http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9819&Itemid=59
By Colin Campbell
If you want to sit down and talk about games with Ken Levine, bring a packed lunch. He’ll happily talk all day long. When I went to see him, we only had 30 minutes but, somehow, that turned into an hour.We talked about plenty of specifics concerning gameplay, character, narrative, environment and so on. But mostly we talked about the nature of creativity. I think, one of the most revealing things we said came about halfway into the interview, when he talked about how the only way to succeed in making games is to truly “love” games and the game industry itself. He paid tribute, not only to those people directly involved in the success of Bioshock, but also to those who compete directly against it.
“People take small steps, right? I’ll make a small step, or Bioware will make a small step, or Uncharted will make a small step, and we all play each other’s games. One thing I love about the industry is the affection and love that different developers have for each other like when I see Cliffy or Ray and Greg or Chris Taylor or whoever. It’s not like Hollywood where people are constantly looking over each other’s shoulders.
“We are standing on the shoulder of giants. There’s this respect and love that allows us to be open to everybody else’s ideas and we benefit from everybody else’s ideas. Frankly we steal from each other all the time, but it’s better for everybody.”
So, anyway, we start off talking about the nature of character and the gamer’s relationship with the game and its character, and it goes off in different directions. Let’s run it as a straight Q&A, with the emphasis very much on A. I’ll just drop you right into Ken in full flow…
Levine: …one of the interesting things that happened in Bioshock is I never really thought about the main character. When I realized a little late in the game that we didn’t have a main character and that might be a problem, we tried to turn that weakness into a strength. The story evolved around the idea that ‘we don’t have an interesting identifiable main character’. So, let’s not have a main character. Let’s have him not even have a real identity.
The thing you’ve got to think about when you start a game is the core experience or fantasy you’re fulfilling. And that’s in gameplay and in narrative, in story, in setting. To me, Rock Band is the most pure example of fantasy, right? You see that box, you know exactly what it is and you know exactly what the fantasy is. Games aren’t about character, they are about the fantasy of being in a different place.
Next-Gen: Are you turned off game characters because they’re mostly so crappy and one-dimensional?
Levine: Spider-Man 2 as a piece of cult genre stuff is amazing because he’s going through this struggle with his enemies, but he’s really going through a struggle with himself, whether he wants to be a hero or not. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series of shows about her personal problems that is somehow tied into fighting vampires. Her personal life is mirrored in this large apocalyptic story.
The trouble with game characters, and quite often with movie characters too, is some guy just sort of wakes up one morning and goes ‘okay, what heroic thing am I doing today?’ One of the reasons I really liked God of War or the opening of God of War is, as much as it’s bombastic and muscle-headed, I thought it was beautiful the way they started with a guy who is at his lowest point. He’s going to commit suicide. It starts with a mystery. Who is this guy? Why is he committing suicide? What’s going on here?
So they took a very typical superhero muscle guy, and they filled him with complexity right from the beginning. Because big hero muscle guys aren’t usually about to kill themselves, right? They’re usually sitting at the bar and they get a call from star command and they go off to do their fucking job because what else are they going to do? They don’t have any lives outside of that, and I think that’s the problem with videogames. What’s their motivation, what’s driving them to do this, besides heroics?
Heroics are not something that comes naturally. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, you know. I don’t wake up every morning and say, what good can I do? I think ‘oh shit, I’ve got to have breakfast and then I’ve got to feed my family and then I’ve got to do all that other stuff’.
Next-Gen: Going back to character, do you approve of the trend to super-personalize your in-game character, and thereby leave the gamer to create their own in-game identities?
Levine: If you’re going to go for customization, you really have to go for customization and allow personalization in an incredible way. A little bit isn’t enough.
World of Warcraft has this incredible amount of customization. All this armor you can get, people dressing up, spending ridiculous amounts of gold to buy certain colored shirts.
Or you have to go the opposite direction and make a real decision and say the player is going to have this fantasy and be this guy.
Take Lara Croft. I always get annoyed when people talk about her being just about boobs. She was a character that always looked awesome no matter what she did. She would tumble, actually move a few steps before she would tumble so the tumble looked good, it didn’t look awkward, it didn’t look strange.
Now we’re getting to a place like with Uncharted where we have the technology where you can avoid having that programmatic Lara Croft stuff of having to wait until you get to a certain tile to jump, but you also have people moving and looking really good and looking really natural. I like the character in Uncharted. He’s not just the square jawed hero type. He gets nervous about things and he mutters under his breath. The characters have a little more shades of depth than ‘I’m going to get up in the morning to save the world’.
Next-Gen: You spend a lot of time playing games? How do you find the time?
Levine: I have a wonderful understanding wife and I stay up late and I don’t have a social life or friends.
I recently won this writing award and I got up to accept it and everyone was cheering and it was a really wonderful, amazing experience. My heart was lifted. After winning an award, most people go out to parties. I go back to my hotel room and I play WoW.
There’s this quest that I hadn’t done before where you complete a long quest chain and you’re in this building and they give you like a tabard and a new weapon. I turn around and I go outside, and they have programmed in the sequence where all these WoW characters are lined up cheering for you as you go out. And so I have this experience like in life and then I have this experience at home and I don’t know which one made me happier. They both made me so happy because games to me are a really primal part of my life. They’re just part of my life, I love them. Even before I was in the industry I was playing them. I play everything. You have to. I don’t know how you do it if you don’t love it because it’s tough. It’s a tough business and I’m lucky where I am.
Next-Gen: Now you’ve won all the awards. Luminaries are telling you how great you are. People are going to recognize you more at industry functions. People can become very critical. Does that put more pressure on you?
Levine: No. When you’re working in obscurity you can read all the things people are saying about you, you can get a sense of where you are and you feel like you know if somebody says something wrong, a lie about you or something wrong, you can do something about it. But look, when you become a little more public you’ve got to separate yourself from it.
People are going to be talking. Every day people are going to say something nasty about me. You have to be able to accept the fact that that’s just going to happen. You have to live with that and people are going to like what you do and people are going to hate what you do and the bigger you become, the more of a target you become.
But also, these guys are paying fifty, sixty dollars for our game, they have a right to fucking hate me if they’re not happy with that purchase. I think that’s reasonable. Well not hate me, that’s a little extreme, but you know, they have a right to be very disappointed.
Next-Gen: How are you getting on with 2K Games? Is the corporate life driving you crazy yet?
Levine: One thing I’ll say about 2K is that they believed in Bioshock and they believed in pretty much exactly the vision that we had for it.
There were very minor things they asked to be changed but in general it was the game we wanted to make. They didn’t freak out about the Little Sisters, they didn’t freak out about spending the money it took to make the game
You know corporations. Every corporation has their perks and every corporation has their benefits and every corporation is full of a lot of different people. They’re not single entities. So you know, there’s people I love and people who I just work with and we work together and I’m sure there are people who feel exactly the same way about me, but that’s natural in any company, you know?
Next-Gen: They supported a new IP, in a year when new IP was important, which was smart…
Levine: If you look at all these big titles, Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Portal, Mass Effect. What do they have in common? They’re all risky in their own way.
I was talking to Jade last night and she spoke about how they pitched this game, set in The Crusades, and people were like, ‘well where are the monsters?’ You’re not going to hear ‘Medieval assassin running around in a historically accurate period in the Crusades? Where do I sign’ or ‘Of course, an underwater, objectivist utopia. Sign me up.’
New generations of hardware give publishers a little bit of confidence that it’s important to launch new IPs even though publishers naturally are inclined to do the things that they understand. It’s hard to blame the marketing guy for trying to find a sure thing and for not taking a risk because, if you sign Bioshock and it tanks; you’re gone. But if you sign something that seems like a sure thing and it tanks, well who can blame you?
I was always surprised when more money came in to make Bioshock because I was like; do these guys actually know what the fuck we’re making because it’s weird.
Next-Gen: Do you feel that, with Bioshock, you tapped into some cultural trends at the right time?
Levine: Do I look like a trend setter or predictor to you? I had no idea. I had no fucking idea. That’s news to me. I’m not at all in tune with that stuff. As I said, I’m in my room playing World of Warcraft.
I used to be a playwright, so one thing that I was always excited about when I was studying writing, was German expressionism of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Also, I have always been in love with New York and looking at those buildings. And when I grew up, my parents loved Broadway show music so I grew up listening to that period of music. So I just had a real affection for that period but it didn’t come about through identifying a trend.
It came about just through things that I had experienced my whole life. They’re all just swimming around in your head, and you pull a little from here and you pull a little from here. There’s no master plan.
Note: One of our colleagues from Edge Magazine participated in the interview, and you can read some more Ken Levine here at the Edge Blog. It’s a good feature in which he gets down to some detailed specifics about Bioshock’s design.
