By Tom Chick
Doom with dinosaurs? Seamus Blackley, the designer of Trespasser, DreamWorks Interactive's new Jurassic Park-based game, has something else in mind - consistent reality, an internal logic based on natural laws rather than coded responses. Physics, the former PhD student believes, is more immersive than flashy effects.
In testing, Blackley tried to walk a character over a barrel, but, like a circus bear, it began moving backward as the barrel rolled beneath its feet. "I never thought of that, and I wrote the system," he beams. "It's the idea of emergent properties. When the game does something you didn't expect, something that would occur in the real world, that is cool."
ELECTRIC WORD
Emergent Designer
