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Originally Posted by 1up
OK, first off: Should we consider Nathan Drake to be a sociopath? I ask this because I realized that while I was playing Uncharted, it felt odd that he would be this charming everyman kind of guy, but he also killed about 400 guys by the time the game was done, and it's just something that's been in the back of my mind that I can finally ask...
Amy Hennig: Yeah, it's funny -- it's actually a dilemma that we're going to face more in this medium now that characters are getting more well-rendered -- I mean in all forms, not just visual rendering -- in characterization, in acting, the performances, and all that stuff. I've heard some people refer to this as a sort of "uncanny valley of characterization." I'm not sure how we deal with it in the industry. Because you don't want to constrain yourself to saying, "well, we can only tell certain kinds of stories and games, and it's all got to be soldiers; they've all got to be hard-bitten, and it's all going to be post-apocalyptic and grim; there can't be any humor or any romance or anything like that because it's still a game, and you want to be shooting things and having combat."
Now, if you made a game that matched a movie... Let's use a literal example -- let's say you made a game out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It wouldn't be any fun. Because [gaming's] an active experience; you have to have that interaction of shooting and having combat. On one hand, I almost take it as a compliment, that we've done our characterization so well that people have that potential cognitive dissonance of, "I'm this character, yet I'm doing these things." On the other hand, [sigh] you almost have to take the gameplay as a metaphor. Maybe that's going to sound like a cop-out, but, we want the game to be fun at the end of the day. It's not to be taken seriously. Yes, it's maybe a little bit over-the-top in the sense that when you compare it to a film -- or in our case five or six films because of the length -- you wouldn't have that body count. But it's a different medium, and you almost have to take all of that and say, "we want to keep the tone of that genre that we're trying to match." But if we only had you fight three guys over the course of two hours, you'd say, "this sucks." So I think we need a little bit of slack in regards to that cognitive dissonance. Otherwise, the only kinds of games anybody's going to get are...
Evan Wells: Military.
AH: It's a tricky question, and I'm not sure what the best answer is, because you don't want fewer types of games out there -- you want the variety. And you want the gameplay to be fun between all the story elements.
EW: Without giving away too much, I can safely say that we do call it out -- we do make reference to it.
AH: [Laughs] Sometimes you just have to hang a lantern on these things too, when you're like, "OK, we know this is an issue, so let's let everybody know that we know this is an issue."
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