Rob Pardo talks game design with CVG.
More information.There's a quote from Raph Koster that 'the singleplayer game is an aberration.' Historically, games have always been played together.
Rob: I think that's wishful thinking on his part. I think when you look at Raph, all the games he's worked on have been multiplayer games. I think maybe, to him, that might be true. But I don't see any sort of trend that leads me to believe that we're not going to see Half-Life 3, or God of War 3, or any of those kinds of games. Those games are awesome, amazing experiences.
For me, games become exponentially more entertaining when experienced together.
Rob: Don't get me wrong, I love multiplayer games, and from a Blizzard perspective, all of our games have a hefty multiplayer component, but I just don't see them as mutually exclusive. Even games that are traditionally singleplayer, like Super Mario. Nintendo added some pretty interesting co-op gameplay to Galaxy. I totally see that there's going to be more and more multiplayer functionality in games. To say that 'singleplayer epic games are going to disappear because of MMOs...' I think that's a reach.
We actually ban our writers from using the word 'gameplay'. We think we can make a better and more precise point than that. Do you agree?
Rob: To me, a game mechanic is something that's in the game that allows players to have fun. But gameplay is 'what a player does'. It's where they derive fun from the game design. There's lots of things that people enjoy in games. It might be technology, it might be the photorealism, it might be the visceral mechanic... gameplay is just one of those things. Gameplay means quite a bit to me as a game designer... It's really interesting too. I think a lot of people think the way you do: younger designers often come in and I'll ask them, "what do you think was fun in that game?" and they'll talk about things I wouldn't consider to actually be gameplay.
So can you describe what gameplay actually is?
Rob: It's the player's interaction with the game mechanics.