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| - After asking me to fix any grammatical errors he might make when I transcribe our interview, I assure Denis Dyack that I always try to make the people I'm interviewing sound as smart as possible. "That might be a tough one," he responds. Thankfully, he joins me in laughing a few seconds later. The joke is funny because Dyack knows he's smart, unrepentantly and aggressively intelligent in an industry that isn't always kind to people who want to have a discourse above a high school level. Then again, Dyack is used to defending his viewpoint on games. In a GDC panel on the "future of videogame storytelling," he debated with six other panelists, in particular defending his high concept approach against the more middle-brow, appeal-to-the-masses ideals of Saber Interactive's Matthew Karch. We were so enthralled by Dyack's eloquent and passionately-expressed ideas from the panel that we caught up with him last week to go over some of his thoughts on where videogames are headed in the near and distant future. Our discussion began by revisiting his recent appearance on the 1UP Yours podcast. Denis Dyack: Sure, there's actually one correction I'd like to make. When I listened to the podcast, I knew I missed something. When you have that many people in the room, it doesn't sound like it, but it's really hard to understand what it's like -- essentially it was chaos in the room. Because the one-console idea is such a complex issue, I really wish at some level that I would have -- well, it would have boring as sh** for everyone -- but to go through the very structured talks that I do. Dyack: One of the things that I said... it kind of got cut off, and it kind of got lost in translation, I guess. I made the point that a lot of people think that technology changes their lives, and I said that's not always true. Well, actually, that part is true. What I meant to say is that a lot of people make the assumption that technology is going to improve or make your lives better. That's what's not true. When we look at these consoles, they're always sold as something that's going to somehow change our lives for the better. Technology in general affects us drastically. It really has invaded our lives almost wholly, completely, but it is definitely not always for the better. As far as making us able to do more things, it is an enabler, but at the same time, how many people really work only from nine to five now? Studies have shown that people are working on average more than they were in the past with the increase of technology. If people see technology as generally a freeing thing, they probably should look at it from more of a historical perspective. I really see technology in many cases as enslaving. I'm not saying technology is evil, but we have to understand how it affects us. The other thing that we didn't really get a chance to touch base on is commoditization. I'd highly recommend everyone look at the Wikipedia entry for that. Commoditization is related to performance oversupply, which we also didn't get to talk about on the podcast. Performance oversupply means technology is giving people more than what they need, which in turn means that technology is losing its value socially. You can see it with cell phones when they started to do more and more things. You can send texts, listen to music, watch videos, take pictures, all that kind of stuff. With the consoles it's other stuff, like being online. Sony's Home service is a really good example of where I think consoles are moving toward performance oversupply. It's really questionable if people need Home as an interface. A lot of work is going into it, and it's really hard, but do gamers need that? Whenever you start seeing performance oversupply it means that particular type of market is moving towards a commoditized market. We're giving the consumers more than what they need, and people are going to start caring less and less. Dyack: Absolutely. 1UP: So how do you envision this actually coming about? Dyack: Everyone needs to firmly understand that the console manufacturers have a closed model. If they win market dominance, it moves the market toward a monopoly, because it's not an open, competitive market. If Nintendo wins 95% of the market, it definitely becomes a monopoly, because if they control the hardware, they control everything else. The current parties who are involved in pushing forward closed systems will never want a single-console future, because it goes against the current business model that they're trying to apply. What I'm saying is going to happen is that the economics of the industry will not continue to support multiple closed models. It's too difficult, it's becoming too expensive to create games, and eventually -- it's really switched from back in the really early days of the NES, when people would do almost anything to get a Nintendo license to work on the hardware. Now look at Grand Theft Auto IV and how Microsoft is paying lots of money to get it as an exclusive or even just get it on their system. Those kind of market forces, the actual economics, are really going to change things. Not only are the third parties going to want a single console, I think eventually the first parties are going to start considering it. They're spending a tremendous amount of money on research and development, and if they can't win their closed market competition, then they might look at it and say, "Is this really worth it?" like Sega has in the past. It's not a matter of console manufacturers wanting to change, it's a matter of whether the economy of the videogames industry can continue to support the current model. If you talk to developers and publishers, you see a lot of groups disappearing now, a lot of closures of developers, because the economy is so hard. If all the third parties go away, there's not going to be a games industry, so something's got to give somewhere. Dyack: Yeah, if you look at the history of technology, there has been no technology that comes to my mind from all the research I've done that has not become commodotized. So when I say it's an eventuality, history's on my side. Whether it happens today, five years from now, ten years from now -- this is from looking at 2,000 years of historical records on all types of technology: the printing press, cars, cell phones. People make the mistake of thinking a one-console future means that all the consoles will be exactly the same. That's not necessarily true; it just means they follow a standard. Using cars as an example, people steer cars with a wheel, and there's a pedal to go. That's an open marketplace. These kinds of standards are what we need for videogames, because they doesn't really exist right now. I think it will happen, and I think it will be good for the industry when it does. It will mean cheaper games, cheaper consoles, and more competition. Dyack: We actually have a developer diary where we talk about engagement theory and flow and about our theories on how to make videogames. It's all based around this thing we call engagement theory, which is written like a formula: "engagement >= story + technology + gameplay + artwork + audio." If you raise all those things equally to the highest possible level, they become greater than the sum of their parts, and you engage and immerse people into something where they really lose track of time. That theory is the complete focus and structure of the company. Those five areas all have directors and departments. As an example, on Too Human, I'm the overall director. Then there's a content director, Ken McCulloch. He and I have written the stories for all of the Silicon Knights games since the early 1990s. We've got a technology director, a couple of artwork directors, an audio director, and a gameplay director. All those departments interact and communicate with each other equally, because we feel all those parts are equally viable. A lot of companies don't consider music that important; well, we have in-house audio directors here. We think all of those are important. By taking that stance, we feel that we can create content that's well-balanced and more than the sum of its parts. Dyack: No, it doesn't. We're always iterating. We're always evolving the content. Don't think the content department does just story, either. I think I said it at the panel, but we think videogames are the eighth art form. The seventh art form is a term used to refer to film, because film combined spatial mediums and cerebral mediums; it combined previous art forms like ballet and painting and other more traditional art forms. The content department focuses on a lot of those things. Essentially all the cinematographers, the camera guys, are part of the content group, because you can tell a story through the language of film with a certain shot, without having any dialogue. Whatever it takes to tell the story in the game, that group concentrates on, and they are busy from beginning to end just like all the other departments. People mistakenly think our content department is made up of someone who writes the script. That is true, but it's not even close to all-encompassing of what this group does. Dyack: Another good example of how you can tell story in a videogame: our content group sits down with our art directors, and, take the first level in Too Human. The colors in the level go from deep blues to deep reds to build tension. That art palette is decided on by the art directors and the story tellers and the game designers. They all get together and decide how the colors will progress from the beginning of a level to the end of a level in order to build tension as you reach the boss fight. That's one of the things the content group works toward. I think that process is the future. I'm not saying we're defining the future, but I think that type of iteration is going to bring videogames to the next level. As more groups start doing those kind of things, you're really going to see the games industry evolve. Dyack: Really what that speaks to is the struggle people have between gameplay being the absolute dominant force. I've said that I don't think gameplay is the all-encompassing force in videogames versus content and storytelling. If you look at film as an example, in the early days of film, people were just happy to see moving pictures. Trains going in to the camera, dames getting rescued out of burning buildings, all that kind of stuff was all that people cared about. You've got to start looking at ideas of ludology and various non-digital games people play, like sports and puzzle games and chess, and I think what you'll start to see is a merging of those concepts. I think as we become more content-dominated, then we're going to see these genres opening up more. One of the things that really bothered me when I made Eternal Darkness is that everyone classified us as survival-horror. We wanted to make a horror game that wasn't a "survival" game. That's what we set out to make, but of course we were perceived as a survival-horror. We never really broke that until you actually played the game. If they never played it, people just thought it was another Resident Evil, which was very frustrating for us. So puzzle games will probably become more content-based. Take 7th Guest as an example. To me, that's either a mystery or a horror game. You can wrap some puzzle elements around it, but I played 7th Guest only for the story. It's kind of ironic, because one of the speakers on the GDC panel with me actually wrote 7th Guest. Dyack: I haven't had a chance to play that yet, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. Dyack: Well, now I'll check it out for sure. Back in 1996, I did a talk at GDC, basically around the concept of engagement theory. I talked about my hypothesis on what I think people should do to make good games, and I presented engagement theory, opened it up. I said two things that apparently pissed people off. You've got to remember, back in 1996, Doom was hot, and everyone was trying to make a first-person shooter. I said, "If you base all of your games on technology, you're doomed." People didn't like that, they thought I was making fun of [John] Carmack and id. That wasn't true, actually, I just thought it was a bad direction for everyone to try and go. My idea was that there can only be one group that's best at technology, and it's probably going to be id, so developers should maybe really think about taking another direction. The other thing I said was that there's a school of thought that gameplay is absolutely everything when it comes to selling games. I tried to think up examples where the gameplay was extraordinarily weak, but the game sold extraordinarily well. 7th Guest came up, because I didn't think the gameplay in those puzzles was good at all. I just thought they were... puzzles. Some were good, some were bad, but I played that game to the end, and it sold a lot of copies. The other game that came to mind was Myst, where the gameplay, in my opinion, is pretty weak. So I looked at those, and then I looked at Mario and Zelda and all those games that have great gameplay in the Nintendo world, and then I looked at all the tech-heavy games like Doom. I came up with this idea that if one area of the five from engagement theory is so strong, a game can still do really well, but in the end it's all about an engaging experience, whatever you can do to engage people. I also talked about flow back then. At the Austin GDC, man, I was so disappointed. I went to this one talk about one of the Ubisoft games, called "Designing Flow in Games." The guy who was talking said, "I'm really starting to look at getting flow into our level design and our story, because I really think there's something here, but someone beat me to it." I thought he was referencing one of my talks, but he was actually just joking about the game flOw from Sony. One of the problems with our industry is that there's no bed of research to rely upon, and there's not a consistent flow of ideas. It's almost like we're on this archipelago, each with our own islands, and no one can talk to people. With GDC and all these other conferences, we really need to make these places for people to talk and discuss. It really bothers me at these conferences when people start selling their games. That sets a really bad precedent. There's so much to learn and so much potential in our industry, I think we should focus on striving for it. I know that's a super-long answer, so I hope it hit on the right things.
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