Rob Manuel Quotes

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?

If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling.

The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.

You don't really want to talk about 'Duke' in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters… It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.

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.

The moment you start dictating content/themes/story vs. allowing the player to be a participant in the story and carve their own path, you're doing the player a disservice.

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.

The nice thing about a video game is that you can explore the dimensions of a character so much more deeply than you can in a television show or even in a movie.

We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the 'writing style' of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed.

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.

Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

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.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

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.

The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.

Why movies are so powerful is because you are right in there and you stay in there until they want you to come out, and then you've really gone somewhere.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

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

The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.

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

The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.

Each game we make, we like to introduce an emotion that is rarely experienced by gamers in the console game industry.