Clint Hocking Can’t Shut Up: Part Two

Me: Why Africa?

Clint Hocking, creative director, Ubisoft:The main reason is Far Cry is a brand that’s all about going to places you haven’t seen before. It’s about places where you can feel really displaced, where you can feel really out of your element.

What themes were you hoping to explore with Far Cry 2?

What was important to me was to explore themes of trust and betrayal, and friendship and dependency. I really wanted to make a game where—it’s a first-person shooter, you shoot people in our game, t. That’s what you do—but I wanted to make a game where there would be people that you shoot or you might need to shoot where you might have to think about that decision.

It’s not just like Duck Hunt. It’s not just put the little dot over the duck and pull the trigger. It is more like, “I hate this guy, and I’m going to spend many, many hours of the game trying to get the opportunity to shoot this f***ing guy because I hate him. Because he’s a bad person.”

And there might be other people who are your very very close friends who might be lying there bleeding on the battle field and you’re surrounded by the enemy and they’re coming in trucks and they’re coming in jeeps, and you’ve go to leave. Your friend is just lying there wounded and can’t move. Your choice is to just leave him there to be picked up by all these guys who are closing in or to shoot him and spare him from being torn apart by dogs and tortured by the enemy.

How do you take that element [of shooting people] and make it meaningful, or more meaningful than it is in a typical game? How do you at least make sure that sometimes when you shoot someone it’s for something that you really care about or for something that really matters?

Why should games have meaning? Why should decisions about who you kill be difficult?

I’m not 22 anymore. I’m 36 years old. By the time my next game ships I’m going to be 40. And the next game after that I’m going to be 45 years old. That’s not a lot of games I’m going to make in my career if it takes me four years to make a game.

The person that I am is changing a lot and is changing quickly. If I want to make games that I personally still care about, I can’t continue to make games like a 21-year-old. I have to think about what I care about when I’m 30 or 45. You know giant two-headed cyclops monsters with guns that shoot chainsaws out of them—who gives a s*** about that, really? What does that have to do with anything? It doesn’t mean you can’t make a good game, or even a meaningful or important game, with two-headed cyclops monsters with guns that shoot chainsaws, but you have to at least say why. The Romans had Cyclops, but why? What did it mean to them. What is this concept of a creature with one eye? How do you mix something that’s meaningful and important out of the concept of a monster? How do you make something that’s meaningful and important out of the conflict of a monster?

We’re making stuff for a real audience, we’re not making stuff exclusively for 18-year-olds any more. There are 70-year-old people playing games. What do they care about?

It’s not just us being weirdos — there’s this whole convergence towards games being richer and more meaningful.

What sort of demand is there for meaningful content in games?

What I think—and I don’t know, I haven’t looked at the numbers and studied or anything. My feeling is there’s this generation of guys who are about my age—between 30 and 40. They didn’t stop playing games like generations before them. They stopped because they didn’t have time for that. My generation continued to play games. We get a little bit frustrated and a little bit bored with games with big monsters in them and games with elves and all same old s*** that we’ve been seeing for the past 25 years.

We want more. We look at movies and we look at books and we look at other media out there and what all these other people are doing. How come they get to make these movies that move all of society and we’re making games with monsters with two heads? It’s stupid. Why aren’t we also doing the same thing? I think there’s this whole generation this second or maybe third generation of game developers who continued playing games and to us games are very important. To the people who are a generation behind us, games are really important. It’s not just us being weirdos — there’s this whole convergence towards games being richer and more meaningful. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Also see:
Gaming’s Morality Play
Clint Hocking: Think Before You Shoot