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What Remains of Edith Finch
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What Remains of Edith Finch - Ian Dallas Interview

Giant Sparrow's creative director video chats with Gamereactor within the Gamelab Live 2020 framework to look back at their awarded adventure and to talk about creating games with things in mind like sense of wonder or player tasks and focus. Besides, a few comments on their mysterious new game, which is all about interaction with animals and creatures.

Audio transcription

"We're covering Gamelab Live 2020 and the live part means we're not physically in Barcelona under these special circumstances but we are absolutely enjoying the talks this year and we are also lucky to have some of the speakers with us this year again at Gamereactor and this time this one is going to be special to me personally as we're talking about Ian Dallas who's creative director at Giant Sparrow of course makers of What Remains of Edith Finch so thank you so much for joining us at a distance Ian. Oh my pleasure. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of my favorite games this generation hands down but how do you feel about it being perhaps a really really good my first game for people who are not into games and might be interested in this interactive story? Yeah I think it's really exciting to see people that often aren't compelled by the kinds of stories that games usually tell which tend to be about you know people fighting each other and yeah we were really surprised when we started showing the game at festivals like at PAX and places like that to see like pretty young children actually playing the game you know people like maybe like eight-year-old girls who were able to like we didn't even know that they would be able to physically play it and we've heard since that actually a lot of parents have played with their pretty young children and you know the game is really focused on death and subjects that kids don't normally encounter like in you know typical Disney movies so it's been interesting you know to be like people's first game basically and I feel like maybe we ruined them a little bit but in a good way. Might be a bit creepy for kids for some of the situations they're gonna live but it's interesting because interactivity is reduced to a minimum of course you're just walking and listening to thoughts and exploring the environment but actually the little interactivity within What Remains of Added Things is the game changer is what makes it really work as a game and not as something else right?
Yeah I think it's pretty deceptive as a player the interactive moments feel like relatively simple but as developers it's amazing how much time you know like there's a sequence in the game where the player is on a swing moving back and forth and you know that one sequence took us two years to make where we kept coming back to it and it's amazing how many problems there were looking at players you know because I think anytime you give players something that they've never seen before you know they're going to behave in you know kind of unpredictable ways and when it works it feels effortless but it only gets that way through you know a ton of effort and so yeah we were very fortunate to have the help of Annapurna you know to be able to spend four years making something that seems so simple but you know I think that's kind of why you also don't see that many games that aren't about shooting people or jumping or kind of like the familiar things the games are about like swinging on a swing set turns out to be like a pretty significant challenge so making a whole game about those interactions was surprisingly difficult but I think it does add to what the game is. Of course, perhaps that's the key to to my next question which is I think during your talk which was very interesting I have to say I think you mentioned the sense of wonder how does a game creator create or produce or cause that sense of wonder it's something that happened to me with The Witness for example as well that you really want to explore you really don't know why there is not this clear carrot for you for you to follow how do you go create that for these type of games? Well like for me creatively I usually start with something from my own life that evokes that feeling like for Edith Finch it was the experience of being a scuba diver in Washington state and seeing the sort of ocean sloping away into an infinite darkness and that sense of the sort of overwhelming encounter with nature and so starting with something that's pretty concrete that we can come back to and think about and then you know we started making the game as a scuba diving simulator like you were you know underwater and it was a very literal version and then as we you know kept making the game we found other ways of creating that sense of wonder and you know what I think of as the sublime kind of that feeling of like when you walk into a cathedral like what is it that that makes you feel that way and I think you know part of it is a sense of scale like there are some very basic elements there of getting people to focus on something that is very small and then surprising them with a big open area and you know I think in a similar vein there's a lot of surprises in the game that kind of open up in unexpected ways like when the player thinks they understand what's happening in the game and then suddenly things have changed it forces people to re-evaluate their situation in a way that is kind of uncommon in games and in life I think you know humans tend to prefer predictable encounters and I feel like my job is to make people uncomfortable in in those ways where you know they're they're forced into situations where they have to look at things from a new perspective and I think that's where the sense of wonder starts is seeing something often something that you're very familiar with in a new light and games are kind of uniquely able to get people and encourage to see and to explore actually something you also mentioned during this talk was that players are really used to be given a task and to focus on tasks and you want to make them focus on everything else how do you think this approach could for example help the ADD generation players and users who just can't focus on anything on pretty much anything yeah it's tough I mean I think you know not just people with ADHD like regular people too have have trouble focusing and yeah I think games are a nice way to create a space where people can kind of try things out and you know in a low risk environment but I think that's it's really an ongoing challenge for us we found that what is often the most successful is to give people tasks in a game and then to let them wander off the path like if we just put them into a place where there aren't clear goals then that lasts for about 30 seconds and then they start feeling uncomfortable and then they get bored very quickly so I think there's you know it's kind of like an animal that needs a skeleton that you know you don't think of the skeleton of you know a person as being like the most attractive part of them but if it's not there you really notice it you know something that like has to be there to make the rest of it work so we try to create a situation that balances those things and you know I think if if you make a world that is interesting to explore and you give players tools that are themselves interesting then I think it sort of it helps you to naturally focus on that it becomes something that the player is creating goals for themselves and I think that's pretty key to focusing on anything right is making it interesting to yourself kind of tricking yourself in a way but really it's about finding what is fascinating about anything because I feel like everything in the world is fascinating if you take the time to look at it from you know perhaps a new perspective and maybe get a little bit closer to it and hopefully the games that we make are creating a space where people are encouraged to do that that's that's really interesting it really sounds like mindfulness exercises to me like to really focus this way by looking at something else or differently we'll talk about skeletons and animals a bit later but before that how did your comedy background help you create what is basically a drama I know there is always this this link between drama and comedy with both creators script writers and actors but how how did it help you find the right tone yeah I think for me what I'm interested in fundamentally is surprise like I like to create that people were not expecting and I think that's what's interesting to me as a viewer also like I think it's a good way of making us aware of our environment and our assumptions and making things like understanding how silly a lot of things are ultimately like I think comedy is about creating the sense of surprise of like oh yeah this thing that I really thought you know was like a very serious you know part of life is actually from this perspective like kind of ridiculous and so I feel like even though Edith Finch is you know on the surface of it about death and is a you know more harrowing experience than the comedy tends to be it is about creating this sense of surprise and about you know encouraging people to think about things in a different light I'm hearing it's our last question talking about skeletons and animals of course you've been studying animation and you've been working on something new which is about animals and how we relate to them what can you tell us about your new project oh well you know officially I can't really say anything about the new game but it helps that I still don't know very much about the new game I think it is at a stage where I'm really excited to look at the way that animals move and there's something about like for me seeing a crow landing on a branch in front of me and that sense of like oh there's another conscious mind but also the way that I will never understand the way that a crow sees a world and you know the same way that like it's pretty hard to imagine what other people see the world and we have a lot of stories about people miscommunicating and misunderstanding and I feel like the world of animals is so much less explored so that's my focus now is trying to create an interactive experience that you know ideally helps people to see the animals around them in a totally different way like I myself am fascinated by insects you know and and spiders and all these like bizarre creatures that surround our lives mosquitoes and those other things that we don't really think about but I feel like there's room for a game to you know encourage us to see like just how incredibly bizarre the real world is you know we don't even need to go to middle earth to find these just you know impossible creatures so that's kind of where where the game is right now but I'm excited to find out what it turns into I would love to buy a macro lens myself to see insects in a different way as well how does a giant sparrow see the world as a final comment oh um you know I think that our our goal is to see the world in a different way with every game and you know I think maybe the the clearest description I can give is that I personally see the world as something that is beyond comprehension like I think that we will never really understand even things inside ourselves right like our own mind is often a mystery to us and so I think that the world is this really ultimately impenetrable mystery that surrounds us but it's really fun to explore and to try to understand that mystery that's a really nice message and that's different to the crow the giant sparrow is a different type of bird thank you so much for your time Ian and really enjoyed your your talk at game lab this year I really hope we can meet in person in Barcelona and just stay safe and healthy thank you you too thank you so much for the interesting questions"

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