// PC GAMER — GAMING
New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says games can and should pull on artistic inspirations from 'anywhere and everywhere': 'Greek plays, they knocked it out of the park thousands of years ago—why not look at them?'
If you want the player to feel something, look to media that already cracked the code.
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Videogames: They're cool because they make us feel things—like how cool it is to be a cowboy—or think about things—like which things are worth carrying around while being a cowboy.
Or at least, that's what Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer says in his latest YouTube video, adding yet more yield to his recent crop of game development wisdom by explaining the place of artistic inspiration in the game design process.
In the video, Sawyer responds to a question from a viewer who'd noticed that most of his YouTube uploads are primarily focused on systems design in granular, mechanical terms and wanted to know where and how much he draws on artistic inspiration.
Asked whether game design is more a process of injecting art into design systems or designing systems around art, Sawyer provided what he said is "sort of the copout answer": Artistic inspiration, he said, is a constant throughout the process.
The "heart of the design process," he says, is an understanding that "you're trying to get a person to think or feel something about something"—and not just whether or not they're having fun.
"There's a lot of things you want the player to think about or experience or feel. And I would say that's true of art and all media," Sawyer said. "That's kind of the goal. You're sharing something to evoke thoughts or thought processes or an emotional experience."
Where games differ from those other kinds of media, however, is that players often spend orders of magnitude more time with a single game than they would with even a three-hour movie. As a result, for someone like Sawyer, whose development history includes games that "are over 100 hours easily," pursuing that goal requires "constantly reevaluating" not just how major set piece sequences, climactic story beats, and companion interactions are accomplishing the intended player experience, but also whether it's being reinforced by the moment-to-moment systems and gameplay that will take up the bulk of a player's time.
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