April 2008 Archives

Disturbing news from the child front. My two lovely, sweet, and yes, borderline angelic children sang me a pair of gruesome songs tonight, both of which ended with Barney the purple dinosaur considerably worse for the wear.

"What the --?" I stammered. "Who taught you those horrible songs?"

"Everybody sings about killing Barney nowadays," said my lovely, sweet, and yes, borderline angelic daughter.

Welcome to the second part of this interview with Blizzard VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen. If you haven't already read the first part of this interview, be sure to check it out to hear about the power of spinning ideas, and how Metzen got his big break on a bar napkin.

Chris Metzen on the Web: Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, Sons of the Storm

Cecil Vortex: What do you think are the ingredients of good storytelling in computer games?

Chris Metzen: You definitely want "show -- don't tell." And it's difficult in interactive spaces because "showing" usually means it's very keyed into specific art resources or the way your game engine works. Also, more often than not, you don't want to stick the player with minutes worth of exposition. Ultimately, it's a video game and people are conditioned to want push buttons or click their mouse. Whether they're playing Pac-Man or Half Life 2 or World of Warcraft, they want to feel like they're in the driver's seat -- that's the difference between the interactive medium and film, for instance. In film you're pretty much a captive audience. You're going to sit there for two hours and experience what the writer and the director and the actors want you to experience. You have very little say in the matter other than how you process it after the fact, right?…. [So] even if we take control away from you for a couple of minutes to show a pre-rendered cinematic, or a cinematic sequence that shows the next story note unfolding, we want to get people back into the action as soon as possible. And that determines the way your story unfolds. You have to tell it in bite-sized chunks because you know that control must resume for the player pretty soon.

CV: How do you typically kick ideas off?

Welcome! This interview is part of an ongoing series of chats with artists about their creative process. You can find the full set of interviews, including musicians Adrian Belew and Jonathan Coulton, writer Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), cartoonist Dan Piraro, and comic book creator Matt Wagner all at about-creativity.com. You can also subscribe to future interviews here. Thanks a lot for dropping by, -Cecil

Chris Metzen is the Vice President of Creative Development at Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the beloved Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo series of PC games. These are the blockbusters of the PC gaming world, famous for their rich worlds, near flawless gameplay, and graphics and audio that pull the player in and don't let go. World of Warcraft, the company's popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), and its expansion packs, have been the best-selling PC games for 2005, 2006, and 2007. WoW currently has 10 million subscribers worldwide.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. Be sure to also check out Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, Sons of the Storm

Cecil Vortex: How do you explain to nongamers what you do for a living?

Chris Metzen: My core responsibility is coming up with the worlds our games take place in. And over time, the worlds are becoming the game, strangely enough.

When I started out in this racket about fourteen years ago, we were making war games. Essentially, you're playing through a sequence of maps with this virtual army you build over time. It was my job not only to create the single-player component of the game -- the storyline that you ultimately track through in these ongoing wars -- but also to just kind of create the universe behind the game so that when you weren't actually playing, you might still be chewing on these concepts or characters or places that you'd experienced.

CV: What were some of your big influences growing up?

CM: Well, figure that everyone in the industry just loved Star Wars. Star Wars created a monster. But I think what shaped the monster [for me] ultimately was a mix between Dungeons & Dragons and comic books. Those were my absolute loves, as most geeks around here will probably repeat. I'm more a comic geek than anything else, honestly. I still have about a thirty-dollar habit per week. It's gotten bad; I need a twelve-step program. I even still buy Marvel. So I just grew up with serial storytelling. Every week you could go to the store and see somebody's latest adventure. That template -- the way comics unfold over time -- had a really big impact on me.

I loved D&D -- I loved the big worlds, the big spanning themes, the big epic quests, the unfolding settings with ancient civilizations and ancient secrets coming back to haunt the present. I loved all that. I love mythology. And somehow, as a little kid, comics was the conveyance system -- the media that really captured my imagination…. There was continuity, high drama, threads from beyond space and time. There were threads from the past. There were gods walking the earth. Everything I wanted to have my head in was right there.

CV: Did you create your own comics?

Everybody's always complaining about how people don't read any more, right? Well, I have the solution, and I'm pretty sure it's going to make me a million dollars.

The reason nobody's reading any more is obvious -- we love TV. And the solution's just as obvious: a TV channel that shows books, one page at a time.

Imagine -- the smart thinking you get from a book *plus* the brain-aesthesia you get from TV! I'm so excited, I've passed out twice while writing this. First, when I said I was going to make a million dollars. And then again when I woke up and I re-read that sentence about a million dollars. I'm gonna be rich!

There are lots of great "books on" ideas we should be exploring. I can't tackle them all so I'll put a few out there, and you can get rich too.

"Books on toasters," for example. Why not? Or "books on telescopes." You know, we put a book on the moon and then people will read it through a telescope.

If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a book on the moon. It just stands to reason!

Look, I don't mind that there's all this coverage of the Pope in the news. The Pope comes to America. It's a big deal. I get it.

But it cheeses me off when scientists discover a 15-foot rabbi and nobody seems to give a damn.

Rabbi Arthur Rosenberg, of Holmdel New Jersey, is huge.

I just saw the most disgusting thing on CNN. Wolf Blitzer says to his guest, "May I pick your brain for a moment?" And the guest says, "Sure."

I'm sorry -- I just got up and turned off the TV. Wolf Blitzer is a creepy creepy guy.

is what this fellow shouts
at me and my chat-mate.

We're sitting on a bench,
enjoying the East Bay sun.
He comes up to us
holding a black garbage bag.

He puts the bag down
next to us on the bench.

He was so happy.

There was something
moving in that bag.

He disappears into the coffee shop.
Then pops back out like a
hillbilly leprechaun.

Grabbing the bag he crows:
"I'm making pruno!"

He shakes our hands and
cackles down the street.

I'm telling you,
it almost made me want to
make some pruno.

******
note: I was delighted to find out later that pruno (pronounced "prune-o") is a kind of homemade booze commonly associated with prison living.

They named a drug
designed to help men urinate
"Flomax."

(They really did.
They called it "Flomax."
Can you

imagine the joy in
that room? "Flomax!"
"Oh my God -- we're going to
call it 'Flomax!' Somebody, do a trademark
search!"

"You're incredible,
Dave." "No Sally, you are
the incredible one. You came up with
the 'max' part!")

It makes me so angry. They

named it "Flomax"
when they

could have
called it

"Niagra."