She thinks we don't want to play the games and instead just want to watch cinematic cutscenes, that's called a movie not a videogame.
Actually - here's the excerpt from the interview that comes from:
What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?
Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn’t have a good story, it’s very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.
And with a baby on the way in a few months, my minimal free time (which makes it impossible for me to finish a big RPG in less than six months already), will disappear entirely. If there was a fast-forward feature on games which would let me easily review the writing and stories and skip the features that I find more frustrating than fun, I’d find it much easier to keep abriast of what’s happening in the field.
If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?
A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to “button through” dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don’t enjoy listening to dialogue and they don’t want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you’re a player who only enjoys the dialogue. In a game with sufficient story to be interesting without the fighting, there is no reason on earth that you can’t have a little button at the corner of the screen that you can click to skip to the end of the fighting.
Companies have a lot of objections, such as how to calculate loot and experience points for a player who doesn’t actually play the combats, but these could be easily addressed by simply figuring out an average or minimum amount of experience for every fight and awarding that.
The biggest objection is usually that skipping the fight scenes would make the game so much shorter, but to me, that’s the biggest perk. If you’re a woman, especially a mother, with dinner to prepare, kids’ homework to help with, and a lot of other demands on your time, you don’t need a game to be 100 hours long to hold your interest — especially if those 100 hours are primarily doing things you don’t enjoy. A fast forward button would give all players — not just women — the same options that we have with books or DVDs — to skim past the parts we don’t like and savor the ones we do. Over and over, women complain that they don’t like violence, or they don’t enjoy difficult and vertigo-inducing gameplay, yet this simple feature hasn’t been tried on any game I know of.
Granted, many games would have very little left if you removed the combat, but for a game like Deus Ex or Bioware’s RPGs, you could take out every shred of combat and still have an entertainment experience that rivals anything you’d see in the theater or on TV.
First off, I'm assuming that with a name like King of the Wastes, that you're not a woman - which is more specifically who she was talking about. And even then, not all women - but those who happen to be coming from her same perspective.
Personally, I don't think it's such a crazy idea. I wouldn't have much use for it, but I understand where she's coming from. Myself, I'm a married father with a 10-month-old son. I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home, and most of my day consists of taking care of my son and keeping up with the housework.
All told, from the time I wake up with him, to the time I go to bed - I have about 4 and a half hours of free-time. Total. Anything that I want to do for myself (including showering, or even spending time on this forum,) comes out of that finite amount of time. And that's not consecutive, and many days it's much less than that. And considering that some of that time I'll of course want to be spending with my wife, it means that if I get a solid hour of videogame time in during the day (including week-ends) then I consider myself pretty lucky.
So I can see the appeal. My wife also enjoys videogames, but finds more frustration than fun in a lot of the combat sequences in these games. She loves Mass Effect, for example - but she's really just trudging through stuff so that she can get to the dialog sequences. In fact, a lot of times she has to use her special fast-forward button (me) to get her through particularly challenging segments.
And anyway, she's still only the writer (I don't believe the only one for any of these games in question,) and not the one responsible at all for making those kinds of decisions. She also mentions that it would only be worthwhile for certain games with a lot of out-of-combat content.
Ideally? Yes, you'd probably want a writer that works with the team and is on the same page as everyone. And of course, let's not forget that there's no evidence Jennifer Hepler in particular
isn't, solely from this. But I don't see any of this as "the worst thing ever," by any means. If a texture artist who had worked on Dragon Age had said in an interview that he wished you could skip past all of the dialog - would it have garnered the same reaction?
This is for a company that is known for making games which specifically attempt to mix both combat and story sequences, and have both play an important role, after all...
It seems that's kind of the problem that all this started from - people taking sound-bites out of context and blowing them up into something they're not.
» Sun May 13, 2012 11:18 pm 
