When Naughty Dog Took A Risk On Uncharted 2 | Richard Lemarchand (Uncharted, Naughty Dog)

Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There were people around the studio who were like, You're crazy, this isn't gonna work. People are gonna hate this. Because what if they lose the player?

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hi there, my name is Stephen Lake, and welcome to the first ever episode of The Examined Game. So this is a brand new podcast that I've set up where I basically speak with the people behind my favourite video games, hopefully some of yours as well, ranging from childhood right through to adulthood, present tense releases, classics from the past, and everything in between. Anytime I play a good video game, I have questions. I want to know more about what it took to make it, I want to know more about the people behind the game, and this is my opportunity to basically scratch a certain curious hitch that I've had for a little while. The first ever episode, today's episode, is with Richard LaMontchand, the co-lead game designer for the Uncharted trilogy, the original three games. I've wanted to speak with Richard for a little while now. I think that the way he talks about Uncharted and the decision making behind that game and some of the things they did to make it the classic it is. So Richard spent much of his career at Naughty Dog from 2004 through to 2012. He also wrote a book, A Playful Production Process for Game Designers and Everyone, and he is now a fully tenured

Joining Naughty Dog and the creation of Uncharted

SPEAKER_01 1:12

professor of cinematic arts at the USC Games Program at the University of Southern California. He also has games such as Gex and Legacy of Kane under his belt. It's a really lovely conversation. Please stick around and subscribe. We've got some great conversations coming up in the next few weeks. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Well, I I have often said I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been in on the ground floor of the creation of a series like uh Uncharted.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

I'd love to hear about what it was like just to be in that sort of quite sort of um unique position of seeing such a special game come together.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Um and it was kind of unique in my career because while I'd been around a number of cool game series close to the uh their the time of their inception, um uh Gex uh in particular and the Soul Reaver series, I'd never really been around right from the beginning. I always kind of came in uh a few months or a year after things really began. And while I wasn't full-time on Uncharted from the beginning, I was the lead game designer on Jack X Combat Racing, which was the Combat Racing game we made. Uh it was the last PlayStation 2 game that Naughty Dog made. Uh um uh the last but one game in the Jack and Daxter series. And uh uh I was working on that full time, but was able to dive out and be in the meetings where um the game was slowly cohering uh with the group of people who were working on it full-time, who included um my friends Amy Hennig, who's very well known as the game director of the first Uncharted game, creative director of Uncharted Two and Three, Bruce Straley, who was the lead artist who had later gone to become the game director of uh Uncharted 2, Evan Wells, uh one of the co-presidents of the studio at the time, who kind of took care of the design parts of the projects, and a bunch of other cool people, including new folks that we'd hired, a lot of um initially uh a lot of technical directors from um film special effects industries who had the kind of um next level skills that we were gonna need uh working on the PlayStation 3, you know, this hugely more powerful platform that we were working on. And um, so I got to kind of dive into and out of these meetings, and it was very interesting watching the thing cohere from uh the initial constraints that the project had until the moment when uh the idea of this modern day um uh treasure hunter um uh slash salvager slash sometimes archaeological thief, uh inspired by golden age adventure, uh was going to be the thing that we were making. I to sort of answer your question, actually there was a lot of pressure because um, you know, Naughty Dog had recently been bought by Sony. They'd had these huge successes on the PlayStation, first with Crash Bandicoot that became the kind of de facto mascot game for PlayStation 1, and then with the Jack and Daxter series. And there was a lot of anticipation that Naughty Dog would create a game series that would become um, you know, a kind of tent pole franchise uh that would become a series that people would um buy a PlayStation so that they could play it. So, yeah, the expectations were pretty high in terms of what was going to be accomplished. Um, but I think that uh no creative person can really thrive uh in a situation of intense pressure, and so I think we all probably put that by the by and trusted that we were going to be able to do our best. I mean, uh I joined Naughty Dog as a fan of the studio, um and it was kind of a

Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter and studio evolution

SPEAKER_00 5:07

special place, you know. It began small and it remained small for quite a long time uh through the Crash Bandicoot years. It grew through the Jack and Daxter years, but was still only 40-some people when I uh joined the studio. Um, the median age of the studio was a little higher than other places where I'd worked, and I think that kind of represented a body of um uh craft, you know, and a uh understanding of how to make games well, um, a little more wisdom, maybe, uh maybe a little more storytelling ability. So the uh uh the folks in that room, who also included Dan Ary, who uh you know had done great work on the uh Jack and Daxter series, um uh began pitching to each other. Uh with these initial constraints, we knew that we wanted to make a third-person character action game, uh, you know, with the same kind of on-the-button uh um action gameplay that the previous two game series had had. Um Jack and Daxter had marked a kind of leap forward for Naughty Dog in terms of end-game storytelling and the standards of storytelling. And uh, you know, obviously that was Jack and Daxter was the first series that had um dialogue, uh uh, which Dan Ary had written a lot of. And so um we knew that we probably wanted whatever we were going to make next to be the same kind of leap forward, you know. I think probably the uh marketing ideas around the PlayStation 3 was that the system was more sophisticated, the audience was getting older, you know, people were now playing games into their 30s, 40s, and so maybe our audience we could anticipate that they would be uh a little more mature. Another interesting uh design constraint was that, you know, the older you get, the less discretionary leisure time you had. So that maybe instead of the 40-hour games that we've been making uh in previous console generations, maybe a shorter uh game length for the single-player game was going to be acceptable. And with those kind of constraints, and it's a truism that a constraint is a designer's best friend, right? Gives you somewhere to stand, something to build off of. I think people just started pitching to each other, and everyone had their own passions and interests, you know. Uh, but eventually, over time and a lot of discussion, uh, you know, we arrived at the place that we arrived at.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

It sort of sounds a bit, and you know, I've I've experienced this as you know, whenever you're you're creating anything, especially when you're sort of building on a library of good work, is you know, the only way to grow is up, right? So if you're not sort of adapting and and iterating and changing, um not that not that that should be done without good cause,

The evolution of protagonists in games

SPEAKER_01 8:07

but I I you know I sort of wonder there's there's well, it happens to many companies or the directors, whether it be games, film, books, whatever, like if you can't evolve and change, then you sort of do get left behind, and and again, that seems like something that naughty dog is just like continues to do. Um, and it just feels like what you're talking about there in that particular moment was again one of those huge jumps.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Leveling up moments, yeah. Trying new things. I do think that uh it's a very interesting aspect of the studio, the way that they have continued to reinvent themselves to a degree, you know, to find a new direction. I mean, I often think that The Last of Us uh marked another kind of um uh direction for the studio, you know, building on those on the same techniques that we were using of cinematic, in-game storytelling, and the thoughtful planning of character-based drama, but taking it in this whole uh tonally very different uh direction to great success.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Well, the sort of evolution of protagonists in in their games, it sort of, you know, it's kind of getting a bit until you withdraw, which is like full grizzly, and then it starts to kind of come down again with um.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Well, and I'm very interested in the things they did in The Last of Us Part 2, you know, with Ellie and Abby as protagonists.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

And then actually I was kind of I mean, I don't want to turn into conspiracy theorists, but I was looking at it it's Bruce Bruce Australia. He's got a studio now and he's doing a game. Um called I forgot the name of it.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Uh the name of his studio is Wildflower Interactive.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

And then I think his protagonist is is this a sort of elderly uh grandmother.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

I'm very excited for their game, uh, which is called Coven of the Chicken Foot. Uh with this yeah um elderly woman and then this other entity. Um and uh yeah, I think that uh um surprising protagonists, uh and I mean that in every sense, characters or types of characters that might be a surprising choice for a protagonist, yes. Uh and also the things that happen to and with that protagonist. Um it's the essence of drama, really. You know, you'll find it in almost every um uh manual of of storytelling uh that it's um uh surprise uh is how we get and hold players' attention. Um it has to be in balance to that. My my friend and colleague Danny Bilson always uh says that uh you have to balance this essential element of surprise with relatability, uh, and you have to find reasons that people will care about a protagonist. You kind of have to get their heart on the line and reel them in, you know, and there are countless ways to do that. So I'm very, very excited for Bruce's game. I dare say that you know, I see ideas in there that I've heard Bruce talking about for the whole length of our friendship, and we first met at Crystal Dynamics when we were working there before uh Naughty Dog. So it's gonna be great to see what he and the team are cooking up.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

This is again, this is a total I don't want to get round to the the unchart two stuff, but I was just thinking about obviously the work you're doing now and just what you were talking about about sort of what what you know the magic sources that comes together to make a sort of a project uh or a studio great. And I was wondering with your students, what is the sort of thing that you uh well how do I want to phrase it? Like, what do you see them doing a lot of

Teaching game design at USC

SPEAKER_01 11:57

that they should perhaps do less of? And what is the one thing that they should be doing a heck of a lot more than that that than not, you know, from from your experience?

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, you know, I was just talking about arriving at Naughty Dog, this great studio of which I've been a fan for years, and one of the things that I really liked working about there was their uh the uh process. Um you know, um it's a truism. Every student of design in other design disciplines, uh, from graphic design, industrial design, architecture, typography, knows that um good design is rooted in good design process. And process was what Naughty Dog had a lot of. Um, they had uh clearly distinguished pre-production and full production phases. Um and they'd been uh working in this way for a long time, going all the way back to the Crash Bandicoot games. Um now, this was partly because of my friends Mark Cerny and Michael John, MJ John, um, who are two uh game designers, um uh game developers. Mark Cerny's probably best known now for the role that he's played in the development of the systems hardware for the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5. And um uh, but Mark and MJ are amazing storied game designers whose careers go back years, and they work closely with Naughty Dog and Insomniac games from the early days of those studios, and they observed and then codified and fed back into the studios the healthy processes that they observed there. And a lot of it was to do with pre-production and the way that when a project gets messed up, it's very often because pre-production either isn't done properly or gets skipped over altogether. And so this is what I have been lucky enough to be able to bring to the USC Games program where I now teach. Uh, because um uh I think it's a uh a common um trap that uh students of game

Pre-production and vertical slices

SPEAKER_00 14:06

development fall into. They have loads of ideas, they're very excited to get going, but they do the wrong things in the wrong order. Well the right things, but in the wrong order. Uh and um uh a lot of it is to do with um rather than designing by coming up with a lot of ideas and hoping that they were gonna work, you have to build something. And we talk in the game industry about this thing called a vertical slice, uh, which is one of the big deliverables that you need at the end of pre-production. It's like um, you can think of it like a playable demo of the game, just like those demos we used to get on cover discs back in the day, you know. Um, that shows you a little bit of all the elements of gameplay that are most important in the game, and also that sets a kind of standard for production values, how it's gonna look, how it's gonna sound, the quality of the animation, the dialogue, and so on. So um, yeah, we shifted our focus a little bit in the USC Games program to help our students design by making, and uh and in order to figure out what it is that they're making before they move into full production. Um, the other thing uh uh is this special game design document that Mark Cerny really helped to codify uh called the Game Design Macro, which rather than a great big thick kind of telephone directory style game design document like the ones that I used to write at the beginning of my career and that no one would ever read and that instantly uh went out of date the moment you started real development, um, you write a short overview, uh an outline of the flow through the game, focusing on the locations, the characters, the styles of gameplay, and the story beats that are going to happen in each part of the game. And then, armed with that kind of rough overview plan, then you can move forwards into full production with confidence. I've often said that it's this document um uh that uh is the thing that makes the production of a big, complex, naughty dog game possible because without it you just get lost and you waste time working on kinds of things. It also helps you having an overview like this helps you to scope down, uh, you know, to reduce the scale of your project uh

Game design macros and scoping projects

SPEAKER_00 16:19

when you need to. And that's something that um game students need to do a lot because they're early in their careers and they haven't really worked out how long it takes them to do things yet. So they usually have to scope down. I've never seen a student scope their project up.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

It's surprisingly similar to documentary uh production and lecturing, and it's like, well, why don't we well let's let's bring it down from seven lead characters to maybe one, two at absolute most, you know, do one thing really well instead of a lot of things um poorly.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, that's a big part, I think, of the way that Naughty Dog worked. I got to see that uh uh repeatedly, you know, where we would have a list of ideas. Um, but we worked in a way that um I've always known as concentric development, where you polish the core as you go and you don't move on to the next thing until the first thing is really good, really tight, kind of shippably good, uh, that so that you could release it. Um this is another key way I think of uh uh you can develop games in a healthy way. Because when you need that means that when you eventually need to cut stuff, uh then the things that you already have are watertight and um you're not struggling to fix up broken systems.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

So yeah, I mean moving on to well, firstly, you know, in terms of shifting on to Uncharted 2, off the back of Uncharted Um One, did you have a lot of ideas in mind about how you wanted to sort of evolve the series um out of the gate? And you know, how did that, you know, how did you start to execute on those things?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Well, we did, we had a lot of ideas, of course, because once the ball gets rolling on a game like Uncharted Drake's Fortune, and

Moving from Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 2

SPEAKER_00 18:09

everybody on the team starts to figure out the kind of world we're working in, the kinds of things that are uh exciting, and the kinds of gameplay that works best, um, that the ideas just begin to snowball after that. And I would say that Uncharted 2's pre-production phase was kind of this charm period. Um uh there was a particular, very short sequence in the first Uncharted game, um, where uh rather than um kind of taking control of the camera for a long time and using those kind of quick time event button presses to make a sequence of cinematic action uh feel interactive, um uh which, you know, I I've liked the occasional quick time event in the past, but I think the um received wisdom is, and certainly I think, that they are too low frequency of interaction. You've kind of jumped from the uh control system that the player's been living in the whole game into this, it feels thin, it feels um very uh too overly constrained. So

Creating cinematic gameplay

SPEAKER_00 19:25

we wanted to have that same kind of cinematic action, but to keep the player in the flow of the control scheme, the regular control scheme that they've been using. And um in Uncharted Drake's Fortune, there's this bit where Drake's at a waterfall, um a Jeep full of enemies pulls up on a cliff top above him and starts shooting him. He's like hanging off an edge in cover, and he has to like pop up and can shoot back at them. And eventually you realize there's a classic video game red barrel in the Jeep. And if you shoot it, there's a very, very short cutscene. It's like uh under two seconds long, I think. Timed it. I should go and figure it out. And the Jeep flips as the explosion happens and crashes, and the guys fall out and wash away downstream, and the Jeep now forms a bridge so that you can run forwards. So this was emblematic of what Naughty Dog now call in-game cutscenes, where you barely disrupt the main flow of the gameplay and you you know do a few clever camera tricks, camera cuts, um, and get the player right back into the flow of the action to create this feel of playable cinema, which was what Uncharted 2 was all about. That was really our North Star. How can we get this um the strongly cinematic feeling of all those 80s action movies that we had grown up loving? And in fact, you know, the entire history of action uh films in world cinema, and inject that into real-time gameplay. And it worked very well, you know. We immediately started coming up with scenarios uh that would support this kind of thing. Uh, the um uh train sequence uh in

The Uncharted 2 train sequence

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Uncharted 2, where you jump on a train in our fictional uh uh Nepalese city and make your way up into the Himalayas, um, where the train is really moving through the video game environment, which was a first for games. Uh normally, you know, you animate the environment to make it look like the train is moving. That afforded a lot of cinematic action and uh culminating in this uh big explosive sequence at the end. Um, and all of the other ideas that just came thick and fast. It was as if, you know, we kind of um uh uh well, we worked in a way that I think it was probably Amy Hennig brought it to us, working onto index cards, writing down all of the Ideas that we came up with in our brainstorms on index cards, and then shuffling them on the on the desk. And this is a time-honour tradition in screenwriting. Blake Snyder recommends it in his book Save the Cat, for example. And so we would find groups of ideas, you know, an MPC who's with you, and maybe a particular enemy, or uh, you know, a major boss-like enemy like the helicopter in the Antarctic City, uh, a location, a special event, a narrative beat, and suddenly you've got a whole sequence, you know, of the game, and you can pin that up on the corkboard. And by the time you've got a few sequences, you start to see a natural order for them. You can figure out how you're going to get from sequence A to sequence D with a few more sequences in between. And um, yeah, I mean, it took a lot of hard work, you know, um, uh, a lot of uh uh careful uh uh discussion uh by um Amy and Bruce, our directors for that project, and the kind of core story team uh around them, uh my uh co-lead game designer Neil Druckmann who's now uh president of Naughty Dog and uh uh and I and a few other folks in the mix, uh including uh our editors, um uh uh Taylor Kurosaki, animators, like my friend Josh. So it was uh, you know, not a a tiny team, but a small team of people figuring out uh the sequences. But I want uh to emphasize gathering up ideas from right across the team, um uh which was growing at that time and uh uh beginning of Uncharted 2. Um and um uh and this was how we worked towards that game design macro that I was just describing for Uncharted 2. Uh so yeah, kind of a perfect storm in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

I mean that train level, you know, it was the one wasn't an 80s movie, but you know, having seen um Mission Impossible as a kid, you know, what was the phrase you used? Cinematic?

SPEAKER_00 24:13

Um oh playable uh cinematic action.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Yeah, so just just this kind of like unscratchable itch to play a really a proper train

Why the train level worked

SPEAKER_01 24:25

level in a video game, you know. Um and I I don't think I got that until I got to Uncharted 2, which was quite a few years later. But it was just that honestly, it's just like I don't know, I don't even know if I have words for it, but you know when you you you know when you're playing so because I was just some reason I was always I used to do stop motion animation, I was obsessed with like train action scenes, you know. Oh so to to to finally get get to a play one out that really gave all those things you were talking about was um I'm not sure if I've really experienced something quite like that since, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

I'm happy to hear that. It was it's uh interesting case, the train level, because it was one of the first levels that we started work on, and one of the last levels that we finished. This thing that I'm talking about of a train really moving through the environment, we had to invent a whole new core game system to do it. Our um uh dynamic object traversal system, we called it. Um, and it's quite common in games these days to have a moving object that the characters can uh use their traversal abilities and their other abilities on top of. Um, but it uh hadn't been done before, at least to my knowledge, in this way uh back then. And um, our programmers had to either touch or rewrite nearly every system in the game uh to make it possible. And a whole load of gnarly bugs uh arose in this level. We discovered quite late in development that um when you were aiming your gun, the ray cast from the end of the gun was actually aiming at the end where the enemies were one frame ago. Uh, you know, and in a game uh running at 30 or 60 frames a second, that's not uh a very big distance. But when you're on a train moving at like 60 miles an hour through an environment, the enemies were two meters away, so you wouldn't hit them. And you'd throw grenades and they'd move into the coordinate space of the world, shooting back towards you, and all of this stuff. But it what it meant was that even though um uh the train level was one of the last levels we finished because of solving all these problems, it made all of the systems in the game very watertight. Because if it worked in the train level, we knew it must work everywhere in the game in the game.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Well, what I'm for putting it off.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Thanks. Uh to the talented team members. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

To see it sort of come together. Um, and then so yeah, you know, uh the thing that I was really keen to talk with you about was this, you know, the placement of this sort of village scene in the game. And I guess um, and also you know, my interest in that come came from a place as a gamer

The Tibetan village sequence

SPEAKER_01 27:18

from being a very small child, I was always um looking for those kind of safe spaces in video games, right? Like even from Sonic or whatever, and I would uh for the most part you kind of have to roleplay them in your head, but even playing things like Wonder Boy and like I would I would really linger in the the the villages and the towns, or the same with with Zelda, just because of that innate desire to sort of be in a a place that you know is kind of like um nothing stressful is gonna happen, you know. And I guess my first question is more broadly about that idea of of you know it's it's fair to say that most a lot of games are very they're action-oriented. I think players have an innate desire to sort of um be given a little bit of a break and a rest. Right. And I think that you can you can take that quite far and that if you can capture them in the right way, if that if you sort of agree with that.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Oh, very much so, yes. I mean, um I've always been interested in very diverse styles of uh gameplay, just as I'm interested in diverse styles in all art making, you know, I've always been equally enthused about punk rock and ambient music. Uh and I think that uh for a long time uh games really only traded in kind of uh at least um the mainstream of games um arguably overtraded in that high intensity play when we have all of these other styles of gameplay available to us. Um and uh very often I think game developers were anxious about exploring other styles because what if they lose the player? You know, what if um players recoil from either a tonal shift or a shift in the patterns of gameplay uh and they stop playing the game? Um so

Slowing players down in AAA games

SPEAKER_00 29:25

you know, coming back to this question of how sequences of uh of a game like Uncharted 2 emerge and how the ideas come up, um we knew that we wanted to go up into the Himalayas where there would be a temple uh to find uh um to you know unlock the some of the final secrets of the game. And um uh uh I wasn't in the room when it happened. I think it was probably um Amy, Bruce, Neil, and Evan who cooked up this idea for well, we we know that we're coming out of a big battle um uh in the flow of the gameplay, and we're going to end up in another big battle before too long. Um the intensity of the game right before the peaceful village sequence in Uncharted 2 is really, really high. And um they realized that we needed to do a reset. You know, it's a bit like the old spinal tap thing, you know. If if you're at 10, do you have an 11 to go to? The obvious answer to this uh uh kind of um uh uh intensity arc problem is to bring the intensity back down. Um and I had been recently um been shown a game uh called The Graveyard uh uh by um uh uh my friends at uh Tale of Tales, uh uh Aurea Harvey and Michael Simin. And um uh I'd been shown this game by Robert Cogburn, who was another one of the uh game designers working on Uncharted 2. Um, and I'm

Designing emotional attachment through gameplay

SPEAKER_00 31:13

not sure whether um uh the folks in the room were aware of this game, but they had this idea for a peaceful sequence of the game. A game where we took away uh all of the um core, nearly all the core abilities of Drake, certainly the combat abilities, and just allowed him for a few minutes to explore this village. Uh and there were a few key design elements to it. Drake had just been injured and nursed back to life. He'd been found in the snow by the village leader, brought to the village and nursed back to life. Uh um when he wakes up, uh none of his friends are around. It's just him and the village leader, Tenzin, who becomes an important character in the game. And Tenzin doesn't speak any English, uh, only uh speaks Tibetan. Drake doesn't speak any Tibetan. So he's wandering through this town. Um he's uh uh stranger uh to them. Uh the people of the town are going about their business, um uh, you know, tilling the uh the small gardens for their crops and admiring the view, kids are playing. Um and uh uh we all ended up thinking that a sequence like this would not only serve to bring the tone back down to a baseline that we could then build from, um, but our hope was that it would um create an emotional attachment for the player to this village and its people, so that when the bad guys show up, uh the people who were um pursuing Drake on the train, I don't know, after the artifact that he has, um, and the village comes under attack, that you would then feel responsible for the plight of these people in a first-hand way, without the game having to kind of tell you that you uh you should feel guilty in a cut scene. We thought that players would just sort of internalize it because they'd had all these first hand experiences through core gameplay of this beautiful place that is now uh in chaos, and um I think it really paid off. Uh I th I mentioned this game, The Graveyard, which is an early art game by a Belgian-American uh uh art game, indie art game developers, Tale of Tales. And um the game is a memento mori. Uh, it's a game with um triple A uh production values, so great graphics, great animation, really good sound design. You play an old woman and you're walking down a path through a graveyard towards a bench outside the church at the end. And uh as you walk down the path, you know,

The Graveyard and quieter game design

SPEAKER_00 34:17

your steps are kind of faltering, and the sunlight is playing across the scene, and birds land on the tombstones, there's a dog barking in the distance, and um, you know, it doesn't have much in the way of uh uh recognizably um uh gameplay that would like grab you and draw you in and want you to keep playing. It just allows you to focus on the traversal mechanics of the game and what kind of meaning is implicit in them. Uh in some ways, I think it's the first uh walking simulator. I don't really like that term, but it's a recognizable one for a you know, walking simulator as a first-person narrative game uh without um the mechanics like shooting that were traditional first-person games, where you can do other things, uh narrative things, maybe puzzle problem-solving kinds of things. And so, yeah, I think the graveyard kind of uses the meditative pace of walking to shift us into this space of what ultimately becomes a contemplation of mortality in this tradition of um Renaissance paintings of uh Memento Mori, which were intended to um make their audiences humble um in the face of their inevitable death. And um, I won't say more about um the graveyard, I think people should go and play it for themselves, but it kind of set a light bulb off over my head. I'd been oriented to games as an art form for a long time and was noticing the things that were happening here and there in games culture that ran counter to um the mainstream of game design. And I think it's a truism that when there's stuff happening in the avant-garde, there's great potential for it to um uh uh for those ideas to make their way into the mainstream to enrich what's happening in the mainstream of of any art form. Um so as soon as I heard this idea, I I think you know, I walked into the room and uh Amy and the rest of the crew were discussing the idea for this peaceful village that would then become war-torn. I was like, can I work on the peaceful village level? They gave me that job. Um, I then had to do a lot of running around, mainly talking to the animators. I mean, we already had the level because it was getting built. And if you when you play through the peaceful village level, I think that actually it also kind of foreshadows what's going to happen there later, the fighting that's gonna happen there later, because you can see the kind of recognizable low walls that that's what I picked up when I was replaying it.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

I was like, oh, no, this is extraordinarily

Bringing meditative gameplay into mainstream games

SPEAKER_01 37:03

traversable uh village, you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think Bruce Straley did a lot of the level design uh for that place. It's a great piece of level design. Yeah, you um uh kind of walk through the village and it's lit as if it's uh a clear sky sunny day. Um, and there are all of these people around, you know, and um uh with little animations that show them at repose. There's a guy kind of hoeing his garden, and like I said, people looking over the view, two kids uh playing with a ball, little kids hiding behind a wall, uh, quite a few yaks for you to uh go and visit with. Yeah, it's I think it uh I was lucky that I was able to persuade the uh animators to take a bit of extra time out of their day to make these additional animations that we were gonna need to realize this thing. Um and I was very pleased with the reception it got uh because it was uh commented on a lot, actually a surprising amount by um reviewers of the game when the game uh uh came out.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

I often find and it's a good barometer for me for some whether it's something I want to play, but when you can see that a reviewer is excited because they seem to be they have found themselves engaging in something that feels uh new, you know, or surprise them that they're they're extremely keen to write about it because it may have something different to say.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we uh we were very happy because it seemed like a kind of a risky thing to do at the time, uh, to have a kind of a sequence with little in the way of core gameplay. And there were people around the studio who were like, You're crazy, this isn't gonna work. People are gonna hate this. And admittedly, you know, there's a uh small number of players who do just run straight through the peaceful village. I think you can get through it in like 70 seconds or less if you kind of speed run it. But um in playtests, I was happy to see that most people kind of took they took their time a bit and kind of lingered and explored a little bit and soaked up the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

I was thinking about yeah, that that that sort of ask to sort of slow oneself down.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

Um there's something mindful or meditative in it, I think.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

But how do you because because I suppose what I'm suddenly thinking about is all those games when it's not not that same thing, but it's usually because you've got an NPC that you need to stay with and they're following you, but their their rate of movement is so much slower than yours, so you're like at the exit, ready to go, kind of jumping in the bits. But but that scene doesn't um do that, and I know that you're the one you're following in that instance.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

That's right, we reversed it. Tenzin's leading you through, and the uh the areas are gated a little bit, um, especially at the beginning, it has to open a gate uh as you approach. Uh, and that's a kind of subtle design strategy that encourages you to explore a bit. Um uh, but yes, no, it's interesting to be following

Audio design and emotional pacing

SPEAKER_00 40:11

someone rather than being followed. It's this kind of inversion. I think that um, you know, a lot of it is about tone. I'm a big believer in the power of audio design. Uh and um uh, you know, it's mainly sort of environmental sound in that sequence. Uh and I think that sound design can do a huge amount to um shape people's emotional experience. Uh, and I think that all of the great games, the great narrative games that have come out of every style from AAA through to the indie narrative games that I loved have have tapped into that, the way that we can um, in a way that's quite transparent to the player, that's not noticeable to the player. Uh, we can really sculpt their emotional experience uh just with a you know the tweeting of some birds, the blowing of the wind, uh the clouds dappled across the landscape and bring things back down. And then, you know, I'm a big believer in allowing players to drive their own experience. You know, we're an interactive art form, uh, we want to engage people's agency as much as we can, and so um, yeah, it should be up to the player how long to linger. But I'm very interested, Stephen, in the your remarks about your desire, your long-standing desire to experience more of these moments uh in games.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Um I mean it's why I gravitated to you know LucasArts games and you know, because even Sierra games are a little too perilous for me, but you know, with with with Monkey Island it forgetting moving the story forward, but I could just spend time and you know, Scumball or Melee Island or whatever, and and but I would still end up playing kind of action or adventure-oriented games. Um, but I just and I always sort of felt a little bit different from my friends in that sense because I always found them a little more too stressful or or perilous, you know. And I would I would eke out and I would find out those spaces in the in the most sort of non-that type of game I I possibly could, um, and just try and exit exist in them.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Well, and I think you're not alone in in your desire for this style of game. I think you know that's what's driven the cozy games movement. Uh all of these wonderful games in many different styles. Uh uh Jesper Yule, um uh my friend, the Danish uh scholar

Cozy games and reflective spaces

SPEAKER_00 42:42

of games, writes about this in one of his books, reflects on the way that um not all video games are traditionally game-like. They don't necessarily have um uh uh they're not necessarily winnable or they don't trade in points. Um the sort of um uh movement which started a long time ago towards games, maybe video games, maybe more as toys. And I think that the um Will Wright's work on his sim games are emblematic of this. Sim City uh has a kind of meditative uh quality to it, you know, as you kind of build and nurture your city. The Sims obviously has a similar kind of thing going on in it. Um, one of the earliest uh art games that I'm aware of um was I think it was an Atari game. Uh it was called Alien Garden, uh, and it was developed by Bernie DeCoven, uh, who plays an important role in the history of the academic program USC Games, where I teach. Bernie was uh um a game designer, a scholar of play, an educator associated with this thing called the New Games Movement, um, which kind of arose uh out of the peace protest movement in America in the 60s. Hippies on marches, devising um uh non combat-oriented games, non-competitive games for them to play when they were kind of waiting uh um uh to begin or after a march. Um, Bernie is a wonderful thinker, a multiply published author, who talks a lot about meditative, the meditative community-building qualities of games. So he developed this game, Alien Garden, with uh Jaron Lanier, who's now very well known as a virtual reality pioneer. Um, and this game sees you attending a kind of virtual garden with strange creatures and this emergent uh musical score. Um, and we can find, I think, these patterns of play in lots of places down history, and I'm really happy that they seem to have gathered steam, you know, becoming game genres in their own right, the um all of the wonderful kind of diorama building games that you can find on now, the way that these techniques have really made uh their way into um all of my favorite AAA narrative games, you know. They now use uh quieter sequences like this. Um The Last of Us has you know

Games, mindfulness and meditation

SPEAKER_00 45:20

used uh um uh techniques where you either uh take away bits of the gameplay or insert other pieces of gameplay. I really like the guitar playing sequences in in Last of Us. I think they lend a lot around this. Um yeah, it's I think it's a marker of um uh the ongoing maturation of uh games as an art form that we now see these this kind of emotional tone and the ideas, the almost spiritual ideas, right, that uh are um uh tied up in it.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

Can you elaborate on that at all? What do you mean by that? You mean like is in just sort of trying to sort of tap into something a little bit deeper for a player?

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Yeah, I mean I do think that uh uh I won't become that person who bangs on about their meditation practice, but um I've been meditating for a few years now. I've always been interested in it. I did yoga when I was at Naughty Dog actually uh for many years, and I think that yeah, it's helpful for people to get attuned to their inner lives for a multitude of reasons, no matter what kind of person they are, whether they're a very action-oriented, goal-getting person, or whether there's some whether they are someone who in their daily lives needs to tune into a more reflective space. I think it's useful for all of us to be able to cultivate um that ability to be able to um have a little bit of detachment from what's going on and to observe what's going on more clearly, right? Uh without getting so caught up in the emotion that you know it inevitably forms a massive part of all of our lives. I think that um human beings are mainly driven by emotion. In fact, uh um uh there's a professor at UFC, uh Damasio, who uh is a very famous um uh neuroscientist uh and philosopher who says that um human beings are not primarily thinking beings, we are feeling creatures who happen to think. Uh and you know, the more we learn about the way our minds work, the more we understand the primary role emotion plays in shaping our memories, our decision-making processes. So, like I say, I think it's helpful in a variety of ways for us to reflect uh and to get oriented on what's really going on for us and for others. I think it helps make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_01 48:07

I mean it may and again you're saying like the the joy of seeing these sort of gameplay elements, you know, that lack thereof, entering to you know being present in triple A games and um you know, giving people the opportunity to sort of um have an experience that they might otherwise not have, say in an action game or an adventure game that is just always a 10 or always at 11. And because I guess you've you've like you couldn't put this level at the start of the game, right? I mean, although actually I'm trying to I'm sure there's examples now where that actually does um uh is is more uh happening more, but you sort of get the buy-in and then you're given the your sort of permission. It's like okay, I'm gonna slow you down now, and we're just gonna chill out, and then you're gonna appreciate this. And actually, because of the immersive nature of the the place where you take the players, there's also like a kind of a a cultural appreciation,

Why pacing matters in storytelling

SPEAKER_01 49:10

you know, it's not like you've got them walking down a quiet street in in New York, you know. Um, you know, you take them somewhere extraordinarily foreign.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

Yeah, yeah. I always think that it's a bit like having uh um an artist's palette, uh a painter's palette full of colours. Um and with those different colours, you can create really any kind of experience that you want to. Uh the thing I always try and point out to my students is what you were just saying. It comes back to this thing of are we at 10, 11, 7, 3. Um, there are lots of different um patterns that work in terms of uh unfolding uh sequence, and I think that it's oftentimes just having the courage uh to do it. One more um influence that I wanted to mention is the work of uh uh Femito Wader, you know, who developed Eco and Shadow of the Colossus. Um and it was something that you said in one of our emails about just taking a moment. Uh I think it was your desire to just like sit down and have a rest in uh a certain action-y game that you have.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

Oh, I think it was like, you know, if there was a bench in Donkey Kong.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Yes, right, right, right. And it immediately made me think of the save points in ICO, uh, where um uh they sit down on a sofa, and the sofa's kind of you know an anachronism. It's like a um uh it doesn't belong there. There are no other, it doesn't seem like a world that would have sofas in it, but they sit down on this sofa and rest for a moment. And I think that that that's uh a kind of indication of a tone that is pervasive throughout his games that has this uh quality or character of uh reflect reflectiveness, reflection, you know, on what is at stake here. I think Shadow of the Colossus pulls this off absolutely beautifully, where we're working uh towards a particular goal that is a personal goal for the protagonist of the game, and we gradually gain the sense that maybe what we're doing is terribly wrong. So, yeah, there's a lot for us to do as storytellers, and you know, storytellers are very often interested in exploring

ICO, Shadow of the Colossus and rest spaces

SPEAKER_00 51:27

moral territory, and I think that as games have gotten more sophisticated in exploring the the ethical consequences of the actions of protagonists, antagonists alike, um again they're maturing as an art form.

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Well, I think video games and again I just I love that thing about it, say, in the sense of a triple A game or something where you can get the buy-in and then it's like okay, now we're gonna put you, I mean the the last of us won does it you know, and and and and then two as well, but I think it kind of feels like it comes out of nowhere when you find yourself in the hands of of of Ellie, you know. Like we're gonna put you in the hands of this other person that is more likely not just statistically very different from from from from who you are, you know. Um and I I always think I mean I don't this this is because this is a whole other interview, but you know, I think a lot about um representation in movies and in video games. I know video games get a lot of flack, um but I feel like I b I'm exposed to a much wider variety of of characters and ideas and stories and themes in video games than than in even the most sort of nuanced movies often. Um and I feel like maybe it's that's that's well they they should be equal at the least, but it almost one might assume that it would be the other way around, but I don't know that it is.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Yeah, I certainly think games have come a long way around questions of representation, not just the kinds of characters we see on screen, but uh in terms of who's writing their stories. I I think we need to keep working on that. I don't think we can let our guard down, you know. I think that um a lot of what we respond to in story is the authenticity of the storytelling. Uh and you know, it's a truism that you should write what you know. Uh, and so I think that we need diverse authors, diverse writers, in order to be able to create those diverse experiences. But I think, you know, we've come a long way and uh we're gonna keep going uh down that path. Um, yeah, and I'm very interested to see as games, you know, become, I often say like a literary form, in as much as I think cinema is a kind of literary form, you know, there are words involved, there are stories that involve ethical situations that novels have been exploring for centuries. I think that games are a literary form as well, and there are great scholarly works on my shelves here written, you know, about uh uh games as uh literary works and the way that they are the meanings are received by audiences. And I think that while I'm not really a person who uh goes on a lot about how games are a special kind of art form, because I actually think they have more in common with cinema and literature than we sometimes think, there are very interesting opportunities for game developers around the player's agency uh and how that weaves into a story uh and how it can be guided by the designers or allowed to roam freely in different patterns of play to uh uh allow us to have special kinds of experiences around this stuff, around exploring ethical moral lessons.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

And just just to come back with to one question I wanted to ask again about the village was well, firstly, you know, you you pulled it off right, like it worked. Um but again, there's a great YouTuber called Annie Austin, I think his name, and he does these videos called sort of like some like strange and odd places in video games where he'll just go and he'll slow right down and go find the weirdest like little corner in a game.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01 55:20

It's absolutely um and his channel seems to have sort of um blown up recently. He's done like a video like where do all the rivers in Skyrim go? And does the does the power system in Grand Theft Auto actually connect up? Um I love that. It's absolutely brilliant um storyteller, but I guess I'm thinking about the there's a certain pace and rate that a player goes through a level where they're not they they they're gonna pick up on a certain amount of attention to detail, but at the same time they're sort of gonna keep on moving, right? And and with that level, you're kind of like you're you're slowing them right down. And my guess is that if you misstep in terms of the the the level of detail that you're willing to put into that, it's it's basically gonna sort of fall flat

Environmental detail and player immersion

SPEAKER_01 56:03

on its face, right? So you do do you just sort of need to double, triple the amount of kind of um attention to detail that you're putting into a level like that?

SPEAKER_00 56:12

Uh it's interesting. I've been teaching a class in level design for a few years uh now, and the other day we were talking in class about how um uh as Robert Yang says in his excellent online book about level design, the leveldesignbook.com. Uh Robert says that uh, or maybe one of his co-authors says that very often level designers put a lot more time and attention into an interior space, like a small room where you're gonna spend a lot of time and a lot of important things are gonna happen, than uh they then uh the developers might put into a vast open world space. Um and I think that historically that has been true, you know, if you're developing, you know, square kilometers of space and you have to populate it, and you know, developers have invented tools to allow them to place trees and bushes and rocks algorithmically so that we don't have to at least initially place every single one by hand. Um, there's a certain amount of hand tailoring that ends up having to happen. Um and I'm a very details-oriented designer, although I think that might be a truism. I think every designer is detailed-oriented, you know, it's the whole um God lives in the details or the devil's in the details, depending on how much trouble the details are giving you. Uh and I um think that you're right, there's a real tension. Players sometimes just are running through and they're not attending to the details, but any player could stop and look at a corner or a wall or the ground. And um if you know that experience from uh the early days of 3D in console and PC games, where you end up stuck in a corner looking at a stretched texture, and it just it it breaks the willing suspension of disbelief that players and people experiencing all kinds of stories have. Uh so I'm always on the lookout for ways that we can make it so that it seems like everywhere has had a lot of design love. Um, it's why I love a theme park like uh Disneyland, you know, near where I live here in uh Southern California. Um, because Disneyland is relatively small by the standards of a modern theme park, and it was, you know, one of the first uh, you know, at least post-World War II theme parks to be built. And it's had so much love over the years that everywhere you look, there's another charming, interesting, story-supporting detail to experience. So maybe we should chalk this up to one of the next great challenges for game developers is how to make everywhere in the world seem rich. I think it's gonna have a lot to do with systems design, a lot like those tools that place trees automatically. I think that we're gonna be able to develop ways of making video game environments more ecological, you know, so that where the sun is shining, moss doesn't grow, but in that shady corner, there's lots of moss and lichen, you know, hanging from the branches. Uh and uh, you know, games will be able to respond in in real time uh to make them as rich as they can possibly be.

SPEAKER_01 59:37

I love that reflection, yeah. Um well I feel like you know, I mean, this is yeah, this is certainly sort of scratched uh an itch for me. Oh and and that's what I love. I just love sort of to the idea of just getting into quite granular detail um on this stuff. I mean, I think you know, I put in my email I had a bonus question. Yeah, which which you you know, because you alluded to it in that the the the tone control, but it never got not followed up, which was this idea that Uncharted sits more within sci-fi than fantasy when talking about the um the soup the you know uh you know this idea that there's the sort of supernatural elements, but you sort of um alluded at kind of challenging

The future of ecological game worlds

SPEAKER_01 1:00:18

that. I just wondered if you could elaborate.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

Well, it's a fun thing that we used to uh talk about in the studio. Um you know, I I had in mind to talk to you about world building, uh, because obviously when you're creating um uh a big new story world, you have to build that world. In the craft of world building that you know any kind of fancy or science fiction storyteller needs to engage in, um, you've got to figure out whether you're gonna do top-down or bottom-up world building. Top-down is where you take years to invent, maybe uh maybe years, to invent a whole world in every aspect. You know, what kind of planet are we on? What continents? What's the weather like? Where are the big cities? Um, what are the political systems like? You know, all the way down to the lives and the histories of uh individual uh nations or characters. Um but we did bottom-up world building where we invented just enough detail to support the kind of game we wanted to make, the kind of story we uh wanted to tell. Um and as part of those discussions,

Science fiction vs fantasy in Uncharted

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

we were always going back and forth around these questions of um, you know, is Uncharted gonna be, is it gonna have supernatural elements? In the way that at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which has taken place against this very realistic, you know, uh pre-World War II.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:44

Just enough, just a little, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

You get that, but it's very clearly supernatural, right? With these spirits coming out and swirling around. I won't spoiler it for anyone who hasn't seen Raiders, it's an amazing film. Um, and uh, you know, we knew that we wanted some of that flavor because it's such an essential part of the kind of golden age adventure uh that um that we were uh trading in. At least the suggestion of it is, you know, we knew that we wanted to have some element of spookiness, uh, you know, part of the way that we were gonna get at that surprise and the mystery was the sense of, you know, what the what the heck is going on here? Um but I'd love to, and I'm not gonna talk about it too much, because I think that at the end of the day, I want players to decide for themselves. Um, but we like the idea that um maybe um everything that happens in an uncharted game uh is uh scientifical, scientifically uh explainable. Um so Amy and I were big fans of uh Neil Marshall's excellent 2005 film, uh The Descent, which is about a group of um uh women uh spelunkas who get trapped underground and have an encounter with some entities. Um and uh um uh we uh have some uh there's a kind of similar encounter in the first Uncharted game. Um and to my mind it was never quite clear whether those creatures were um uh supernatural in some way or not. Um uh it could be that they were um the devolved descendants of the people who had inhabited this island uh centuries ago. Maybe the devolution was accelerated by some biological vector like a virus, which would then make Uncharted more of a science fiction story. Um, but that doesn't, to me, quite seem scientifically plausible as well. So maybe there was something strange uh to do with the treasure that transformed them uh in this way. So I think that was a departure from the movie The Descent, which is much more clearly these are meant to be um some kind of devolved remnants of an earth branch, uh, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands uh of years old. And I I just think it's a nice place to play around in. I think that a lot of science fiction actually blurs uh the boundary between uh fact and fantasy, uh, and it's uh a fun thing for us to kind of tease audiences with. I think if you play it out in the right way, you can really um uh uh ramp up people's emotional engagement wanting to know what's the explanation here. Uh and um uh whether you give it to them or not is a matter of choice for the the creators.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:00

Well, that's why I quite like your answer because it just raises more questions than than less, which is which is exactly how you want to leave it, right? Well, I really thank you, appreciate your time on this. You know, I mean I feel like who've gone on probably forever, honestly. But um, it was just great to uh yeah, drill in to uh to uh so many different sort of um pieces around a brilliant set of games.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:27

Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you, Stephen. Thanks for all of your thoughtful questions. Uh I feel really lucky to have worked with that incredible group of people, uh Naughty Dog, and uh you know, to be able to mm bring their wisdom to my students in the USC Games program. It's been a pleasure, thanks very much.