Gamasutra Interviews Denis Dyack
By Chris on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 1:34 PM PST In Games Industry
Denis Dyack, whom you’ve undoubtedly heard of thanks to his tendency to voice his often controversial opinions in very public forums, was recently interviewed by Gamasutra, discussing everything from the Wii to niche games to World of Warcraft. It’s an extremely interesting interview, and one I’d highly recommend you invest the time in reading.
Gamasutra: It feels like we, as an industry, don’t have the time to step back and really think about it, because we’re always pushing forward to finish the thing that we’re working on. It’s really hard to take a larger view.
DD: Research and development in our industry is almost nonexistent because of crunch time. Whenever I hear about someone trying to create the world’s greatest AI, it’s all marketing. It’s never real. I didn’t talk about this in the talk, but our second game, Fantasy Empires had a learning neural network and an agent that would try to learn from what you were doing. It was part of my master’s thesis. We did a lot of tests on it. It actually adapted, it helped people, and it actually was a great test case. We put it in Fantasy Empires, and it was a little bullet point on the back for marketing and no one noticed. No one cared.
It’s all about the entertainment value, and I strongly believe in that too. It’s disappointing sometimes. It’s really interesting to see the one talk — the one before mine — where the guy started talking about flOw. He’s like, “Someone beat me to it!” And I’m like, “Man, flOw’s been around for 25 years.” That’s what I was talking about — nobody’s talking to each other. He brings up a game, and just because it’s called flOw, it’s like people have been talking about flOw in our industry for… I remember I did a talk on it in 1996, so that’s 11 years ago. And that was at GDC, after Legacy of Kain.
The fact that we have these people that are speaking in the industry who don’t necessarily know the stuff — that’s one of the problems. We have to communicate more, and we have to try to get out there. I like these conferences for that, and I did like that he tried to put forth theories on stuff, even if it’s not necessarily everything I believe in, but we’ve really got to get away from. So the things that I’m worried about at GDC is, “How awesome is your game?” “Oh, it’s so awesome, and here’s my new gameplay demonstration and what we’re going to do.” To me, the marketing is winning out over the industry development.
Read the full interview at Gamasutra
This guy gets alot of flak for being very opinionated. Although I don’t agree with him on everything, he at least voices his opinion in a respectable manner (unlike a notorious dev of the past whos name (that ryhmes with ‘tart’) we shall not mention). I really try hard to give everything Denis says a chance, but he’s burned so many bridges along the way it’s getting harder every day. He’s been backing off a little lately, especially the whole “We will have justice!” against Epic debacle, which is a good thing. Although half the time when he acts like he’s defending small developers against a “greater evil”, I can’t help but think he’s sneaking that whole Epic backlash in there subtly.