Q and A session: Eric Wile
MarsCon 2015 played host to a diverse lineup of keynoters, including game design industry veteran Eric Wile. His resume includes stints at Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Computer Electronics America, Big Idea Interactive, and Verant Interactive. His credits include storyboarding, level design, and Game Master for EverQuest. We sat down with him to get an experienced perspective on the game industry today, and what he's got his eye on for the future.
Game design has somewhat polarized into the monumentally expensive AAA franchises on one end and an avalanche of small, free or inexpensive, simpler mobile games on the other end with less and less action in the middle ground. Do you think that's the way of the future, or do you see room for any other space?
I think from the game design standpoint, the problem that you're going to run across is that we've seen this indie thing before, it's not the first time we've seen it. Indie was a lot of the drive back in the Atari 2600 days, that's where we got games like “KOOL-AID MAAAAN” and things that were just absolutely terrible.
But the thing is that Indie saturated and ruined the 2600 market, but now it's a little bit different because Indie is actually giving us more than just Flappy Birds as well. So I think that realistically Indie is going to get stronger, but to say it's going take on a Triple-A studio – not unless it has veterans.
Do you think that the Indie scene can feed concepts into the Triple-A industry in a way that is going to change stuff faster than we're used to seeing things change before the modern Indie scene took off?
If they can learn to get along long enough to have the conversation again.
Is there tension there?
There's a tension because you gotta keep in mind that when you bridge over from Triple A studio to Indie Studio you've been kinda like blacklisted by your own – I guess you could say [by] other veterans in the industry because they feel like, “You're taking away from our talent pool.” Well no, you forced us to go Indie, so there you go.
You mentioned actually – and I love this – real world achievement rewards like Pax tickets for in-game accomplishments. Do you have any other ideas that you're cooking on like that?
Actually, one thing that I missed about when I was a gamer back in the 2600 days – back in the day, you got real world achievements. Like “Hey, I got a little plaque with a badge that says 'Well, thank you for playing our game, and here's this.'” Why can't we do that again? Why not? Who cares about achievements in Xbox and PlayStation – anyone can get those. Why not give them something else?
In most games, story is a thing that unfolds in chunks parallel to actually playing – you play the game a little bit, and you get a chunk of story, repeat. I got this theory about games presenting gameplay for which you care about the story as you're warfighting or racing or playing football and it affects how you warfight or race or play football. I'd like to know what you think the future of story-meets-gameplay is.
I think story is what makes a game interesting, because if I'm playing a first-person shooter that's just strictly shooting and that's all I do, then it feels mundane and I've done it before. But if it has something where I'm learning something, I feel “Geez, I'm getting more out of this game from the story that I'm actually enjoying.” Like, BioShock had a deep story to it, Half-Life obviously, Halo has a really good story. But there's very few games of that genre that have story that is in-depth enough, and I think story is a big thing.
Borderlands has great storywriting and great character writing, but it doesn't have players playing with the story the way Mass Effect or other story-based games where story is foregrounded -
Like a Telltale game.
Yeah. And in those games, the player's agency is mostly about picking a decision from a menu of decisions, and so when they're actually shooting or doing whatever it is, they don't need to really care about the story. They might on an abstract level, but it doesn't really affect how they execute gameplay.
It's kinda scripted that way.
Do you think that there's space and a future for games to figure out melding the story-delivery with the gameplay?
I think in time. You gotta keep in mind, gamers want to release. That's why we want to get into gaming, is because we want that release regardless of its World of WarCraft, or Half-Life – we're just trying to get a release. But the more you engage the gamer with story, the more they get interested in playing the game, because a lot of gamers just get used to the mundane, because that might be all they know. They're like “Well, I'm so used to playing my Call of Duty, I don't know anything else.”
They swear by it, even though it's not like the franchise is the greatest thing in the world. So I think it's perception over time that you build.
For you as a designer, what's new tech that you think is going to change games or how we play them, or hardware that has you salivating as a designer?
Oculus Rift is probably the one thing right now that's got my attention. I'd have to say I like John Carmack. I've very impressed with it because I remember when VR first hit the market in 2000, it gave me a headache, I got migraines from it, even though it was fun to play, it was really interactive, but the quality of the game was not there. Now we actually have Oculus Rift which is playing actually playing like what you see in your screen, but with its full immenseness. The future of gaming is either neural-based technology or engaging technology.