Interview: Ken Levine (Pg. 3/3)

There is this quality to BioShock that I have never really quite seen before and it sounds to me that in some ways it is this collaborative process you are talking about. I kind of get the feeling with a lot of other games that they kind of pound it out to meet a milestone, and it doesn't mean they aren't doing great work and it doesn't mean that it is not a great game, but there is something different about BioShock. Would you say it is the collaborative element, and that you were working with your team the way you did?

KL: Yeah. Quite often I think the fact is that you have a right to who you bring in. With BioShock I am the Creative Director and I'm making it, not just the meetings and everything like that, but I'm involved in all the design decisions, so my level of involvement and my level of understanding coupled with what the product is, is so much deeper than some guy who is swimming in a script or emailing in a script and no reflection on them, it is just really hard.

Because I am also a game designer the story and the game are equally important to me, and that is why I am so uncomfortable with cut scenes because I don't want it as a gamer and again I don't want to stop the game. And if I am going to have a sequence, and it is going to be a non-active sequence, there better be a damn good reason for it in BioShock. That makes my job a lot harder because writing a10 minute cut-scene is so much easier than figuring out how to tell this in the world, but I think it makes it better at the end of the day.

The last thing I want to do is label BioShock as a horror game, because it is not, though it certainly has these horrific elements to it that kind of builds on the legacy of your guys at Irrational and now 2K Boston that has that kind of this history and I mean even looking at Swatch 4 in certain parts where there is a bit of a horror element to some of that. Is that something that intrigues you that you are interested in re-visiting? Is that like your "thing" or are you interested in doing something like completely different at some point?

KL: I like the horror. I like the notion to horror. I think it is one of the emotions of games - some emotions are very hard to elicit in games. Horror is one that is a little bit more direct and easy to get to in games. In a movie there are constraints set. You know things won't come from behind you, and you know how long movies are. In games, because they are newer, there is a lot more unknown there. I think horror works really well in games, and I feel I have been lucky to leverage it and my team has been lucky to leverage it in a couple of products. I know how to scare people.

I would agree with that.

KL: That said, I think you never know for sure whether it is going to work. I have told this story before but I remember when we were working on System Shock 2 and the head of Looking Glass asked me, "So, is this game going to be scary?" I honestly didn't know, and it was the same with BioShock. I am doing all the things and turning the gears in all the right directions to make that happen... pressing the right buttons to make that happen, I think, but that is just my gut. At the end of the day who knows if it is going to be scary, who knows if it is going to be fun. You just have to have an internal sensor for that and that sensor may be unreliable. Even the best directors and writers screw up. I have screwed up. The danger of that is sometimes you start doubting yourself, and let me tell you, there are a million things that people blabbered on BioShock all along the way, that if I got panicked over, I would have done something stupid, like there was a fairly large movement within the company to cut the Big Daddies at one point.

Wow! Of all the things. That is very interesting. What was the concern?

KL: I guess it didn't work, like we couldn't get them to work properly. It was really complicated and you have to use your gut. Quite often we cut things out that were very smart to cut. In another universe the Big Daddies may have been smart to cut, but I had an attachment to them... maybe even an irrational attachment to them. I was in a position where I could say "No, we are not cutting this," though just because I run the company that doesn't mean I can do whatever I want. At the end of the day there are really talented guys and they can go wherever they want to go and do whatever the hell they want to do. I have to make sure they believe in me and what I am doing in the project. So you have to listen very carefully and sometimes people are right, and sometimes people are wrong. I think the difference between a good game developer and a bad game developer is to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.

This sounds really open-ended, but in a nutshell what do you think game designers are doing right, and what do you think they are doing wrong?

KL: In a nutshell they are giving gamers more freedom and they are not spoon-feeding them their stories with walkthroughs. They are opening things up for the gamer and that is the future of games; it is freedom. I think what we are doing is a lot more right, than what we've been wrong

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