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View Full Version : Interview With a Genius: Tim Schafer!



Brevity
05-10-2003, 12:27 PM
Source: Gamestudies

Celia Pearce: How do you see the relationship and the role of story in games?

Tim Schaefer: Games have always stressed story a lot. Besides being the part that interests me most creatively, stories also really motivational for the player, to pull you through the experience. Puzzles can be challenging, but I know I go through games a lot of times because I want to see the characters through, to solve their problems, find that character who was kidnapped and see them through to the end. So, it's about motivation.

CP: In many of your games, there is some sort of dilemma that the main character is presented with at the onset of the game that propels the story forward. Often, the dilemma is very "gamey" if you will. How do you establish a dilemma that will motivate the characters through the game?

TS: I think you have to do two things at once. You have to provide the character with motivation and you have to provide the player with motivation. Because the character will care about things that the player will not necessarily care about.

CP: Like what? Can you give some examples?

TS: Well, you end up doing these little bribes with the player. Like in Psychonauts, the new game, you're a kid at the Psychic Summer Camp. There's a girl, Lilly, at the Psychic Summer Camp with you, and she gets kidnapped. And Raz, the player character, really likes Lilly, and he wants to go off and save her. But you don't know if the player really cares because he could just run and jump around and explore the camp and never go off and find her. And so you want to make sure that Lilly actually gives you some cool power or some cool tool in the beginning of the game, as a way to bribe the player to strengthen their empathy. You can't just rely on the story empathy, you have to put in little gameplay bribes, to make them like that character and want to pursue her.

CP: It sounds like you think about the player as a character too, in a way.

TS: I'm always trying to think of a way to describe the model for what we do. People compare it to film or Dungeons and Dragons, or something like that. There are these plays in L.A. where the play is set in this house, and you go from room to room following the actors around. You can hear a scene or not hear a scene. You can go to it multiple times and it's always different. Because if you weren't upstairs at that moment in the story you don't know who killed so-and-so.

CP: You mean Tamara?

TS: Yes. That's a little closer in some way than a movie. You're interacting with it. It's more like The Last Express, which is very similar. Because you can do it again and again, and every time, you miss something. Some games are more like the Haunted House ride at Disneyland, where you're moving through on a track, looking around. That's more like a rail shooter. I think of the games that I work on as being more like a hunted house—the kind you go to for Halloween—something that's been arranged for your entertainment, but more sophisticated, with a plot. You go in and a mummy jumps out of the closet and grabs you, but it's strung together with a plot involving the mummy. But even that's not exactly what's going on, because when you go to that house, you're just you, not a character.

So it's kind of like you're showing up that play, Tamara, and you have a part in it, and you know some of your lines, and you're trying to wing it with the rest of the actors. And they're trained in improv, so they react to you in a way that hopefully holds the fantasy together.

CP: The characters in your games have a quality of being comically heroic, like Guybush Threepwood in Monkey Island, who is a Danny Kaye type of character. You know, sort well-intended, clumsy but endearing the same time.

TS: Actually, we went through a big change over that. The first two games I worked on, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, had these characters - (Bernard Bernouli) and Guybush Threepwood who were these kind of "loveable losers" who kept messing up. That's a plot device that's used over and over again in movies - you solve a problem, but then that actually causes this huge catastrophe, and than you fix that problem, and you get kind of a snowball effect.

CP: And a lot of times the solving of the problem is itself a sort of slapstick endeavor, like the whole business in Grim Fandango where you have to put the birdseeds, and the balloons, and then get the birds to pop the balloons. Half the time it's also kind of comical in its own way.

TS: (Laughs) Maybe that's more of a personal style. (Laughs) Maybe these are all based on yourself in some way.

CP: Usually, I can only play most games for like a half an hour, and then I get bored. But these are games I really played a lot, particularly Grim Fandango and Monkey Island. What I like about them is that the story is not gratuitous to the game play, or vice versa. Everything that happens tells you about the character. It's all integrated, it's not like a story slapped on top of a shooter game, you know what I mean?

TS: Right. And that's what we strive for, because the story is separate from the plot. It's not like a boring cut-scene intro to a level, a long cinematic that you watch before the actual game. I know it's always tempting for me as a writer to put those scenes in and make them long and beautiful, like movies. But that's the biggest challenge—my goal creatively would be someday to make a game with all the story elements that didn't have any cut-scenes in it at all, which is really, really hard.

CP: I give that as a parameter to my students in their game design assignments.

TS: No cut-scenes?

CP: No cut-scenes.

TS: (Laughs) You're kidding.

CP: And they whine and carry on. But they make better games.



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