CGDC '97 Roundtable Report

The idea for this roundtable came to me as I was pondering a question put to me during my job interview by George Broussard, president of 3D Realms. This is essentially what he said: "We expect Prey to be the most over-the-top, violent game ever created... do you have a problem with that?" I found myself pondering the question for the next few weeks. Is the path to the desired end simply paved with more buckets of blood, or is there something more significant involved? From those questions, the roundtable topic was born.

During each session, I began by asking this question: "When you see a game advertisement boasting an 'Over the Top' experience, what does that mean to a potential player?" In each of the three sessions, the response was consistent-it implies more blood, buckets and buckets of blood littered with gore. We next probed to discover our common definition of the term "visceral." The responses varied wildly, but by and large, the key points were this-"visceral" was not necessarily a synonym for "violent," and a "visceral experience" was a powerful experience (and very rare, in PC games to date) which was usually associated with some sort of physiological reaction (trembling gut, tightening sphincter, etc.).

With the groundwork in place, we then set out to explore just what made up a "visceral gaming experience." We created an imaginary game that we were all collaborating on, and began brainstorming. We wanted this game to leave the player exhausted, frightened and exhilarated (from having survived it). What, then, could we employ to create such an experience?

Our dialogue centered around the action and adventure game genres, and our "thought experiment" was a first-person perspective game. Distilling the key points from the three sessions, we came up with the following observations:

*The implication of serious violence is often more disturbing than the actual representation of a violent act (but to "imply well" means showing that you're serious-an example that came up in two sessions was the movie "Bound"-when Jennifer Tilly was threatened with "finger amputation," we all knew it was serious, because it was actually done, and represented, earlier in the film).

*The player must truly feel that something is at stake for his game-bound alter ego (In each session, someone always brought up the counter example of multiplayer Quake, a fun experience indeed, but nothing is at stake, nothing at risk for the player, so it degrades into an arcade-like experience rather than a truly visceral experience).

*To enhance the "much is at stake here" feeling, a true alter-ego, with personality, is far more effective that a nameless identity.

*A problem that we really couldn't solve: arbitrary save games allow the player to play at his own pace, but really mess up the notion that something very real is at stake (after all, you can just restore after a goof).

*When you do show extreme violence, show it sparingly, but make it very intense and don't shy away from realism.

*The aural effect had often been overlooked or underutilized in many games to date-effective use of sound can convey a great deal of mood.

*Try to shy away from breaking the "flow of interaction"-cinematics are pretty, but often throw the player out of the "vivid and continuous dream" (to quote John Gardner) that we've carefully crafted.

Two things stood out in my mind as I thought about the roundtable sessions. First, I was surprised to find out that hardly any of the attendees found the level of violence in games today offensive. Though nearly all argued that simply throwing more blood at a violent game wouldn't cut it anymore as a means to "up the intensity."

The second thing that really encouraged me was how the attendees had really thought through this problem prior to the roundtable. I got the very real sense that developers are really learning their craft and are realizing what it takes, in very concrete terms, to deliver an even more visceral gaming experience for our players.