Warren Spector
Warren Spector
Warren Spector is an American role-playing and video game designer. He is known for creating games which give players a wide variety of choices in how to progress. Consequences of those choices are then shown in the simulated game world in subsequent levels or missions. He is best known for the critically acclaimed video game Deus Ex that embodies the choice and consequence philosophy while combining elements of the first-person shooter, roleplaying, and adventure game genres...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGame Designer
Date of Birth2 October 1955
CountryUnited States of America
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.
The fact is most computer roleplaying games that offer a zillion highly specialized skills end up with nine-tenths of a zillion skills that every player quickly realizes aren't worth the experience points to buy.
For most developers, that kind of situation - a player figuring out how to do something that the designer didn't intend - to most developers, that's a bug. For me, that's a celebration.
In papergaming, players can look at a character sheet of their own creation and see all of their skills, right there, in black and white.
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.
Ultimately, all I wanted was for players to feel like they were in the real world. I wanted them to be able to apply real world common sense to the problems confronting them, and I thought recreating real world locations would encourage that kind of thinking. There's also just a real power, a real thrill, when you fire up a game and see a place you've been or want to go, and then get to do all the stuff you WANT to do there but know you'll get arrested if you try! If that isn't the stuff of fantasy - far more than exploring some goofy dwarven mine or alien spaceship - I don't know what is!
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
The Wii U is pretty cool, and the thing that I'm most intrigued about it is it's the first gaming platform that actually is exploiting the second screen.
Ray Harryhausen's 'Sinbad' picture was the first film I remember seeing. I was two years old when it came out, and it changed my life forever. I had nightmares about dragons and stuff for years - and loved it!
I've loved cartoons all along. Most people outgrow that when they hit 10 or 12, I guess, but I never did. I'm not sure why.
I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.
I've always said - I've been making games for twenty years, and from the first day I got in this business, I've been saying, 'All I have to do is sell one more copy than I have to, to get somebody to fund my next one.'
I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.
I want content that is relevant to my life, that is relevant to me, that is set in the real world.