So What's Your Story?: BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk
4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 6 of 7
Mastrapa: Someone had described the story of
Fallout 3 to me as, "You need six bullets and you have five." And that tension is spread out through this sprawling game. When you guys make a game, are you able to find a tension that's parallel, or do you have different kinds of tensions that you rely on?
Zeschuk: We build smaller islands of tensions. You don't want to have continuous tension. You want tension/release, tension/release. I think that's why we've always opted for chunks of tension that end -- so you can take a breather. The Zelda games do that particularly well.
Narcisse: I want to shift gears a little and ask about the sex controversy that came up with
Mass Effect. Do you think it's the fate of any game that takes on sexuality to be pigeonholed -- and wrongly so -- the way
Mass Effect was? If you had your druthers, what would you have preferred that the mainstream media had focused on?
Muzyka: I think any art form undergoes an evolution in terms of how people perceive it, and games are going through the same evolution that painting, music, movies, literature...
Zeschuk: Good news, good news ... Twitter's going to get them looking in their direction. I'm not joking.
Muzyka: Wait, so you're saying Twitter's an art form?
[Laughter]
Narcisse: In some people's hands.
Muzyka: I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm intrigued.
Mastrapa: It's a means of expression.
Muzyka: True, and that's an element of art, for sure.
Zeschuk: Sorry I interrupted. But I do think we've almost passed [that time of games being misunderstood].
Muzyka: I think it's just part of a normal maturation as the history of an art form -- it's a commercial art form, sure -- develops. People like to attack what they don't understand, but the good part of that is that it provokes an emotional response. The thing that people miss is the actual view of sexuality in
Mass Effect or other games. We've actually had this in all of our games. It's in
Dragon Age; it's in
Mass Effect 2; it's in everything moving forward. It's not something we're shying away from in any way.
Zeschuk: It's not like it's all that graphic, either. It's actually less than what you see on, like, DirecTV.
Here's where you go in the
Dragon Age world to become as smart as Mssrs. Muzyka and Zeschuk.
And that's the point. [Fox News] missed the point and they took it out of context. The scenes that were shown, that was all [the sex] was in [
Mass Effect]. But, to get there, it's the journey that's the more important thing. The romantic journey of building a relationship over dozens of hours -- representing lots of real-world time, once you translate the game time to the real world -- it's a normal way to interact as humans. Romance, friendship and hatred are valid expressions of relationships, and we're trying to reflect those in the game.
Narcisse: Would you have preferred them to have looked at the entire character arc as opposed to just one point on it?
Muzyka: Yeah, because that's looking at the art as a whole. Michelangelo ... I'm not saying our art is equivalent art to Michelangelo's...
