While most videogame publishers seem happy to produce clones of movie blockbusters, the best game designers aim for something more original and inspiring. Along the way, they’re creating a hybrid medium with architecture as exhilarating as a gothic cathedral and plots as intricate as a Neal Stephenson novel. Here’s how four pioneers are making a new art form. - Jeff Howe
Tetsuya Mizuguchi
"Playing a game and performing music are structurally similar; they both entail a call-and-response style of repetition," Mizuguchi says. For his earlier rhythm-based game, Rez, he drew from the work of Kandinsky, who believed that a painting could please more than just the eye. "Our ultimate goal was to impart the sensation of synaesthesia" - literally, the mixing of the senses, like hearing a color - "in which power, movement, speed, color, shape, and taste are all stimulated."
Major influences
Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinksy, the Chemical Brothers.
Signature game
Lumines, a 2005 mash-up of Tetris and a DJ turntable.
Hideo Kojima
Metal Gear Solid was lauded for its lengthy cinematic cutscenes, but Kojima believes good game design owes more to architecture than to film. "I honestly believe they’re essentially the same thing. In both cases, the blueprint is everything. In both cases, the designer has to ask what service the structure will provide. From there you decide what raw materials you will use to help reproduce the sense of play and fun over and over. Looking at the different functions of a building can be a great study in game design."
Major influences
Leonardo da Vinci, shogi (Japanese chess), the spy novels of John le Carré, amusement park architecture.
Signature game
Metal Gear Solid, the 1998 masterpiece that still tops critics’ lists as the best Sony PlayStation title ever.
Dave Jaffe
"What I adapted from literature, and Greek mythology in particular, is a scale that’s much grander than anything film can accomplish," Jaffe says. "People have said God of War plays like a Greek epic that never got written down." He boasts that his team threw out the conventional wisdom about game design. "If Terry Gilliam created a kids’ pop-up book, what would it look like? We wanted that kind of magic in the game."
Major influences
Special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts); just about any comic book (Superman, Wonder Woman, Avengers, Justice League of America).
Signature game
God of War, a postmodern remix of Greek myth and the Indiana Jones movies.
Warren Spector
Spector was well on his way to a doctorate in film studies when he got sidetracked into designing role-playing games. "I think games are way too influenced by movies," he says. "We need to recognize and celebrate the influences from other mediums. Then at the end of the day we’ll leave behind all other media and exploit the essence of videogames, which is that they’re player-driven." Deus Ex draws heavily on literary conventions, not just in its dense web of allusions to everything from Snow Crash to the Bible, but in "a sense of ambiguity that’s hard to get across in film. In Deus Ex, there were different ways to end the game. You could take down the electronic infrastructure, or you could empower a sentient AI to expand those links and make everything connected. It wasn’t about defeating a boss, it was about, What do you want the world to look like?"
Major influences
Bladerunner, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons cocreators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, sci-fi author Jack Finney (Time and Again), architect Christopher Alexander.
Signature game
Deus Ex, an ingenious blend of role-playing game and first-person shooter.
credit Jun TakagiPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Tetsuya Mizuguchi
credit Jun TakagiPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Tetsuya Mizuguchi
credit Jun Takagi; Da Vinci:Art Resource; Shogi:CorbisPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Hideo Kojima
credit Jun Takagi; Da Vinci:Art Resource; Shogi:CorbisPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Hideo Kojima
credit Gabriela Hasbun; Cyclops:Everett CollectionPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Dave Jaffe
credit Gabriela Hasbun; Cyclops:Everett CollectionPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Dave Jaffe
credit Gabriela Hasbun; Ford:KobalPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Warren Spector
credit Gabriela Hasbun; Ford:KobalPHOTO COMPOSITING: JEFF LYSGAARD
Warren Spector
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