When and where did he say that? I'm writing a dissertation for uni and wanted to use this quotation but can't find any detail on it.
Thanks.
John Carmack is still in the early 90s. Games are moving forward towards the storytelling medium. Look at Mass Effect2, Heavy Rain, and Valve's half-Life games. As visuals grow, we will soon have Pixar-like characters and animation that will make us believe on what we are seeing as actual actors, not a bunch of polygonal models that we don't give a shit about.
Oh yeah, it's a terrible quote and I hope he has a different attitude now. Even if the quality isn't that good in iD's stories, compare the amount of time devoted to story in Wolfenstein 3D or Doom to the new Wolfenstein.
Also, story gets in the way of porn, in my experience, so I prefer the storyless variety. It gives context to games that often enhances them and sometimes is what makes them worthwhile (Persona 3/4 and the Darkness would be pretty boring without stories and characters).
I just can't use the quote in an essay unless I can find the original interview this was in. But then if I can't find it that could mean he didn't really say it.
" I'm not sure that analogy really works. You don't need story in a porn movie because you're only gonna watch it for a couple of minutes. But you do need to play through a game, which takes a lot longer. "He's expressing his opinion about story in games. He's basically saying that it's not important because the gameplay, like the sex in porn, is what you are really interested in.
It comes directly from a great book called " Masters of Doom", a book I cannot recommend enough. Just go buy it, you won't regret it. The quote is even worse when given proper context as it was given to Tom Hall who was at the time working on designing a narrative to Doom....Yeah....Suffice to say: He left.
Everything that I have read about Carmack points to one very simple assumption: He is not a designer.
He's a brilliant coder and is pinnacle in moving the tech of modern gaming forward. But I strongly doubt he plays as much games as you do. Or has the same amount of interest over why the space marine is shooting demons, versus how he can tweak the engine enough to have a certain amount of demons onscreen at once.
Don't take it seriously. He is what he is. The quote was during the early 90's during the development of Doom. He was wrong.
Although, I do get the feeling this highly flawed mantra has stuck with the company for far too long. Ironically, it was Doom 3 that was technically Id Software's first foray into a shooter with story, and it was appropriately terrible.
" It comes directly from a great book called " Masters of Doom", a book I cannot recommend enough. Just go buy it, you won't regret it. The quote is even worse when given proper context as it was given to Tom Hall who was at the time working on designing a narrative to Doom....Yeah....Suffice to say: He left.Wow. That makes far more sense than whatever I was going to post. But yeah, Doom 3 proved that Id was still very much in an early 90s mindset of game development at least in 2004, because it was basically the original Doom but you had to switch to that damn flashlight every time you wanted to see all the pretty graphics.
Everything that I have read about Carmack points to one very simple assumption: He is not a designer.
He's a brilliant coder and is pinnacle in moving the tech of modern gaming forward. But I strongly doubt he plays as much games as you do. Or has the same amount of interest over why the space marine is shooting demons, versus how he can tweak the engine enough to have a certain amount of demons onscreen at once.
Don't take it seriously. He is what he is. The quote was during the early 90's during the development of Doom. He was wrong. Although, I do get the feeling this highly flawed mantra has stuck with the company for far too long. Ironically, it was Doom 3 that was technically Id Software's first foray into a shooter with story, and it was appropriately terrible. "
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