Opinions, tears, and expletives: David Jaffe explains why games shouldn’t have stories

It’s like, you know what? I say that’s fuckin’ bullshit, and I’ll tell you why it’s bullshit. I have the front line… I worked for and with Sony for 16, 17 years. Sony innovates in a lot of ways, okay? But one of the ways… In ’95, I remember being at the first E3 and seeing some of the logos and the promos for PS one, and it was all about how this is the new artform. This is the new medium. And they take that shit seriously, and here’s how I know it, because this is the company that published and supported Parappa, and Heavy Rain, and ICO, and Shadow of the Colossus, and flOw, and Flower, and Journey, and when I was at Sony Santa Monica we were the studio that initially greenlit and supported for a long time L.A. Noire, and we were also the studio that supported Six Days in Fallujah, which if you don’t know was supposed to be sort of the world’s first documentary video game. It was really about war, but it was supposed to be emotional, and more of a genuine sense of what it meant. It was a more important game.

And some of those games that I just mentioned are brilliant games. There’s no doubt. Only a fuckin’ fool would look at ICO and say it’s not a brilliant game. But I will tell you something that you will think, “Why are you talking about yourself, Jaffe?” I’ll explain in a second, but let me tell you something about myself. I cry at almost everything. Okay? So I cry… There’s a commercial every Christmas where the mom takes the cookies out of the oven and the narrator says… I’m gonna cry right now because I’m thinking about it. She says, “Childhood quickly slips away.” I have this little fuckin’ kid… Oh, fuck you all, I can’t help it! Okay? Because I have little kids and I love them so much. And so… It’s like, “God, that makes me so sad.” Hallmark cards make me cry. I love political debates, right? I adored The West Wing, I love Meet the Press, I love listening to people talk about philosophy.

So the point of sharing this with you is because I am open to receive. I am susceptible to media. It’s not like I’m some cynic asshole, like, “Fuck, I’m not gonna cry at Terms of Endearment.” It’s not that. I love that stuff. I love being affected by media. And I’m like… Well, if a guy like me is so open to this, why in the world are these amazing games, some of which that I just mentioned from Sony, that I was on the front lines watching some of these be made… As much as I love them, why are they only evoking emotion and storytelling one-fiftieth, one-one-hundredth of the fuckin’ cookie commercial that airs every Christmas? It doesn’t mean they’re not brilliant games, but there was something weird about that. It started me thinking, even more… How much of this is an ego portion, on the part of us game-makers? Why do we feel the need to do this?

This is what was the clincher for me, which was, I said… A lot of these people will say, “Well, I have something to say. I have a story I have to tell.” I started thinking, “You know what? If you really… If you got something inside of you that’s so powerful, a story you’ve got to express or a narrative you have to share or a philosophy about man’s place in the universe that you want to get out to the world, why in the fuck” — and I use that term, Mom, wherever you are, intentionally — “why in the fuck would you choose the medium that has historically, continually, been the worst medium to express philosophy and story and narrative? Why wouldn’t you write a book? Why wouldn’t you make a movie? Why wouldn’t you go on a blog? Why wouldn’t you run for fuckin’ office?” Instead, to me, it’s the equivalent of being one of the world’s best chefs and instead of working at a four or five-star restaurant, you choose to ply your trade at McDonald’s. It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s when I started thinking, “There’s gotta be something more.”

I get it, because I came into it with that same intent, that same desire. There’s an ego part of it, there’s a desire of all people to want to express ourselves, to be important, to be relevant. Especially when you’re compared to the movies all the time, because the movies are not just a powerful medium, but the behind-the-scenes shit is glamorous. I’m not saying that’s everybody in this room, or every developer, every gamer. I can tell you, I was susceptible to it. You watch the behind-the-scenes stuff and say, “Fuck, they paint those guys to be really important, they have something to say.” It’s all bullshit, we know that now if we’ve been in this industry, it’s all PR. But ultimately you kinda buy into that. So I get that. But then it struck me, I got kinda frustrated, because I said, “You know, we are important. We’re extremely important. If you look at the biggest successes of this medium, it’s not the story-based stuff.” It’s Modern Warfare multiplayer, which is a global phenomenon. It is Skyrim, it is Guitar Hero, it is Angry Birds, it is Madden, it’s the stuff that embraces what makes the medium special.

Above: What would God of War be without its story?

When you actually think about that, and you think about how fucking disrespectful we are to what we give to the world, it gets you a little angry. Because we do noble work. We are saying important things. We’re entertaining the world, and it drives me fuckin’ crazy that we chase after this need to be “more,” according to these GDC folks, when I think we’re already so much. People will say, “Well, Jaffe, why does it matter to you personally?” And it matters to me because… They say, “Well, you got to make Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal’s a pure mechanics game, it’s pure gameplay for the most part.” And I get it. I’m not sitting here saying, “No one should ever go off and try to expand the medium.” They should, all the time. I think that’s wonderful. If someone really thinks they want to do this, then they should go do it.

But I think we need to adjust our thoughts, I think we need to change how we think about what this medium is, and get off the path of “This is movies,” or “This is the next generation of storytelling,” and get back to “These are games.” And in doing so… Where we haven’t done so, we’ve kinda let the gameplay muscle atrophy, we’ve let our skills and abilities and our… Evolving the actual medium that makes this medium special, I think we’ve let it go. I think it matters, also, more so, I know it’s not just developers here, but it’s executives… It matters almost more to the executives than it does to us developers, because you guys need to get a bullshit filter. And you need to get one before you waste any more money. Because here’s the deal. It is real easy to bamboozle y’all. It is so fuckin’ easy to sit in a pitch and talk about, “I want the realism and the grittiness ofBreaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, and I wanna put it on a spaceship, and I wanna make it feel like Tarantino, and I wanna speak to the human condition,” and you walk out of that meeting and you’ve given him a green light and you feel like, “Yeah!” You can fuckin’ see that in your head. But you can’t fuckin’ see the game in your head, you can see a trailer to a movie that doesn’t actually exist.

And you better start learning gameplay language… Well, I’m not gonna say “better” like you’re gonna die, but I think it’s good if you learn gameplay language because then you can do one of two things. You can either… It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited. I would never want that. But then you can actually sit with a developer who’s saying this and say, “You know what? That’s cool that you want to do that. Tell me how. Explain to me…” Unless the goal is just the IP, like I look at a game like Assassin’s Creed, which I really like, it’s like… If you’re coming in as a developer saying, “Look, we get that the gameplay is this, the IP is this, we’d love to merge them where we can…” But if you come in with a cognizance and awareness of actually what the product is you’re making, great. And if you’re an executive that knows how to suss that out and ask that, that’s great.

But what you don’t want to do is have a developer who doesn’t fuckin’ know how they’re going to do this. They romance you with the promise of something more than it ever will be. Or not more… I even slipped into it, right? It’s not more, but different from what it ever will be. And then it ends up not being that. I think that’s really dangerous.

And the last thing I’ll say on this is, I think the guy who really has it right, and I think he’s one of the smartest designers working in games, is Harvey Smith. He did Deus Ex, which is one of my favorite games, and it basically really speaks to player authorship. In stories via gameplay. The guy just wrote a novel, and he’s also making a very heavily player-authored game right now. Here’s a guy who I think gets… “This medium is good for this, this medium is good for that.” Play to the strengths of the medium. I think we need to understand the medium, I think we need to play to the strengths of the medium, and in doing so we’ll make much better games, and we’ll make players a lot happier. That’s my talk. So thank you, and if you…

[Applause]

I don’t know why you would have questions about that, but if you do, I’m happy to answer them. Anybody? I can’t see anything so I’m assuming the answer’s no. Thank you guys very much, I’ll see you guys tonight at the awards. Thanks a lot!