Player Agency Quotes

A game is a series of interesting choices.

It's a business when the NBA cuts you, trades you or waives you. But you're a villain, as a player, when you take your future and your happiness in your own hands and it's unfortunate.

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

I'm a believer that players are good self-directors, and I think one thing that's good about video games is they can direct their own experience.

I am conscious of that when I make these games: I try to make a game that has beautiful open spaces, gaps, room for players to enjoy it in ways that were not authored. I never want it to be where you have to follow the rules completely, where you have to do things exactly as the designers intended.

I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.

The right way to enjoy 'Heavy Rain' is really to make one thing because it's going to be your story. It's going to be unique to you. It's really the story you decided to write.

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

I used to think about video games, "This is clearly an amazing, new narrative medium, and it's going to be mind-blowing when people get to grips with what's possible within this medium." It took us a century to get really good at film. Video games are at a much earlier stage.

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

Some people are shocked when a game evokes real-world issues. But this platform is about becoming the characters, not just seeing them from the outside, like in a film.

On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.

Time and time again, the players constantly surprise you and often not do at all what you expect and completely muck up your preparation, and that's kind of the beauty of the game. It wouldn't be as fun to the DM if everything worked out exactly how you thought it would.

It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.

It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense.

I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story.

Half-Life is the finest implementation of a game on rails anybody has ever done

I haven't been in a position to be a free agent or know what that is like and then to have the chance to go where you want to go. That's always been - I feel, with players, they want that option.

We're growing into an entertainment medium as opposed to 'We make games. We make Mario jump.' We no longer have to focus so hard on the technical hurdles and can ask, as a player, why am I doing this? Why am I making these choices? Games that don't have that strong foundation stumble.

As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

It is one of my pet hates when I see players who have agents who do everything for them. They don't know how to set up their own bank accounts, they don't know what they are spending their money on and they can't make their own decisions.

From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

Obviously, in the NBA, there's a lot of different decisions that people make. The whole thing in the NBA is that people sometimes have an opportunity to go where they want.

The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible.