Gamasutra - Warren Spector on Getting Design from Good to Great

Farflame spotted this article about game design. Pierre-Alexandre Garneau asked the creator of Deus Ex - Warren Spector how to create a great game:

Warren Spector is best known for creating Deus Ex while at Ion Storm Austin. He has since created Epic Mickey for Disney and he is now the Director of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas at Austin.

I had the opportunity to ask him questions over email as part of a series of interviews about getting design from good to great (you can read a previous interview with Richard Garfield here). As a game design consultant, I help developers turn their games into hits, so I was very interested about his method for creating his remarkable hits. His process to choose which project to realize is particularly interesting.

PAG: While in the early stages of a project, how do you choose which direction to go in? Which idea to pursue out of all of the possibilities?

WS: I have a whole process I go through - a series of questions I ask myself to determine if an idea is worth my time to pursue. The questions are: What's the core idea? Why do THIS game? What are the development challenges? Is the idea well-suited to games? What's the fantasy? What are the verbs? Has anyone done this before? What's the One New Thing? And what is this game REALLY "about?" If I don't like the answers, I ditch the idea. If I DO like the answers, I have a template I use - a form I fill out - to determine if I understand the idea well enough to keep going with it. If I can't answer all the questions or fill out the form to my satisfaction, I move on to the next idea. Ideas are easy...

One more thing: It occurs to me I should explain the question "What is your game about." Basically, I think every narrative should have a subtext - a question or set of questions it asks players to think about. You don't want to make them explicit, and you don't want players thinking about them consciously - you want them exploring the question through their choices as they play. For example, Deus Ex was "about" this:

• "What happens if you drop a guy who believes in right and wrong, black and white, into a world that's all shades of gray?"
• "What does it mean to be human in a world where human augmentation is a reality?"
• "What would the world be like if every conspiracy theory people believed to be true was, in fact, true?"
• "How would the world be better off - in a new dark age where we had free will, in a world of total peace created by a sentient AI but lacking free will, or as it is today (ruled by the Illuminati, of course)?"

I just think games, like any other narrative medium, can explore things below the surface action depicted.

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