I'm surprised that a lot of focus was put on that silly Chainsaw Lollipop comment rather than other things he said that irked me a bit. (Then again, it is probable the guy is SLIGHTLY spiteful against a ridiculous game that stomped his…but for a good reason).
I didn't watch through all 20 minutes of this, but there was a comment that games should be "relevant" and he kinda tied that with how one "experiences" a game. 3.The problem with this, only a few good studios can pull this off and it happens to be the ones with decent writing staffs. If you don't do a good job with it, the game will come off as pretentious, annoying, or even amateurish. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with a game that is strictly fun like Chainsaw Lollipop. Only a very FEW games should be like Heavy Rain and Walking Dead because that is what makes them special. 1.If about 80% of the games were presented like these two, I would be bored of gaming really quickly. 2.The highest priority for games should be the "fun factor" (entertainment and playability) and not whatever Spector is saying about relevancy. That goes in the narrative and that is secondary to having a good interface. That's exactly why people liked Lollipop Chainsaw…
Though he did make one relevant comment:
"You learned you have no time to make mistakes anymore. You learn to be overanalytic."
A good value for a studio that flopped after screwing up with Epic Mickey.
1. First of all that's not the point, it's not about having the market be composed of 80% of those type of games it's more of pushing towards a diverse market where those type of games become as normal as any other type of game(because right now they aren't they're the special rarity while you get flooded with action and shooter games). I mean how many heavy rain clones do we have right now? Mmmh…
Second of all how are you not bored of gaming already with so many games of the same type coming out every year right now? So voicing that concern towards someone pushing for more diversity in themes seems somewhat weird. So many games always being designed after the same principle with the same idea of empowerment of the player. Also david cage and jenova chen don't promote gameplay mechanics, it's not about hey look how heavy rain or journey plays and make more game like them. It's about the idea of design behind them, one putting story in the forefront the other of putting emotion in the forefront. Trying to adapt those philosphies does not necessarily mean walking dead/heavy rain/journey clones until the end of time it just means having a different focus on a different set of problems. Those can be solved very differently depending on the team or heck crazy idea, we put those things in the forefront and marry them with the existing expertise of empowerment mechanics and things like spec ops come to be.
As for his original point he meant relevant to all people in some form like how movies and music are. Which just means not just making games that fullfill the empowerment fantasy but making games about things like being a parent, pregnancy, depression etc, etc. Things everday people get.
2. I strongly disagree, putting the "fun factor" before everything else is the exact thing that has been limiting game design and as a result game types.
What should be the focus is the "engagement factor", as an interactive medium I feel like(and I recognize that this may differ from person to person) that we have the highest capacity for engagement. Also this doesn't mean games can't be fun anymore and they have to be all serious and make statements, no tetris is a damn engaging game and as a result arguably pretty fun, it's just a broader perspective that developers should be encouraged to take. Allowing them to approach making games from other angles.
3. Also highly arguable, seriously the reason why we don't have more games like this is more likely than not publishers not wanting to take the risk.
Why fund something like heavy rain(being a somewhat untapped market) when you can have your team make assassin creeds(fits into the established market), just from a risk/return perspective? And if you notice many of the more interesting things have been either funded by sony(heavy rain, journey), come from indie developers(fez, braid) or come from smaller studios that have been dealing with that stuff for years(telltale/double fine). Also I'm not sure what "decent writing stuff" even means within the industry. We have strong authorial figures like david cage, who writes entire scripts before starting to work on the game or ken levine who does a more "on process" iterative aproach. Then we have amy henning who puts gameplay over her writing and adapts to whatever it demands or the portal team(well 3 people I believe) that seems to work around it. Then there is bioware with their strong writer teams.
Being a writer for games can demand vastly different skills. And when games are written by decent writers coming from other mediums they don't tend to be very impressive coughamalur, salvatore*...
Also Journey had no writing staff, because the design focus was different and yet it ties into how one "experiences" a game.
As for the epic mickey thing, can someone enlighten me but wasn't the first actually pretty good? As for the second I haven't heard much about it be it about developement or generally people speaking about it. What I have heard is disney not having a clue about their direction for their games division. It changing between not wanting to do it anymore, joining the social game space or still wanting to give it a shot and choosing depending on the numbers.
That rather makes it seem that there was a lot of wonky buisness going on.