These extracts reveal how the Guildford, England-based start-up behind the game faced the obstacles of succeeding as a new development house, while capitalizing on a small staff size and “game jam” mentality.

Media Molecule executive producer Siobhan Reddy crafted the postmortem of the Sony-published game, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

“LittleBigPlanet’s codename was The Next Big Thing, and the support the game received from Sony and from the press shows it. The game makes bold strides into the arena of user-generated content on consoles, and this postmortem simultaneously chronicles both the game’s and the company’s creation.”

Small Team With Area Experts

From the beginning, Media Molecule was determined to retain a small team. While the studio had to expand a bit more than it expected, it largely achieved its goal, to the intended effect:

“Going through this process cemented what we wanted to do: build a small studio of talented and creative people whose focus is to create a genre-defining console game that would be both commercially and critically successful.

“LittleBigPlanet was designed as a game that could be made within our means. Being able to strike out in a new genre (or an old neglected genre, depending on your point of view) meant we could focus on making the game we wanted to make, and not waste effort by slavishly copying the standard feature set that might be expected of a more typical mass selling game.

“We decided early on that we wouldn’t grow the company larger than 20 people — however, we inflated to 31 once we realized the ambition of the project. We also decided that we would assign a large area of responsibility to each person. For example, one person would be focused on the game engine while another person would focus on physics, or production, or character animation.

“Paradoxically, we also wanted everyone on the team to be able to have input on every other aspect of the game. In this way, the different areas of the game would feel more integrated as level designers, artists, and programmers sometimes switched jobs for a few hours a day. The communication overhead needed to support this practice wouldn’t have worked with a large team.”

Game Jam Design Style

One key principle of Media Molecule’s development process, facilitated in part by its small team size, is its “game jam design style,” which allowed for a huge number of potential ideas discussed, as well as copious prototyping. The studio has enviably retained the practice even as its team has grown:

“During the early days, the process went something like this: Conversations would take place that would then lead to some design work being done. Sometimes the design wouldn’t stick, but other times it would, unlocking a whole new host of possibilities.

“Our natural process, maybe because of the high number of musicians on the team, was for people to riff off each other. We referred to these discussions as “jamming.” We didn’t start with a design document, but we did lock down areas to try out. The flow that had been discussed was eventually visualized by Healey, and this became the framework for the greenlight and actually the whole game.

“Once the framework was set, everyone was free to go wild within his or her area. We gave people freedom to design and prototype in their own way. We tended not to spend a lot of time in design meetings because people were (and are) always itching to get out of them and actually try stuff.

“We met regularly to make sure everyone was still going in the same direction or to stir up excitement by sharing at a new direction we wanted to try out. We experimented with, and eventually shelved, many ideas during this early period.

“Once we had gotten to the stage (post greenlight) where the concept crystallized, Healey consolidated all the various ideas into a design document to share with the team. This document wasn’t kept up to date daily, but a full consolidation was done at key points to make sure everyone was behind it.

“In the periods between consolidations, targeted designs would be written up outside of the main document. During the final phase, we moved toward one-on-one discussions and emails, which sometimes led to a lack of cohesion or accountability, though it’s perhaps because of the small size of the initial team that we got away with it anyhow.

“Ultimately, most of the knotty design decisions at the start of the project were resolved by rapidly trying out our ideas via code or pre-visualization. We went down a fair number of design dead-ends, but even the failures gave us useful information. This tactic wouldn’t have been very efficient if we had a large standing army of artists and level designers waiting for the design to be finished.

“Now that we’re a larger team, we have retained this approach. It’s a little hard at times, but with the fundamental idea of a framework being set by the directors, the owners of specific areas of the game are trusted to create great things (and encouraged to try out hard, exciting, or unusual ideas). We regularly review how our projects are coming together. The fact that design documents often come together after you have tried something is a very positive notion in our company culture.”

Building a Studio and Making a Game at the Same Time

Like many young game development houses, Media Moleculed struggled with constructing its company in parallel to constructing its game:

“Our focus was often split between building the game and establishing the studio.

“We recently conducted some team surveys and learned that there were a lot of things that worked well enough when we were a very small team, but broke down as we became bigger and busier. These issues ranged from the trivial to the serious: employees not knowing who to get direction from, starting meetings on time, making visible the reasons people failed to come to work, office space not being used efficiently, inconsistency in work-life balance-the list could go on!

“There is an expectation from the team, and a good one, that every area of the company be the best it can be. We underestimated the amount of support we needed to ship LittleBigPlanet and run the company to its best simultaneously.”

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into LittleBigPlanet’s development, with “What Went Right” and “What Went Wrong” reasoning, is now available in the January 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes the 2008 Game Developer Front Line Awards, highlighting the best tools available to game developers in the past year. Plus, Nicholas Olsen offers a primer on Apple’s iPhone SDK.

As usual, there is Matthew Wasteland’s humor column, as well as development columns from Power of Two’s Noel Llopis, Bungie’s Steve Theodore, LucasArts’ Jesse Harlin, and Maxis’ Soren Johnson.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months’ and a year’s subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of January 2009’s edition as a single issue.

OneBigGame was founded in March 2007 by Guerilla Games co-founder Martin de Ronde. “Our intention from day one was for the funds to go to several children’s charities,” he explains.

Early in 2009, OneBigGame will officially be unveiling its games portal, with a portfolio of small, donation-driven web games created by famous designers and top development studios, as well as the broad community of indie developers.

“In Save the Children and Starlight, we’ve found two highly regarded and reliable partners that for decades have helped children structurally resolve the problems they face, which is completely in line with our mission objective. With these two partners, we are certain that funds are well spent.”

De Ronde says OneBigGame’s titles are “now very close to being done.” He says they can “stand on their own two feet,” but that customers will also benefit from the knowledge that they’re supporting charitable causes.

Jenny Isaacson, VP of brand marketing and communications at Starlight Children’s Foundation, commented: “We are extremely excited about working together with OneBigGame to lessen the problems for seriously ill children nationwide.”

“We have a long history working with the games industry to help our cause and see OneBigGame as the next big step in showing how games and entertainment can help alleviate problems for children facing difficult medical conditions.”

Philanthropy and partnerships director Caroline Underwood of Save The Children UK called OneBigGame “an extremely innovative platform to raise funds from an audience who will be the donors of tomorrow.”

“Not only will OneBigGame help raise funds for our cause, but it is also a fantastic way to raise awareness among these youthful audiences that many children around the world need our help,” Underwood says.

From the unfortunate pointedly, ethnic enemies in Drake’s Fortune to the pained grunts of Big Daddies, to your teammates telling you not to shoot them, all games have hundreds of snippets of sounds in the wings, waiting for you to provoke them.

Even games that feature voiceless snarling enemies can create palpable atmosphere just by including interesting, scary, or numerous enemy and character barks. A game like Doom 3 relies heavily on such mechanisms: the groans, screams, roars and screeches that your enemies produce are all the information you’ll be provided with about their nature, aside from a few introductory cutscenes and forced expositional text documents.

Of course, there are also games that trade in verbose, incredibly context-sensitive responses. In Deus Ex, leaping on a table will elicit disapproval and derision; entering the woman’s bathroom will earn you a disapproving coworker for the foreseeable future.

All of these interactions are worked out within the minor conversations and comments seen in passing through the game. Likewise, enemies in Deus Ex respond to you or what you are: a dangerous, fearsome genetically modified murderer and policeman.

But Deus Ex provides these interactions alongside traditional cutscenes. Games that don’t have cutscenes have to work even harder to get mileage out of on-the-fly, in-game narrative tools, because that’s all they have. Thus, it is not surprising that the most interesting and subtly successful practicer of this trade is Valve.

Masters of Understatement

Valve of course has a slight edge in this department: their policy of constant immersion within the avatar (never in there single-player games does the camera escape from the protagonist’s point of view except in death) has forced them to become better and better storytellers in areas that others do not have to explore as fully.

Valve’s Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 tested its technique in a new way. Before, Valve only had to provide the banter for Gordon Freeman’s temporary comrades: they would mostly comment on the present combat situation, and nothing beyond that.

In the first two expansion episodes, however, Alyx Vance became the player’s near-constant companion. As a result, she couldn’t just have combat and quest-related asides; she had to be able to respond to and “interact” with the character on a verbal level, creating the illusion of a consciousness aware of Gordon, traveling with him.

This was accomplished by making various physical actions taken by the player produce verbal responses from Alyx. In pitch-black tunnels, if the player turns off Gordon’s flashlight, Alyx will tell you to turn it back on. Likewise, Alyx will cover her eyes when you shine your light at them.

These are of course the simplest of examples: Alyx would also comment on any number of puzzles and situations that she and Gordon found themselves in. Some of these comments were vague and could happen in different locations, but others were location and situation-sensitive.

Still, Alyx and the Half Life world still have cinematic scenes of a sort, and an extremely strong narrative force, however camouflaged.

What if a game eschewed all but the briefest opening and closing scripted moments, and instead had to rely entirely on randomly (and not so randomly) generated sound bites to flesh out its characters and settings? Enter Left 4 Dead, Valve’s co-op online zombie apocalypse shooter.

Likable Nobodies

Left 4 Dead features only a handful of in-engine cinematics and one pre-rendered movie: aside from that, the story and characters are what you make of them, aided by their continuous stream of dialogue between each other.

This of course means that there is no story to speak of. Your plucky (or grizzled or naïve) heroes either make the escape vehicle or not. There are no long-term story-based consequences for actions taken, beyond the death of a survivor.

Each character has a recognizable personality, if you take the time to learn them. Louis is sure that things will get better soon, that things will go “back to normal.” Francis hates everything: train yards, vans, the military, rooms, you name it and he’ll tell you he hates it.

Bill is the gruff old survivalist who is the unofficial leader of the team (think Nick Nolte at any time in the last 10 years). Zoe is the wisecracking college student, the only one of the survivors to regularly find humor in their unpleasant situation.

That entire paragraph was culled mostly from the in-game dialogue. Sure, you can get the general idea of it all from the opening cutscene, but cutscenes only paint brief portraits. It’s the character’s constant dialogue that reinforces Zoe’s zombie insults and humor, Francis’ constant complaining, Louis’ strangely resilient optimism, or the grudging respect and feelings the group feel for each other.

These are just the obvious aspects of each character. If you play the game enough, you’ll hear Bill joke about the last zombie plague (in the ‘50s) being much worse than this one. I’ve played this game for tens of hours, and gotten nowhere near to hearing all these characters have to say.

All of this character depth, and there isn’t a “quiet moment,” romance, or philosophical debate to be seen. It’s like a great horror movie with all of the bad stuff cut out, with characters that constantly remind you of their humanity without making too big a show of being “characterized.” And yet these are still horror movie archetypes, it’s just that they’ve been given a slightly different stage this time round.

It’s Best If You Don’t Notice

This is the ultimate argument for seamlessly integrating characterization into gameplay. When this kind of descriptive writing is treated as commonplace, it blends into the gameplay. At the same time this technique gives players absolutely no control over said characterization.

It makes it a part of the world and the characters in a way that a game like Fallout 3 or Final Fantasy could never replicate, despite occasional comments on the hero’s progress or “spontaneous” conversations between NPCs.

In those games, characters speak their parts and then go into vocal hibernation. Here, there’s never a “dialogue camera,” because the characters are performing their fake humanity all the time. It’s subtle and effective, as most people have noticed, and it makes the game that much more fun to play, when you know each character by name, personality, and sound.

It’s this hard to describe phenomenon, this almost casual, off-the-cuff air, that’s such an impressive accomplishment. Of course none of these sound bites are haphazard or unplanned. Every single one has been defined and designated as carefully as possible, so that every survivor has several reactions to certain kinds of enemies, to each other’s deaths, and to rescue.

The brilliant trick of it is, since there is only one narrative mode, everything is character performance and definition. There’s never a point where we stand back and watch things unfold, and when we do, it isn’t a character-based scene, it’s a car driving away.

This kind of characterization cannot (in this state) replace storytelling. It can’t compare to the changing relationship between Elika and the Prince in Prince of Persia, for instance.

In that game, the comments produced by characters changed over time, reflecting the changes in their relationship as set up by story segments. This doesn’t mean that the approach so deftly executed in Left 4 Dead couldn’t be employed to tell a story, and a detailed one too.

Load Times Are No Match For Conversations!

One game that makes this attempt is Mass Effect. Say what you will about the game’s long elevator rides, Bioware decided to fill those trips with some interesting dialogue. Every once in a while, the two characters you had with you would have a conversation.

If those characters happened to be Ashley and Liara, the conversation might be about how Ashley is a xenophobe. Their next conversation would acknowledge the previous one, and involved Ashley saying that she had learned that not all aliens were bad.

This didn’t mitigate the horror of the long elevators, but if it had been expanded and deepened, think of the possibilities. Every elevator ride would unlock knew insights into character’s motivations, relations with each other, and thoughts regarding the various quests at hand.

There’s something to be said for NPC interaction that isn’t player initiated: it makes the ensuing relationships and dialogues feel more tangible and less dependent on player input. That’s an important goal when the whole game revolves around player action and inaction.

Worth The Effort?

This of course points us toward the problems inherent in such interactions. How do developers ensure that we fickle players will stick around to see these conversations (aside from annoying elevators)?

Valve knows that we’ll be there for every second of Left 4 Dead’s dialogue, but that dialogue doesn’t catalogue the change of opinions or characters over time. The incredibly difficult job that designers have is to bring these moments closer to the realm of normal gameplay. Why expend effort on that kind of content when they know they can make us watch a video?

I’m sure that they’re doing just that as I write this: trying to figure out more and more ingenious ways to get us to pay attention to such moments. Obviously this technique has a long way to go before it approaches the success and acceptability of a cutscene, but it’s a viable support tool, and a potentially insightful and subtly brilliant kind of storytelling. It’s something I’d love to see more of, because it’s the kind of thing that I play games for, regardless of genre or theme.

[Tom Cross also writes for Gamers' Temple and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

Creutz, who says he came away from a management visit with Take-Two feeling “bullish” both about the market and the company itself, said in a note to investors that Chinatown Wars will be “an important test of Take-Two’s ability to make inroads on Nintendo’s wildly successful DS and Wii platforms.”

And the analyst suggests Nintendo has something to gain, too: “Nintendo wants their platforms to appeal to all gamer segments(not just casual/family) and views Take-Two’s IP as an important driver of core gamer interest,” he says.

Creutz also observed that Take-Two’s already begun an “increased focus on costs” at Rockstar following the recently-signed profit-sharing deal with the studio’s key employees.

Finally, Creutz said Take-Two’s management continues to be “frustrated” with used games sales trends spearheaded by retailer GameStop. Take-Two in particular frequently expresses concern at lost revenues due to resales.

Take-Two is “examining ways to ameliorate the problem,
which includes strategies around online play and downloadable content which extend the lifespan of AAA titles,” Creutz concludes.

The game’s closest challenger was Namco Bandai’s Wii exclusive role-player Fragile at number two. Developed in conjunction with Baten Kaitos and Eternal Sonata creators tri-Crescendo, the game sold a modest 26,000 units.

Appearing in the top 10 for the first time since its debut in December, Namco Bandai has finally been able to properly replenish stock of Taiko Drum Master Wii, with the game moving up nine places to number three with around 26,000 units sold.

The final new entry in the top 10 is Koei’s Zill O’ll Infinite Plus for the PSP, a remake of the cult PSone and PlayStation 2 role-playing game.

The only other two new entries in the top 30 this week are Valve’s Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360 at number 12 and Kadokawa Shoten’s anime-licensed dance game Suzumiya Haruhi no Gekidou for the Wii at number 13.

Media Create Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Booty officially became CEO of Midway in October 2008, though he held the role on an interim basis since March. He’s been with the company since 1991, when he joined as an engineer and programmer, gradually gaining in responsibility to take the role of VP of product development in 2002 and later, senior VP of Worldwide Studios.

Midway faces bankruptcy and stock market delisting, recently reduced its staff by a further 25 percent after layoffs throughout the year, closed its Austin studio and terminated projects.

Though the company reached two separate agreements with its bondholders that give it a reprieve until late February, the company could thereafter be put under by a buyback obligation that went into effect when Sumner Redstone sold his controlling stake in the company back in December.

PlayStation 3 owners can already purchase and download the first title released under the deal, Bejeweled 2, from the system’s PlayStation store for $9.99. The release includes support for PSN Trophies, PSP Remote Play, and HD resolution. The match-three puzzle game also includes four modes, new gems, and a hint-on-demand feature.

The other four casual titles slated for an eventual PS3 release include Zuma, Heavy Weapon, Peggle, and Feeding Frenzy. Despite the “exclusive” nature of the publishing agreement itself, all of the titles have been previously released on a variety of platforms such as PC, handhelds and mobile, and other home consoles, including Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade.

The announcement comes a day after PopCap revealed that its retail sales for PC titles grew by 85.3 percent in 2008, a remarkable achievement considering the PC game industry suffered more than a 14 percent decline in overall revenues from retail outlets during the same year.

“As leaders in their genre, PopCap is to casual games what SOE is to MMOs,” says SOE president John Smedley. “Being the second largest publisher on the PlayStation Network, SOE is excited that this partnership will expand the PlayStation Network catalog with awesome casual titles that players of all types can enjoy.”

Though some would argue that it’s far from an actual “game,” The Graveyard is certainly a noteworthy, introspective title, presenting the idea of death not as something trivial like in most games, nor as depressing or dramatic as many would expect, but as a part of our existence — death of old age.

In the trial version of the short PC/OSX game, players slowly guide a hobbling elderly lady through a cemetery, towards a bench. Alone and without ever saying a word, the woman sits on the bench while a poignant song, sung in Flemish but presented with English subtitles, plays.

The full, paid release is nearly identical except for one feature — the possibility of death for the aged woman.

We spoke with Tales of Tales’ designers Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn about The Graveyard, nominated for the Innovation award at this year’s Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

The two discuss how death is currently represented in video games, their response to critics who refuse to classify The Graveyard as a video game, and why they feel the independent games community is in a state of transition.

What kind of background does your team have making games?

Our team on The Graveyard consists of two people who worked on the project full time, Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, and three freelancers who created specific elements of the game — Laura Raines Smith with animation, Kris Force with sound, and Gerry De Mol with music.

Laura is an experienced animator who has worked on many commercial games. Kris is a musician who has also done sound design for commercial games, even for The Sims. And Gerry De Mol is a singer-songwriter with no other experience with games than making music for our own “social screensaver” The Endless Forest.

We, Auriea and Michael, have always been interested in the immersive and narrative potential of video games. And our work has often been playful in some way, even when it was just sculptures or paintings or performances.

We started our journey into interactive art through creating websites. Those dealt with pure interactivity and not with gameplay at all, though we did include game-like elements here and there.

Some six years ago, we switched tools and started working with video game technology. Not to make games per se, but to explore the immersive and narrative potential of the medium ourselves, rather than just trying to approximate it as we did in our web-based projects.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

The Graveyard was made with Unity. We used Blender for the modeling, and Laura animated in 3D Studio Max.

Can you talk about the differences between the full version and the demo version?

There’s only one difference: in the full version the protagonist can die. When she does, you lose the ability to close the application as the interface to do that is to walk the lady out of the cemetery gates.

While technically the difference is very small, and while you can get a lot of the content from the trial alone — in fact, we feel that you need to play both for a complete experience — the death of the avatar can have a huge emotional impact. It can drastically change one’s experience of the game.

We decided to charge a symbolic amount of money for this feature because we wanted to make a point about the value of games. In most game reviews, the value of a game is directly related to the cost of its production and the amount time you can spend playing.

We are critical of this attitude because it ignores the content of the game and depth of the experience of the player (e.g. how meaningful the game is outside and after playing).

Was there a specific event or source of inspiration that made you decide to create a game about death?

Nothing concrete. There was a memory of visiting a cemetery when we were young, to enjoy the tranquility of the environment. There was a very old but very lucid grandmother who talked about her own death all the time.

And there was also the desire to experiment with an interactive piece that was only about playing a certain person in a certain environment.

What are you trying to communicate about death in The Graveyard?

That’s a difficult question. Because we prefer to offer things to the player to think about for themselves, rather than expressing our own opinion.

Luckily, we live in a time that has interactive technology. Non-linear, generative, interactive media allow us to create art that needs to be completed by the viewer. This has been a desire and even a requirement of art for many centuries. But never before has it been so concrete. For us, art is not about what the artist wants to express. It is about what the viewer can see in it.

The Graveyard offers some ideas — the lively nature in a cemetery, the calm of the dead, the physical problems of an elderly person, the relationship between city and cemetery, etc. — but we don’t offer conclusions or a message.

It’s up to the player to decide what it means. As a result, different players walk away from the game with different emotions. Some feel sad, others comforted, yet others confused or frustrated. All of these responses are perfectly valid.

Are there any other games you’ve noted that don’t treat death as trivial?

From what we’ve seen, there are three kinds of death in games.

There’s the death of a character in the story, often expressed in a cut scene. That sort of death is seldom trivialized as it often signifies an import turn in the plot. The stories in games are often trivial as a whole, though. But so are a lot of stories in books and movies. So you can’t fault the medium for this.

I guess the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII would be the classic example of this sort of death, though we’ve never played that game long enough to experience this moment ourselves.

The second form of death in games is the death of your opponents. Especially single player shooter games are ghastly in this respect. If you stand still and think for a moment about what you are doing, you cannot be anything but horrified.

You’re basically a homicidal maniac on a killing spree, running around like a madman shooting everything that moves. To make this experience more acceptable, game designers often use the traditional tricks of political propaganda: they suggest that the morals and ideology of the hero are superior to that of the enemy and/or they paint the opponents as savage monsters with no other desire in life than to attack you.

We are still sickened to the stomach by the memory of hurling hundreds of living bodies through the air with a gravity gun in Half Life 2. But even Mario and Pikmin are highly objectionable in this respect.

The third form of game death is the one that we criticize in The Graveyard: the death of the avatar, the death of you. In video games, this death is hardly ever a real death.

We can’t think of any game that ends with the death of the avatar. Death is in fact a symbol for failure. The only response that the game expects is “try again”.

Some games even require the death of the avatar in order for the player to learn how to perform properly. There have been games — Grand Theft Auto comes to mind — that have replaced death by being wounded and resurrection by healing. This makes a lot more sense in the narrative of these games.

Did you have a name for the old woman while you were creating the game? Or your own story behind her?

No. No name, no story. I think this is because we start working with a character that we feel we already know, a character that already exists. Perhaps it’s the same for writers. But the way in which writers communicate this is by describing the character and telling the story.

Our medium of choice, however, is realtime 3D. So we communicate the character and her story through interactive scenes. The fact that this narrative is a lot more vague, in contrast to writing, is something that we fully embrace. In fact, it is this vagueness, this openness that attracts us to the medium.

The song that plays while the old woman seems to provide, if not an idea of who the woman is, then what losses she has suffered. Was this your intention? Was the song composed specifically for The Graveyard, or was the game designed around the song, or … ?

We had no clear intention with the song. We just knew we wanted a song to play when the woman was sitting on the bench.

And we asked Gerry De Mol to compose and write this song because we felt that he would contribute something interesting to the game. We often work with our collaborators in this way: while we, consider ourselves to be the authors of the piece, we do open it up for contributions by other artists. We love what they can add to the piece and rarely question it. This is why we always choose the people we work with very carefully.

Some players interpret the song as being about this old woman. And about people she knew. That seems very plausible. But this is not intended by us. Perhaps it was intended like that by Gerry. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you get out of it. Not what we put in it.

Can you talk a little about the audio design of the game, outside of the song?

The production of the audio elements was done by Kris Force. She has talked a bit about this in the postmortem we wrote about the game’s production. The design and implementation in the game was done by us.

Since our primary concern was to create an immersive experience, we tried to design the sound so it would feel as if you are really there, in that place. It’s a rich and layered soundscape that consists of several loops for wind and lots of random sounds placed in 3D, of birds and such. There’s also a church bell that chimes on the hour.

As you move from the gate towards the center of the cemetery, the sounds of the city become more muted and a sort of garden atmosphere becomes more prominent. We were also trying to change the temperature through the sound because we felt the center area would be warmer than the rest since there are no trees and a lot more gravel to reflect the warmth.

So while we may be minimalists in terms of interaction design, I think we are “maximalists” in terms of multi-sensual experience design. We use all aspects of the medium (and therefore rely on all sense of the player) together to create the atmosphere.

Do you have any ideas for what other games could do to make death not seem trivial?

That’s a huge question. To answer it, we’ll need to share a little bit of our view on video game history.

Just the other day I read something by Belgian Professor Jan Van Looy. He claims that the traditional “three lives” structure in arcade games was a literal translation of the three balls that you get when playing pinball.

I’m sure that in those days, the three “lives” of the “characters” on screen where as meaningless as the three balls in a game of pinball. It was just a game. It wasn’t really about something. Games were not a medium for storytelling and transmitting meaning yet.

But while the technology and the desire to create immersive worlds and believable characters has grown, gameplay design itself has hardly changed. Even though we truly believe in Lara Croft and Altair, they continue to just die and resurrect as if they were a yellow pizza disc with a missing slice for a mouth.

The problem is that while game developers were quick to abandon 8-bit graphics, simplistic AI, and chiptune music, the willingness to reconsider game design and structure has been mostly absent.

So much so that when the narrative potential of video games became what it is today, they actually created stories to fit the structure of game (which, as you remember, was defined by pinball) rather than adapting the interaction to fit any story or theme they felt like dealing with.

So here’s the answer to your question: abandon traditional game structures, say goodbye to pinball. It is pinball-inspired game design that forces developers to treat death or most other narrative elements as something trivial.

Now that the technology (and desire) is ready to allow for video games to become a medium of expression, developers need to take up their responsibilities. They need to start with a theme, a story, a piece of content. And then design all interaction so that it supports and expresses that narrative.

If the medium of video games opens up to the enormous variety of stories that can be told, death will automatically become, first of all, less prevalent — in many if not most stories, nobody dies, least of all the protagonist — and less trivial, because the expressive meaning of interaction has become more important than its entertainment value.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

There are a few faults in the model of the old woman we’d love to fix. To try and make her perfect. Our skills have gotten a lot better in this respect since The Graveyard was released.

I think we would try to find a more elegant solution for the fact that walking down the side paths in the cemetery is irrelevant. But only because several players responded very negatively to this. I guess they didn’t realize that the game was not about spatial exploration. So we should communicate this better in the design.

There’s many more things we would do differently if we could start over with a bigger budget and therefore more time. I think many people don’t realize how difficult and time-consuming creating realtime 3D games is. I know we always underestimate it ourselves when drawing up our schedules.

Were there ever plans to include any more interactivity than what’s available in the final version?

Originally we were indeed weak and cowardly, without realizing it. In early versions of the design, we had considered adding a kind of puzzle element about reading the grave stones and figuring out where the husband of the lady is buried. With every playthrough, this would lead to a different grave.

But we abandoned that idea because we wanted to focus on the open-ended contemplative nature of a visit by an old woman to the graveyard. We didn’t want it to become a story about this specific woman and her dead husband. We wanted the game to be about death in general, and in particular about the thoughts of the player about death, old age and mortality.

What sort of criticism have you received about The Graveyard, or what criticism do you expect?

The two main criticisms have been “it’s not a game” and “it’s not rich enough”.

The first one comes from a purist “hardcore” game perspective where everything that is not a game does not deserve attention and should not bear the name “game”.

We try to ignore this response as much as possible but often fail because we feel that a) video games should be a field open to growth and experimentation and b) video games seem to narrow down the meanings of game and play to something that is more specific than any historic definition of the words.

The second response comes from the adventure-gaming puzzle-solving audience. They basically like the idea of The Graveyard but they hate its minimalism. They want to find more concrete story elements or clues to decipher the riddle. And while we feel that the player should use their own imagination to enrich our work, we do understand that some people are better at this than others.

We have already responded to this criticism both in The Path and in the design of a future game by including elements that allow people like this to get more out of our games. In an attempt to guide and stimulate their imagination.

What do you think of the state of independent game development?

We feel the independent games community is in a state of transition, perhaps even steering towards a schism of some kind. A few years ago, almost all independent games were basically remakes of old 2D games. And still today, many indie games are platformers, shooters, RPGs or adventures.

The only reason to call these independent was that they were made with very low budgets. But in every other sense of the word, they were extremely dependent. On former game styles, on traditions, and even on the commercial games industry which many indie games refer to in a mock-ironic way.

But lately, independent games have been evolving towards something more similar to independent film, while perhaps commercial games are starting to look like Hollywood more and more.

There’s a lot more experimentation going on. And contemporary indie developers don’t feel as trapped anymore by old ideas about game design. There’s more and more games out there that put content first and form second. This way independent game developers are showing the world how video games can become a medium, perhaps even an artistic one.

How often do you think of dying?

Michael: I don’t think there’s an hour that goes by without me thinking about death in some way. Most often my own death, I think. I’m not a morbid person at all. I think I’m even what one would call an optimist. And perhaps my optimism comes from deeply accepting death as a fact, even as a thing of beauty.

I think acute awareness of death leads to an appreciation of life. I’m also very curious. Curious about death. I’m not entirely convinced that death is the ultimate end. I’m curious about what will happen when I die. I’m even curious about the process itself, about feeling life slip away from you, as one does, I imagine, often in day-to-day life at those moments when we lose control.

I think mortality adds to the nobility of man. Daring to live when facing the unavoidable end is the most courageous thing that anyone can do. And wasting life is the greatest of sins.

Auriea: Whenever something reminds me. Looking at my dead garden plants in winter and remembering what spring feels like; Certain traditions of still life painting; Reading the news. A few poetic metaphors, and off I go.

Gerhard replaces Geoff Iddison, who was previously CEO of PayPal’s European operations and was brought into Jagex as CEO in October 2007 with the intention of “[accelerating] international growth.” He resigned from the company last month for undisclosed reasons.

“I have enjoyed working for Jagex immensely,” says Geoff Iddison. “The business remains at the cutting edge of the video games industry and its continued growth reflects the strong business model and the high calibre of people within the company. It was great to be part of a business which is shaping the industry in such a way.”

Gerhard joined Jagex in February 2008, and was previously principle security architect for the national lottery at gaming and lottery technology systems company Gtech.

Based in Cambridge, England and founded in 1999, Jagex’s flagship title is free-to-play browser-based MMORPG Runescape, which claims some 5.3 million active players per month. The company also launched FunOrb, a casual games portal, last February.

“On behalf of everyone at Jagex, I’d like to thank Geoff for everything he has brought to the business over the last 18 months, and wish him all the best with his future endeavours,” says Jagex founder Andrew Gower.

“We have an exciting year planned for 2009 and are confident of continued success with Mark as our new CEO. Mark has performed exceptionally well since joining the company last year and I am sure that Jagex will continue to flourish under his leadership.”

While Far Cry 2 doesn’t retain the science fiction elements of the original, Redding mentions that the development team did toy with “surreal or impressionistic” elements, tampering with player perception with hallucinatory moments and other experiments. Some of those ideas remained in the final game:

“Part of it was part of a larger discussion about how to use filters and kind of dynamic art direction, sort of in response to player actions, and doing things like altering the weather dynamically in reaction to how the player’s doing, or even having filter effects on saturation of the screen that would kind of communicate some aspect of the player’s infamy. This was at a point when we were thinking of infamy in much more low-level, mechanical terms as well.

It’s not like that we threw it out for being unrealistic. I think it’s more you have to make sacrifices in order to enhance the clarity of the game. And I think we felt that, in general, we weren’t really necessarily adding anything to the realism and the immersion of the game by doing it this way, but we also might also be muddying things up so it’s harder for the player to see what’s going on. [laughs]

That principle, that was more of an aesthetic position that we took early on, and it dovetailed with the realism goal and the immersion goal. But very quickly, it just became kind of the style of the game, that we would keep things very muddy and visceral and earthy.”

The narrative designer also talked about the first-person shooter’s abusive introduction, in which players are introduced to the mechanics of the game while also suffering malaria, broken weapons, and feelings of vulnerability:

“That turned out to be very challenging, because we’re trying to do two things simultaneously: We’re trying to make the player feel vulnerable and at a disadvantage initially — to set the ground rules of the world and the moral universe of the game — and at the same time we’re trying to give them useful and practical information that’s applicable to play, and not do it in a way that’s completely ham-handed. [laughs]

I think that that’s something we could have had more iteration time on, just to maybe either pace things out slightly differently or try to use fewer obstructing, pop-up-type interventions in order to teach things to the player. It’s a lot to absorb. It’s kind of sensory overload.

At times I think we succeeded, to an extent, in managing it. And at other times, it fell short of what we probably would have wanted in the long term.”

You can read the full feature, which includes more details on Far Cry 2’s narrative structure and subtleties, as well as the challenges of meeting player expectations (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).