Some of you might have read a week or so ago about Guillermo del Toro's game Insane being cancelled after all players got was a teaser shown at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, this reminded me of another cancelled game by an acclaimed film director Steven Spielberg titled LMNO. What is the connection with film directors attempting to create a story driven video game and ultimately the games never seeing the light of day? To be fair Spielberg did have his hands in another game that did release and is a nice little surprise for anyone who owns a Nintendo Wii, Bloom Blox give it a shot but one will see there is no story being told but merely a mix of Tetris, Duck Hunt, and a version of Jenga in which the players goal is to knock the tower down, fun but not the story driven games both of these directors would have hoped to be their debut into the gaming median.
Above is a target video of what Spielberg was hoping to achieve with LMNO, the player is in control of a character who is transporting an escaped alien in search of a way to take them home (ET with more action) but the main fault this video demonstrates is Spielberg wanting too much control over the player perspective. Assuming this game was meant to be in the first person as the video shows what actions would the player carry out? The player looks at a flower, pushes a button to interact with it pushing it towards their alien companion and then the simple punch in the face of an enemy. What? That's it? The player pushes two buttons, everything else in this is Spielberg wanting too much control, controls where the player is looking, now will the player will out the window to see that government shady van coming? Possibly, with the ride visual and audio ques it can be done but watching their companion flipping and going along the lights of this diner is ultimately unrealistic unless Spielberg controls where they are looking.
Go ahead and check out this trailer for the upcoming moving The Prototype which inspired today's post, it revolves around the design of a robotic droid by the military that malfunctions and ultimately escapes its holding facility, just like the designers in this film they are learning like Spielberg and del Toro that you can not create what you don't understand. Designing games is about giving up an amount of control, you can craft a beautiful story but in comparison to writing a film every action sequence must translate to a player with a controller in their hand, a designer simply gives them puzzle pieces to interact with the world in hopefully the way the designer intended and if not hopefully in a way that the player enjoys. Check out Bloom Blox while you are it as well and see Spielberg cater his ideas to pure fun instead of attempting to direct the actions of the player to tell a crafted story.
No comments:
Post a Comment