Jenova Chen Quotes

Sometimes we need to step back and understand the power of video games. 'Dear Esther' does just that. Through visuals, audio, and narration, this title weaves a story around the player as they explore different areas in the game.

Game designers are obsessed with emotion. How do we create the emotions that we want gamers to feel, and how can we really make it this intense, emotional experience?

We believe that we can use interactivity to create meaningful games. Games with emotions and virtual actors telling you something. Resonating with you as a human being, giving you food for thought. We don't need to deliver messages or whatever, just need to create a moment in time that will leave an imprint in your mind.

I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.

We want playing our games to entertain people on many different levels. Deeper down, I want to make a connection with the player, and it's the way, to me, of saying to the person playing the game that they're not alone in the world.

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.

My goal is to make a player think, 'I want to reenter this world of lies tomorrow.'

While films are a very visual and emotional artistic medium, video games take it one step further into the realm of a unique personal experience.

The video game market is huge, and the ability to tell stories, and tell different kinds of stories in the gaming space is quickly evolving and changing for the better.

We need games like 'A Closed World' for many reasons. When you hear another developer talk about how games need to grow up, they need to tackle adult themes, and how they need to embrace that ability to transport the player into a different world, this is that game that they want other developers to make.

It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.

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

I don't pretend that 'Heavy Rain' will be a revolution, and I don't know if people will love it or hate it. All I can say is that it is definitely going to be different.

We're not going to just duplicate 'Heavy Rain,' because we are passionate about innovation and discovery, so we're trying to discover new ground and see how we can move from 'Heavy Rain' and create something even more immersive.

Some media used to talk about video games only to say how violent or addictive they could be. With 'Heavy Rain,' they talked about the story of the game and the emotions they felt while playing.

I love games like 'Flower,' for example - I thought this was amazing. It's great, it's new, it's different, and it's invented something that didn't exist before.

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 technology for radiant stories in 'Skyrim' is phenomenal. We tried and pared it back.

You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.

Half-Life is the finest implementation of a game on rails anybody has ever done

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

I've had the tremendous fortune to work on games like 'Life is Strange' and 'Horizon Zero Dawn', where there was a lot of collaboration between me and the developers.

I don't differentiate game design and script; it is one and only document. I think that one of the biggest problem with storytelling in games is that people tend to separate story and interactivity. Both should be conceived as one entity, each using the other.

Game development combines all this disparate art stuff I'd been doing into one single thing that I could use to say very specific stuff.

You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I've decided to create stories through video games.