Rex Crowle and Christophe Villedieu donât say the kinds of things most of the video game developers Iâve ever spoken to say. For example, when theyâre feeling down they⊠go to Twitter to see what people have to say about their game.
Really? I get that their recent game, the PlayStation Vita adventure Tearaway, was pretty cheerful, but we all know how the Internet works.
So when Crowle and Villedieu told me this a couple of weeks ago during an interview in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, I was incredulous.
âI was going to uninstall Twitter from my phone when the game came out, because I didnât want to look,â Crowle said âBut strangely it was good to read.â
âNowadays there are lots of haters,â Villedieu added. âThey are the ones that shout louder, those are the ones you hear. That never happened with Tearaway. Theyâre shouting: âI love it!â âBuy it now.â Itâs not constructive what theyâre saying but itâs so positive. Sometimes when I feel a little bit down I go to Twitter andâŠâ
He let out a little cheer.
Tearaway was one of the great creative successes in gaming last year. It may not have been a sales blockbuster, but that doesnât negate how wonderful it was. The game was cheerful, charming and wildly imaginative.
It used the portable Vitaâs front camera to perpetually capture a video feed of the gameâs player and projected that feed into the gameâs world, making the player the sun in the game.
It used the Vitaâs rear touch panels to enable a playerâs fingers to appear to poke through the game worldâs terrain.
The game itself appeared to be made of folded pieces of paper and used a sort of in-game Instagram to let players take filtered photos of its wondrous sights.
As happy a game as Tearaway is I was still surprised at how cheerful Crowle and Villedieu were. Talking to them was like what youâd think talking to people who make candy or rainbows would be like. The studio they work for, the Guildford, England-based Media Molecule, merely makes video games. LittleBigPlanet games, most famously, crafted by a team that is composed of game makers, artists, architects and creative types.
Everything they do is imbued with good cheer. Consider Crowleâs comment: âI think we as a company try and marry up stuff we enjoyed as kidsâsplashing around in puddles or whatever, dressing up and making fortsâbut with modern trends as well. We did that a little bit with LBP when we trying to create the first gaming social network and slightly different with Tearaway by keeping an eye on Pinterest and Instagram and general web technology.â
I asked them both ifâI donât knowâif this was a show, if anyone ever curses at their studio. âOh yeah,â Crowle said, not entirely convincingly.
If youâre not getting the vibe, I suggest you watch this presentation Crowle made the day before I spoke to him and Villedieu. Itâll give you a sense of what heâs like and of what Media Molecule seems to be⊠some sort of merry band of folks making happy games. In this, he mentions such delightful ideas as a Zelda game attached to a knitting machine that crafts you yarn versions of the gear you unlock, as you unlock itâand a Mario game attached to your thermostat that heats the room youâre in when you enter a lava zone.
Happiness. That is the coolest thing about Crowle and Villedieu. Itâs not just that they seem happy, but they seem to want their players to be happy. But itâs not just that. Plenty of gaming people talk about putting smiles on faces and stuff like that. Theyâre talking about making players feel good. That stopped me in my interviewing tracks, too, when they said that. They wanted to make the player feel good?
âI think you can have fun by killing peopleâenemiesâin a video game,â Villedieu said, âbut you donât feel good doing it. I think in our game youâre helping people, youâre helping the world to heal and change and youâre sharing a bit of yourself.â
âI would change the terms,â Crowle said, disagreeing a little as politely as possible. âItâs more about making the player feel good about themselves. Itâs less about the player feeling good, as it is sort of showing them that the fact that they are in the sun and glowing is kind of positive message. The world is looking at them in a positive light.â
âWhen you first see yourself in the sun, the first thing you do is smile,â Villedieu said. âItâs just perfect.â He smiled.
Save the cynicism for other articles and other interviewees, I guess. I really liked this idea of a game meant to make you feel good/uplifted/positive a lot. Crowle elaborated as he described making Tearaway, a game for which he was the creative director and Villedieu served as game designer:
âI wanted to get a feeling in the environment like it really wanted you to travel through it, that you were being rewarded by being shown new things, that new things were unfolding, and that kind of each footstep is rewarding through the tactileness of the paper and it responding, rather than the sort of more stop-start approach [in video games] where you go into a room, battle everyone, the barrier goes down and you go to the next room. [I was] just trying to let you ramble through the environment a bit more.
âItâs kind of like instead of seeing XP and numbers fly out, itâs like seeing heart-shaped confetti instead,â Crowle continued. âItâs lot of positive reinforcement. I also tried to make sure there were some peaks and troughs as well so it wasnât all a lovefest.â
No, Tearaway isnât all a lovefest. Neither is most of gaming. Neither is much of game development. Or Twitter. Or interviewing people. Or reading articles. Or living life. It is nevertheless as refreshing as can be to talk about happiness for a bit, to meet happy people making a happy thing. Sometimes the skies can be blue. Sometimes, thanks to a video game, we can be in the sun. Sometimes itâs cool to smile.
https://lastchance.cc/tearaway-the-kotaku-review-1467706606%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.
