Hideo Kojima Quotes

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

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.

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.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

First of all, I don't dislike direct storytelling - people seem to think that about my games! Actually, the truth is, I'm just not good at implementing direct narrative in my games.

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.

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

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.

Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it's a brand new audience for me.

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 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 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.

On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.

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.

Most games end up with quite caricature scripts because they are just here to serve the game-play mechanics but not to trigger any emotional response.

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.

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.

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.

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.

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.

I don't want to criticize any other designers, but I have to say that many of the people involved in this industry - directors and producers - are trying to make their games more like movies. They are longing to make movies rather than making videogames.

A lot of the strength of an RPG world lies in its foundation: its systems, lore, and when appropriate, its magic systems. While there are elements tied to 'Project: Eternity' that at first glance seem to be classic fantasy, that's intentional - we do want to recreate some elements of a High Fantasy experience.

Before 'Final Fantasy VII,' I would have told you that I had zero interest in RPGs with turn-based combat. But that game was so well done, I didn't care what genre it was. Any genre can be done poorly or done well.