GDC 08: What's Next For God Games
From the minute I walked in, I knew this was going to be a great lecture: a Calvin & Hobbes comic was projected on two screens and classic rock music was blasting over the speakers. And then Earnest Adams took the podium and I fell in love with the man: he was wearing a fedora. Apparently he used to wear top hats, but he forgot it in England.
This lecture was different from the usual track Adams normally follows in his speeches, as he normally lectures on interactive storytelling. This time around, the focus was on examining some of the aspects of god games and to throw some ideas out into the public domain so that developers might be able to take something away if they’re working on such a title.
Adams explained that he is not a really religious person, as evidenced when he said, “I agree with Robert Heinlein in that I believe the word ‘supernatural’ is a null word,” during his introduction. Instead, he’s interested in the possibility creating a god game where concepts like faith, theology, and lasting consequences are all key factors in gameplay.
We were given a number of examples from the god game he’d been working on, Genesis, when he was over at Bullfrog before the studio was completely absorbed by EA. The game itself was going to be billed as the first title to directly be about faith; the goal was for players, through a combination of war, evangelism, and godly powers, working to unite the people of the world beneath their banner. Faith was set to be a vital resource in the game, there would be different mana types to derive power from, players would move about the world on a magic carpet-like perspective, altitude-dependent spell availability.
A number of the concepts Adams discussed from Genesis were things that were, at the time, completely revolutionary. Some of these eventually appeared in Lionhead’s Black & White titles, but some of the more interesting things he mentioned have yet to appear. I was particularly interested by the use of a class system and establishing how it would work in the different towns. To me, the idea of making war a messy and problematic endeavor with lasting consequences was particularly interesting (he cited Northern Ireland as an example, where constant war has drained the economy and then kept investors away). The other interesting idea he presented was the possibility of using tolerance to exist alongside your fellow gods (citing the examples of Medieval Spanish communities being populated by Christians, Jews, and Muslims without any major conflicts between them). However, tolerance was actually set to be the riskiest venture because you’d leave your people open to the possibility of foreign influences. Finally, I really liked the idea of establishing the fact that too much religious activity (worship, holidays, etc) would be detrimental to an economy, as historical cultures like Rome and the Aztecs started to fall apart under such settings.
The last portion of the speech focused on some ideas for developers to mull over when they’re working on the Next Big God Game, some of which are possible on current technology and some of which aren’t. All of Adams’s ideas centered around making game worlds more alive, from making the people more autonomous to giving other gods more personality to creating a deeper psychological dimension for the effects of faith on NPCs (such as making conversion a bigger deal and having a deeper impact on the converted). Of course, these possibilities were merely food for thought, but Adams closed the lecture by wishing everyone in the audience working –or thinking of working- on a god game the best of luck and challenged everyone to push the limits of the genre.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to GDC, Miscellany on 22 February 2008
Other stuff like this: earnest adams, game developers conference, gdc, gdc 2008, god games, lecture, speech
