronous play, where you’re playing at the same time as somebody else, playing at a different time as somebody else - those are fascinating problems to me as a designer. That was the challenge of Civilization Network, to take this brand new technology, this new way of playing games, and take what’s cool about Civilization and marry the best of those together and come up with something unique.
IG: Looking at this explosive field of social gaming, is that something that you think is really the new frontier? Is that more the future of this industry? The cost of development for a console or PC game, the traditional video game sector that we look at, is just enormous, whereas Facebook is almost like a return to the old days of the arcade, where you can create games for relatively little cost. The risk is low because of that, and it allows people to experiment a bit more and see what sticks. Do you see that as the future of this industry, almost returning to its roots?
SM: I think it’s a new frontier. I don’t think it replaces any other forms of gaming. It just is attractive to a different type of gamer. You’re not going to see hard core gamers switching in totality over to social gaming or iPhone gaming or whatever it is, but you’re certainly correct in that there’s a lot of new outlets for gaming, whether it’s iPhone applications – again, a lower development cost – Facebook applications, browser games, all these things. It just enriches the world of gaming as opposed to one thing replacing the other. But it is the new frontier I think. It’s a place where we’re still discovering the rules, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, what’s the audience. That’s probably what makes it very exciting for me, is to be part of exploring the frontier and trying out different things that haven’t been done before and see how they work in this new world. But I think we, every year or two, we do see a new – whether it’s the Wii a couple of years back, or iPhone gaming or Xbox Live – there’s always a new opportunity. Gaming is just growing into more and more different areas without really leaving behind any of the existing ways of playing.
IG: What to me sort of validates the social gaming space is that really high profile people such as yourself, and Richard Garriott, who now just started Portalarium, and of course your friend Brian Reynolds is one of the chief guys at Zynga…so these people are almost migrating away from the traditional space to go into social gaming or iPhone gaming.
SM: I think it’s that frontier aspect that does kind of remind us of the early days, when we were experimenting, when we tried out lots of new things. I think that is part of the appeal. And the development cycles aren’t as long, and kind of more designer focused in many ways and I think that…compared to the size team that’s required for a console game or a PC game, it’s a little more dynamic situation in social gaming. It makes it fun for designers in that way. By the same token, a lot of cool new energy is going into Civ 5 – a lot of cool new ideas are there. It’s just a great time to be a game designer.
1 Comments
May 4, 2010
I think Sid took a look also at eRepublik.com when thinking about Civ Network. :)
All those gameplay (and not only gameplay) problems he spots and all those opportunities are indeed huge.