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It seems like a lifetime ago that the three of us were together: Ron, Jake and Chris, huddled around that shaky metal table outside that Borders bookstore. The details of that day are quickly receeding from memory—at this point, all of that rumbling and babies-of-the-damned talk from the first two installments rings no bells to speak of—it's all nonsense. - An Interview by the Idle Thumbs staff
Ron Gilbert: The Lost Chapter
The guilt, however, remains. Back sometime in 2004, we promised you a third installment to this bastard, and here it is. No more Gilbert interview lurking above like a sad cloud, occasionally drizzling on my life. No. We promised — a promise preceeded with the words "Dear God," but it was a promise all the same — and we will deliver.
But first, make sure you've read part 1 and part 2, because otherwise you'll be very confused and sad. And of course, we can't forget to warm up our patented HeadMode™ technology...
 | Ron Gilbert |  | Chris Remo |  | Jake Rodkin |  | Robot Eye |
And now, Ron Gilbert Speaks: The Lost Chapter. When we last left our beloved trio (and possible robot eye), the tape recorder had run out in the midst of a discussion of Animal Crossing, which Ron has just told us is his favorite game ever made...
| Jake: So, Animal Crossing, your favorite game ever made...
| | Ron: Yeah, it's actually really hard for me to think of a better game than that.
| | Jake: It's an addictive game.
| | Ron: It's a very addictive game.
| | Chris: I've actually not played it. I didn't have a Gamecube when it came out.
| | Ron: You're missing out. I think one of the best things about Animal Crossing is that you can go in, play the game for short periods of time, and you never lose. Animal Crossing isn't a competition, and I think that is one of the very big problems with games these days is—well they're called "games," right—it's a big competition. If it's not a competition with "controller number 2," it's a competition against the game to beat it.
In Animal Crossing, you just go in and you just play. There really is no goal to that game. Well, you can create little goals: I want to build onto my house, I want to do this, I want to do that. So you can create these little goals, but there isn't a goal for the game itself. I think that's really neat.
Animal Crossing isn't a competition, and I think that is one of the very big problems with games these days is it's a big competition. If it's not a competition with "controller number 2," it's a competition against the game to beat it.
I think one of the neatest things ever—and this really bothered me the first time it happened, but I came to appreciate it later on, it's almost like design genius—is that the game follows the real clock, so it knows what time it is. It's nighttime in the game when it's nighttime at your own house, you know.
But the thing that was so cool was, at 10:00 at night, the store closed. And I couldn't get anything done anymore. So, what's the first thing you do? Well you set the clock back on the Nintendo. And then you have to set it back again. But the thing I think is so absolutely genius about that was, the game was almost telling you, "You're done playing. I don't want you to burn yourself out on this. You played it, you're done, go do something else." To me that's how games should be. You just go in, you play a little bit every day, and you go on with your life.
I think there's a lot of stuff that's designed into Animal Crossing to keep it a leisurely, casual experience. You really do need to let time go by to get an advantage. In some ways it is a multiplayer game. Another player can start a character in the same world you're in—you can't be in there together, at the same time but you're in the same town. You can influence everybody, you can pass objects back and forth, you can write letters back and forth. There's this interesting sociology stuff going back and forth where you can write nasty letters about the other person playing with you to some character in the game, make them hate this other person. There are all these wonderful things you can do with the game. It's great.
I think the problem with Animal Crossing is that it's about cute little animals. I think it's really limited its audience.
| | Jake: The Nintendo curse?
| | Ron: Yeah.
| | Chris: Uh, what's the Nintendo curse?
| | Jake: Nintendo putting out all these really great games that are full of cute little animals, cutesy characters, and then people who aren't open minded enough or just aren't receptive to that sort of look completely pass the game by.
| | Ron: But it probably does well in Japan, I imagine.
| | Chris: I suspect Nintendo keeps doing that because in Japan it's probably not as much of a curse as it is here. Japan would never produce Doom 3 for example.
| | Ron: Yeah, I mean I don't think Animal Crossing needed to be some, you know, dark thing where everybody played a mass murderer in a town.
| | Jake: So a bit more like The Sims then?
| | Ron: Yeah... The Sims didn't really grab me.
| | Jake: Same here, but I know a handful of people who like both games a lot.
| | Ron: I think the problem with The Sims was—it's the same problem I had with SimCity—at some level you feel like there's a spreadsheet underneath everything. And it's just figuring out the spreadsheet. Once you've figured out the little formulas, the game's gone. The Sims always felt that way to me. I'm sure Animal Crossing has the same mechanism underneath, but there's just a fluidity to it that The Sims didn't have.
| | Jake: That spreadsheet thing reminds me of adventure games.
| | Chris: A lot of current adventure games for sure.
| | Jake: Where if you know the underlying rules of how to play an adventure game, you don't need to really worry about the story or anything, you just sort of...
| | Ron: Yeah, in some ways that's true.
| | Jake: If you get to a certain point you can just sort of abstract adventure games away from what they're supposed to be and you just sort of think of them as some weird elaborate trap thing that you've got to work through.
| | Ron: It's kind of like being in the Matrix, right? You just sort of start to see...
| | Now puzzles are all like, flipping levers to get stuff. That's not what puzzles are. I think that's kind of been this weird little distraction in adventure games, and in some ways it's probably given adventure games a bad name.
I mean you can argue that that started with Myst, but Myst was sort of one of its kind at the time, but now that's the rule for adventure games. Story-based adventure games are much more rare these days. Now you're often just presented with this sort of amorphous display of gears... You occasionally see a night watchman in the gallery in which you're trying to work through these levers or something... But they've pretty much taken all the very abstract gameplay mechanisms of adventure games, and reduced the genre to nothing but that. I don't think adventure games are helping themselves by staying in that mold.
| | Jake: When Myst first came out did you consider Myst an adventure game?
| | Ron: No, I didn't.
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| Jake & Chris: Yeah, no one did.
| | Jake: Except weird people, and now it's taken over.
| | Ron: Games like Myst, and 7th Guest and... uh some other games that came out around that time?
| | Chris: Journeyman Project?
| | Ron: Yeah. They're really interesting because they have these quote-unquote "puzzles" in them, which I would consider classic puzzles that you'd buy at the game store, like sliding block puzzles. It's almost like somebody said, "Let's build an adventure game," and someone else said, "Oh, adventure games? They have puzzles in them!" and that first guy goes, "Puzzles? Oh, that's interesting..." and then they went and built a bunch of sliding block puzzles... And it's like, "No, no, no, no! That's not what we mean by puzzles!"
| | Chris: We mean you've got to make... the monkey into a wrench!!
| | Ron: Yeah. [laughs] It's just kinda weird. And then all these games just developed like that. And now puzzles are all like, flipping levers to get stuff. That's not what puzzles are. I think that's kind of been this weird little distraction in adventure games, and in some ways it's probably given adventure games a bad name.
| | Jake: Well that's not the distraction anymore, it's what adventure games often just are now.
| | Ron: Yeah, what they are. Exactly.
| | Chris: This will probably cause a certain segment of the adventure game populous to explode out of anger and—
| | Ron: [laughs]
| | Chris: Uh, you know, just be careful when you go to sleep at night.
So, we're treading on dangerous ground with this interview.
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Thumbcast 08
Wiiiiiiii this is the wii podcast! Plus: Gears of War is for noobs, and Viva Pinata is nothing like Animal Crossing. |
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Thumbcast 07
A brief look at PS3 and Wii launch hype, discussion of gaming shows VideoGaiden and 1UP Show, the mario rap, and more. |
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Thumbcast 06
We discuss Tetsuya Mizuguchi's perpetual state of jetlag, the closing of Lik-Sang, the closing of Clover Studio, and possibly other bonus closings. |
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It is not as bad as it seems, because the voltage is quite low.
