In the first half of his BAFTA presentation, titled, “From Shodan, to Big Daddy, to Elizabeth: The Evolution of AI,” Ken Levine, creative director at Irrational Games, talked about creating meaningful characters in games, covering his work on System Shock 2, BioShock, and recently, BioShock: Infinite.
Here are some quotes from his talk, as well as a few from the beginning of the Q&A. The full video is available online, with the rest of the Q&A in the second half (begins at 40:43), moderated by writer Simon Parkin.
On System Shock 2 …
“At that point, we really didn’t know what we were doing at all. Here I was president of the company, I was lead designer, and I had never shipped a game. I had worked on Thief but it hadn’t shipped yet. And we were really wondering how we were going to make this game, because the Dark Engine, which was the same engine that Thief was built on, was not really a shooter engine, it didn’t compare to the Quakes of the time. It was sort of slow and a little clumsy, but it did certain things really well, it did a level of detail really well. So, we looked at the engine and we said, ‘Okay, well, it’s not going to run very fast, but it does have a lot of detail. What if we combined shooting and RPG?’ We really focused on story. Because of that limitation we sort of stumbled into Irrational Games’ mission. And that mission has been to bring players-to turn players not into an observer of narrative, but a participant in narrative.”
“I started thinking about: how can you make a dialogue between the player and SHODAN, is that possible?”
“That was really our first stab at: could you start really interacting with characters without pausing, without cutscenes, without some kind of dialogue tree?”
On BioShock …
“After much trying and much effort we managed to get somebody to pay us to make a game about a failed, underwater, objectivist utopia.”
“I did not think this game would be successful.”
“Could we make the player feel an emotional connection to these characters?”
“The inheritor of the mantle of the Big Daddy and Little Sister is not a monster … to me the inheritor is her, is Elizabeth.”
On creating Elizabeth …
“The most requested cut feature in this game, from our team, has been Elizabeth, in BioShock 1 the most requested cut feature as we were working on the game was Big Daddy.”
“[Guillermo Del Toro] said that a great monster is a monster you can imagine in repose.”
“I could write her nice and funny and all that, but some people who help you out, you tend to grow an affection for …”
“We didn’t want to turn her into a gun turret, we never wanted to have her shoot, because then she’s just kill-stealing from you and that’s just not who she is. That doesn’t make her interesting.”
“The reason her eyes are so large is because we wanted her emotions to register at a great distance.”
“We always feel at Irrational that the power of seeing something that you feel you found on your own versus something that’s forced upon you is what makes the games we do a little different.”
Q&A …
“I’m deeply in love with this game and the most important thing to me in the game was getting … If I look back on the game, how I’m going to judge my personal success, and people may feel differently, is: are there going to be moments where the player feels a connection, as Booker, inhabiting this world, feel a connection to this character, and will you feel any sense of a relationship?”
“I think that’s the space if you think about the games industry and about games, and this may be just be me, but I think where we want to go is: can you interact with people? We’re really good at interacting with guns and I love all kinds of games: but can you get to a place where you interacting with people?”
“[Elizabeth] really was an experiment, and there were times, there we days, where we really thought the pillar of our game wasn’t going to happen.”
Source: YouTube
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