Warren Spector calls "failure" on Uncharted and other big hits: does he have a point?

One of the first posts I've written for Videogames Beyonder was about Warren Spector and his 'One City Block' design dream - I'm going to translate that one from the original italian text soon, as it's a very interesting description of some of the highest objectives attainable in the realm of game making. And I'm happy to return to Spector in the wake of his PAX Aus 2015 keynote, where he made a distinction between "low", "medium" and "high expression games" based on players' agency and the potential for emerging, unpredicted situations. For instance fighting games, sport games and sandbox experiences (Dishonored, Fallout, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, The Sims are explicitly mentioned) would fall into the high expression category, while things like Uncharted and Heavy Rain would respectively be low and medium affairs.

Taking such successful brands and associating them with a "low rate of expression" has caused a bit of unease among the fans, as if Spector was trying to imply that certain genres were somehow "better" than others. While some of his words about Uncharted suggested that this was not the case...

"It's not that games like these are bad, but they limit your ability to interact with the game world, so the story can unfold the way the storyteller wants it to unfold.
You have very limited ability to express yourself; it's about how you accomplish a predetermined path to get to the next plot point.
It's a great story - a better story than I'll ever tell in a game - but it's not a player story; it's not your story."

 ... some others weren't chosen as wisely, causing an apparent contradiction:

"If all you want to do is show off how clever you are, get out of my medium! Go make a movie or something, because that's what you should be doing."

Game developers are not required to be subtle or elegant, but such statements creates unnecessary friction rather than helping to get the real point of discussion across, and that is: certain genres are somehow better than others at doing what? There's no misinterpreting Spector here, as he talks about offering engagement through chances, variety and reiterated unpredictability, rather than an underlying scripted narrative that justifies the gameplay.

In fighting games, the moveset associated with a character is a tools allowing the players to build their own emerging narrative, match after match: the story you tell your friend about how you beat a boss or a strong contender online, is something the game creators may or may not have predicted. The same goes for RPGs and adventures where open mechanics (= interactions) can be used to resolve particular problems and puzzles in clever and unscripted ways.

Offering engagement through chances, variety
and reiterated unpredictability, rather than
an underlying scripted narrative
that justifies the gameplay

That's what it means "making the most out of the medium" in Spector's terms, which are quite a departure from the kind of experiences he is known for; storytelling is one of the original Deus Ex (2000) strong points after all*. With the rise in computing power for both PCs and consoles, a merge of complex IA and physics could contribute towards making Spector's design dream a reality: games where the objectives are only loosely defined, and the players can use the world rules to attend them while weaving a deeply personal, active and surprising narrative all along.  

Sounds rather futuristic, right? Maybe not that much, but there's no denying the need for extensive (and expensive!) research on how the underlying systems of such games should work, and that's something that is simply not possible in the current AAA space without a radical change of philosophy from the publishers - call it courage if you will. If anything, it should be up to people like Spector to find ways to carry on such research, possibly within the scope of smaller projects: his assertions at PAX Aus may be interpreted as a wake up call to whoever has similar ambitions at heart, but the monetary problem remains.

Nowadays, it is much easier and cost effective to tie specific gameplay systems into rigid (or semi-rigid) scripts, and there's actually nothing wrong with that - both Uncharted and The Walking Dead are compelling experiences that people loves AND expects to spend a finite amount of time with. Their existence has perfectly valid commercial and design reasons, in spite of a scope that is barely comparable to what Spector would aim at - a goal that is unquestionably worth pursuing somehow.

* Quite curiously, one title that better aligns with Spector's recent views would be Thief: The Dark Project (1998), a particularly gameplay-centric experience that he produced until the mid-1997, when he dropped out of Looking Glass Austin to set up Ion Storm: in the words of project director Greg LoPiccolo, the goal in Thief was to "build a type of simulator where object interactions are correct and physics are tied in correctly". Lead designer Jeff Yaus wanted everything in the game to "behave as it should. For example, things that burn will burn, and then is up to the player to burn things, whether or not we've anticipated it" (sources: Wikipedia's "Thief: The Dark Project" and "Warren Spector" entries).

Should you be interested, here's Naughty Dog's timid response to Spector's opinion about Uncharted

Amy Hennig va via da Naughty Dog. Cosa significa per lo studio?

In questo momento della giornata, gran parte di voi saprà già cosa è accaduto presso Naughty Dog: l'acclamata Amy Hennig, sceneggiatrice di Uncharted e di Legacy of Kain, ha abbandonato lo studio americano e con esso, lo sviluppo della quarta avventura di Nathan Drake. Una notizia già eclatante di per sé, ma corroborata da una speculazione secondo cui l'abbandono sarebbe stato causato da Neil Druckmann e Bruce Straley, responsabili di The Last of Us. Gran parte delle reazioni sul Web recano il segno del disappunto e del sospetto, ed è naturale chiedersi cosa possa essere accaduto di così grave da portare ad una conseguenza tanto estrema.

Chi sinora ha avuto la curiosità di seguire i vari dietro le quinte di Uncharted e The Last of Us, sa che Naughty Dog ha una struttura orizzontale: ogni progetto ha i suoi responsabili, certo, ma tutti i membri dello staff sono liberi di esprimere la propria opinione qualora ritengano che uno o più aspetti del lavoro non funzionino a dovere. La sede della software house consta di un grande spazio aperto dove le postazioni dei dipendenti non sono fisicamente separate, per cui ad esempio, un grafico può tranquillamente raggiungere un programmatore e dirgli "è possibile implementare/ modificare/ eliminare questo?", e viceversa. Esiste un rapporto molto diretto tra i dipendenti.

Nonostante il rischio di confronti accesi, Evan Wells e Christophe Balestra hanno scelto questa impostazione perché a loro parere, consente di risolvere al volo buona parte dei problemi inerenti alla realizzazione di un videogioco, talvolta addirittura trovando soluzioni più brillanti rispetto a quelle degli stessi game directors. Che in Naughty Dog siano potute emergere differenze creative tra la Hennig, Druckmann e Straley è quindi più che probabile; tutt'altro paio di maniche è ritenere che ad un certo punto, il duo di The Last of Us abbia detto alla Hennig "sei fuori", come suggerisce IGN. Solo i presidenti possiedono questa autorità, ed una decisione di tale portata dev'essere stata ponderata con attenzione da Wells e Balestra sulla scorta di cosa era meglio per Uncharted 4.    

A tal proposito diventa importante rilevare come Uncharted 2, universalmente ritenuto il miglior capitolo della serie, sia l'unico co-sceneggiato dal trio in questione. Anche Druckmann e Straley, dunque, conoscono bene la ricetta segreta del franchise, e poiché intraprendere una direzione più "oscura" rischierebbe di portare troppo vicini ai territori del nuovo Tomb Raider, questo dovrebbe infondere un po' di ottimismo riguardo alla possibilità che lo spirito originario di Uncharted venga preservato. In extrema ratio, l'abbandono di Amy Hennig potrebbe diventare l'opportunità di crescita che in tanti auspicavano, soprattutto chi ha patito la debolezza narrativa de L'Inganno di Drake.

Naughty Dog si affacciava al futuro da una posizione di forza, ma questo incidente di percorso riflette uno stato di precarietà che oramai interessa tutta l'industria del videogioco, un ambiente nel quale cambiamenti e decisioni drastiche costituiscono la norma giornaliera.