Question 3: Solutions?
So, where does the industry go from here? Schafer had a couple of ideas. For one, he says that the talent who can create great stories and characters is out there, they just need to be brought into the industry. He says that things will change over time as we bring in new blood and they get familiar with games and how to integrate story into gameplay.
Schafer also says that game developers can strive to be experimental without letting their publishers know (the crowd of developers watching the talk interrupted Schafer to applaud.) He says that whenever he pitches ideas to publishers, he talks about all the safe, standard features... and about the explosions.
At this point Michael Mateas, a Professor at Georgia Tech and one of the founders of the Game Lab there who had until this point not said anything, talked about the technology that games will need. He asserted that game programmers and designers need to develop a language that will enable them to think about procedural narratives. Follow? In other words, a way of coding games that will deal with unexpected situations and react accordingly. Mateas says that in years to come, awards for "character design" shouldn't just be based on how the character looks, but on how the character behaves in the game. He says that we need to start thinking about story in organic terms, not just as some sort of branching possibility tree.
Spector agrees that we need some new technology, but says that we're a long way away from scaling it up to something that, for example, EA will risk publishing right now. "We have big technical hurdles to leap," he says.
Neil Young doesn't think that it'll all happen at once. He sees game development in the middle of a long, gradual change. For example: Brothers In Arms adds new elements of squad-based combat to the formula that he helped to make popular with Medal of Honor. It's just one experiment that pushes the bar a little higher. It'll be the same with story development. He asserts that "there are ways to explore or advance this topic in games that are very commercial." He thinks it'll happen over time, so long as the game development community has a focus and a committed vision.
Judging by the panel and the crowd reaction, the development community definitely does have a commitment to telling better stories and capturing the elusive emotions of the gaming audience. But, as for how close we are to a "Citizen Kane Moment," -- well, that seemed to be still open for debate.
