Graham Nelson Quotes

There's a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don't want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character.

We're growing into an entertainment medium as opposed to 'We make games. We make Mario jump.' We no longer have to focus so hard on the technical hurdles and can ask, as a player, why am I doing this? Why am I making these choices? Games that don't have that strong foundation stumble.

The most important thing in games isn't the designer's narrative, but the story the player creates through his experiences.

Players like to know that they've discovered things that even the designers didn't know were in the game.

The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

With a movie, it's probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration. But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player.

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.

What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this.

I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.

'Guild Wars 2' is a wider world in that we have a lot of different mechanics available for storytelling. We have our personal story, the story of you, which is tailored for your character. You answer some basic questions; you make some decisions early on, and that follows through.

There are so many games where you fight aliens or zombies, and they have very high-fidelity graphics, but they don't ask the question of why the events are happening.

The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren't sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters.

I don't just write a script, and then someone takes it away and builds a game. I am continually getting input in order to create a big suspension field to hold the gameplay together so that the gamers aren't doing arbitrary tasks, so that they are doing things that seem meaningful.

Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.

Stories in which the player doesn't inhabit the main character are difficult for games to handle.

From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

I disagree that injecting emotion into a game comes at the expense of the playing experience.

I think you have to serve a lot of masters when you're doing a video game: you're not just telling a linear story or doing something that's all action.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.

Whenever I write the scenarios for my games, I don't necessarily envision them being liked or being wonderful for everyone.

A good game impresses you with what you're doing. I think that's a fundamental difference that I as a game designer need to recede in the background.

It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense.

A lot of times, when someone's going to pick up a game, it can be a bit daunting, like if they haven't played a roleplaying game, or they haven't played things in the series. We spent a lot of time on flow. How it feels to move through the world. How the game rewards you depending on which way you turn.

The intention behind the high difficulty of the games I direct is to evoke a feeling of joy and accomplishment in the player when they overcome these challenges.