Flower Power
Kellee went to GDC Europe last week – where discussion of TGC’s Flower began with the David Cage’s keynote talk on meaning in games:
Cage said, baldly: “Most games have no meaning”, and games don’t generally have anything to say — “you just spend some time getting excited shooting and jumping”, most of the time.
The Quantic Dream head added that he believed that games’ narrative structure is broken. As opposed to simultaneous narration and action in movies and books, cut-scenes split up the action in games. So, Cage concluded: “No-one cares about the story because nobody is there for the story.”
He added that most game characters must be close to caricature — to look like what they are. They also tend to need a simple goal, and need to look good for a teenager. In contrast, many movie characters have a background, a motivation, have relationships, and are created to generate empathy.
In further controversy, Cage suggested that, most of the time, game art is mediocre compared to other art forms. But some games can compare because they have “developed the emotional side”, he said, citing Ico, Shadow Of The Colossus, Rez, Katamari Damacy, and Flower.
So, said Cage, we have some decisions to make. Shouldn’t we start thinking about social emotions, if we want to evolve? “Do we want to be toys, or art?”, he asked provocatively. “Maybe there are books that you’ve read that have changed who you are.” Shouldn’t games do similarly?
How about the sandbox versus the rollercoaster? Contrasting with CCP’s EVE Online talk earlier in the day, Cage feels that, since “nobody conceived this experience for you,” it may fall flat. Whereas, in the rollercoaster, you can’t go wherever you want, but “someone designed the experience for you to be optimal.”
These are two different approaches, and Cage believes that the rollercoaster is the one he tends towards. Why? Because people want to play for just 20 minutes at a time, not necessarily for many hours or to find there’s nobody in the sandbox to play with.
How about journey vs. achievement? Cage said he believes many adults care more about the journey, with emotional highs and lows carefully mapped out, and cited Flower as a great example of that.
Kellee continued this discussion in her own talk – a postmortem of the Flower development process that highlighted the team’s search for meaningful gameplay that provides players emotional shelter – instead of the typical frustration/reward cycles in many game designs:
Santiago said that what the team found out is that “sometimes, hard fun is the enemy”, and going towards known mechanics can actually be a handicap. She said that fun is just a small subset of possible mechanics, and that Flower was carefully tuned to give the player an engaging journey.
This in-game journey that players took in the downloadable PlayStation 3 game wasn’t necessarily a conventional one, but was carefully managed to heighten emotional intensity by the game’s end.
The conclusion was that extremely rapid iteration and playtesting — whether in Processing, Flash, XNA, or PS3 — was what really helped to hone PSN standout Flower.
Great to see that the team’s efforts at pushing through a variety of mechanics to find the ones that supported their aesthetic goal has paid off – as it did with other games Cage mentioned in his talk (all personal favorites, as regular readers know). Three cheers for iteration, subtractive design, and the focus on player experiences! Here’s to continued efforts and new adventures!
:)
