full interview_chelsea hash_8.mp3
Chelsea Hash [00:00:00] So I'm Chelsea Hash and I'm a game developer.
Speaker 2 [00:00:03] Went to the game developer too.
Chelsea Hash [00:00:06] So a game developer is a great catch-all term, which is great for people that work on a wide range of things. I say game developer because I've come up in a background where we do a lot of engineering and a lot art research and a line of design. And you work on games. If two people make the game, what are they? They're game developers. You work on bigger projects and then people take sort of a deeper role and then you sort of identify more with artists. There are plenty of people that say I'm a game artist, but I say game developer because most of the work that I do is about trying to make the games work and that's a lot of working with the different people. So you have artists that draw things and make things pretty and you have designers that think through problems, and then you have... Engineers that apply what they know to solve the problems that have been organized and you know all of that comes together to make a game but compared to any of the other projects that I've worked on I think the way people work together is why I like to do it.
Speaker 2 [00:01:22] That's a lot of balls to the air.
Chelsea Hash [00:01:26] I think the most exciting thing with game development is every game presents new sets of problems and even somebody who says I'm an artist will spend some time researching architecture and then they'll research landscaping or they'll research the way certain people do portraits and, you know, the next project, it's all It's about topography, and it's all about, uh... You know, like draftsmanship and, you know a game could contain any of those things or none of those thing, you have Minecraft where it's just lots of boxes and very low and very pixel-y textures, so it's a... The idea that you get to draw a very specific circle around a set of problems and say, think about this. You know, it's like that's like a really unique thing about a game where it can carve out what it wants to be.
Speaker 2 [00:02:32] Do you enjoy those kinds of problems or something?
Chelsea Hash [00:02:36] The novelty in the problem-solving has always been something that I'm drawn to, and even from the earliest days of my career, I was like, oh, I get to put the first 3D model on a dev kit. So it's like how you make something like for a Nintendo or like Xbox. I was putting the first 3D model our studio had ever put on a device. That newness was very exciting, even though I was the first of very many models and now I focus on different things, but the newness is very cool. There's always new things to tackle, I think. I never expected when I started my career that I would end up doing so much creative writing and I always thought of myself as a...
Speaker 2 [00:03:35] That you started off as something, and then you found yourself doing something additional.
Chelsea Hash [00:03:42] So when I, it's funny because I'm an artist, but I went to all engineering schools and I thought I was going to be a biologist. Then I took one CAD class, like computer-assisted drawing, and I was like, ooh, I really like this. I really liked lining things up and figuring out how do I center. When I got my first job, I was an artist, but I was engineer, and so my job was to solve layout and math and problems for art. And so over the course of my career, I think I always felt like, I'm an artist but I'm not really, I didn't do the drawings. Somebody else did these concepts, I'm just turning it into 3D, and then 3D became way more independently. You know, like an art of itself, but, you know, I was still more on that engineering side and I think over time, solving the problems of like, how do you execute on a vision in sort of like in the sort of, like real time creative space, it's not exactly film, you know, it not a animation, um, like turned into design. And so, like after doing many, many projects as like an artist, eventually. I was doing so much of the like organization of like how we were going to put it together as like, you know, what you're actually doing is design. I'm like, oh, okay. And so I think like that a lot of the teams I enjoy, we have like this hybrid, like everyone's a designer. Everybody's designing something.
Speaker 2 [00:05:26] Is that, do you find that rare that people can juggle both of those kinds of things?
Chelsea Hash [00:05:32] I feel like every team, especially really small teams, the thing that they're making is a product of like their really unique understanding of what you're trying to make. And so I think smaller teams have a lot more space for somebody to extend what they're doing. You're like, oh, I'm just, you know, like you're not just making a level, you're just putting the trees and the fences, you're. You're really deciding how is somebody going to walk through a space? Do they think they can go left and right? And so I think, at least the teens I like to work on, you're doing environment, but you're also designing the level. You're building a character, but you're always deciding how they're going to be seen and how they are presenting themselves. A design mindset lets you stay in that problem solving space that I think a lot of people that make games, it's like solving the problem is the best part. If it's already solved it becomes a different kind of craftsmanship. Definitely not worse.
Speaker 2 [00:06:41] So you mentioned you've called yourself an artist several times? Yeah. So that suggests that video games are not.
Chelsea Hash [00:06:48] Ah-ha, yeah. Some people say they don't like our games aren't the question, but I like any kind of thought experiment, and I think that games are more art the more that each person is asking, what is the intent behind what I'm doing? And I think it's just like the intentionality behind believing that how you're working with the game really matters is the thing that makes it an art to me.
Speaker 2 [00:07:18] And are you, as an artist, trying to express certain ideas through your work?
Chelsea Hash [00:07:27] A really hard thing to talk about, to be honest. This is like a really funny one, because it's so easy to get into this like book report mindset of like, what is the, like, you know, what am I trying to put into the world? And honestly, I think the idea that you get to The experience of the player is something where like the intent is to create a feeling in someone is like a very raw primitive, you know, like we, we'd like make a lot of reference to, um, this is kind of funny. Stand up comedy. You go up and you do your open mic and people like work on, you know, they call it their tight five, where you can, you know, talk for five minutes and get good reactions out of the crowd. I feel like being tapped into just driving a reaction and then trying to make it the reaction you intended is like a very weird nexus of like technology and user experience or things that like in other disciplines would just be designed to make things smooth. So, you know, it's like, definitely there's a, the story. The stories that you're trying to tell are trying to be told in a certain way. You're trying get people to feel a certain way. But the levers that you are pulling are really different. They're really different than the way film can put you on rails and you are experiencing something and it happens in this purely linear fashion. And, you know, but there's games like, uh, this is a very, uh. I hope most people have played a game called Portal, or people that like games have played a game Called Portal, and Portal is a game where you're using sort of like a magic portal opening device that lets you walk in and out of spaces and you solve all these puzzles. And during the development they had you use just a regular box, like a crate to solve the puzzles. You're really carrying this crate with you. And so this game had very little sort of like original narrative content, but during development you're carrying this crate with you. And eventually through play testing somebody said, wow, I'm so sad, oh my buddy, my buddy I have to leave him behind when I go to the next thing, I am sad. And they were like, it happened a lot, people were like oh wow, this is like you're sad and it became the companion cube and you're sort of mining. People are attached to the series of experiences you're forcing them to have, which puts them, like they get attachment to the worlds that they create because they get to affect it, and I think that's really. It's that idea that you're gonna put somebody in this place to become attached to this imaginary thing that I'm interested in. And I think that's a, I don't know if that's different from. Mission statements that other artists have. But I think it's like being able to effectively create that kind of attachment and connection to something that doesn't exist is particularly interesting to me.
Speaker 2 [00:11:02] Well, I think all artists, you started to say this before, is that there's something really fundamental about creating something that causes another human being who maybe you've never met to have some experience, and you're kind of pulling the strings of orchestration. Yeah. Let's talk about that one more time. Yeah.
Chelsea Hash [00:11:21] Yeah, I think whenever you make a game and you're hoping that somebody's going to notice something without saying it outright, and we'll put people, have somebody play the game and we can see them react, and the second that your face reacts before their character does, you only get to see that if you're actually watching them play. And I think there's something about... Unlike a book or a script for a film, you sort of set out to make a game and then, at least for me, sometimes it goes a different way or the mechanic of the game is putting you into a... I'm trying to think out how to say this. You set out to make something, and so much of it is outside of your direct control. And so I feel like some of the more interesting games that I've worked on, it sort of takes on a life of its own. And if you get to, you're sort of like in this symbiotic relationship where you see what it's wanting to do and how people are reacting to it, and then you try to have it be. Like, make an even better thing than what you planned feels really, um... I mean, people use words like it's emergent, like emergent experiences, but, you know, it's a... I think some of the best experiences in games I've made were things that were really trying to be in cooperation with the player. Rather than having this really specific perspective that you're gonna force them to have, you're literally sort of opening the door to having, sort of engaging with what you're having or feeling differently when they still make it through. And I guess that's something that I'm... It's funny, it's this funny dynamic of hoping that somebody's going to take something away and that they might be able to take several different things away, like people walk away with those different reactions and I think I at least really like games where like somebody's bringing something to it and they're seeing something like what they bring to the story sort of like amplifies what is happening rather than having like this like completely laid out plans. You know, when I was supporting the development of What Remains of Edith Finch, it was a story about memories and a story about somebody returning to a family home where they didn't fully understand everything that was going on. And we were doing that play testing. Somebody's like playing the game, having these reactions, being shocked and connecting to like a very sort of like whimsical, fantastical family. But afterwards, like this was my favorite reaction. They said, I need to go call my cousins. And it's like, this wasn't about their family, but it was about a family that felt really believable and sort of brought to them a connection to something in their life. And it wasn't just sharing what we wanted to tell. They were so steeped in it that it motivated them to go do something for themselves. And I thought that was like, that's the kinds of reactions. But you know, it's hard. It's like the really specific reactions of like, I want to make sure you understand this. It's, like, no, I don't want you to like sit in something enough that it's like. You know, like I see the world differently. I'm going to go be able to, you know? I'm gonna. Motivated to go, you know, kind of maybe act and be a different way. And I think there's something. I think this is something really interesting about games allow for so much more space for you to think about and react to what is happening very independently of how the game wants to progress. You can sit and wait. It would be like if you're playing a movie and pausing constantly because you're in control of like how fast it is proceeding. I mean, even just the idea that you spend so much time in a game world that you may not, like compared to a movie, is much, much longer. You're like, oh, this is where I live now, and you know, I think that's, I don't know, there's some challenging things about video games and, you know like, how much time people spend with them, but I think if you look at how much people spend with other. Like other forms of art. I think there are. I think there are other positive aspects to it, especially if you get to experience a range of things.
Speaker 2 [00:16:44] Yeah, we're not, I mean, the whole sociological question. Yeah, yeah, I was just like, ah, I'm going a little too far there, yeah. Well, I do want to ask you, okay, you're giving me so many possibilities here. Let's go ahead for a second, okay, is that, why is it so hard to convince people, and when I say people, I don't mean somebody who's 20 who grew up in it, but somebody who is 50, okay why is this so hard to convince them? Why are we going to have trouble in our show making the case that video games aren't hard?
Chelsea Hash [00:17:17] I think that... Probably having experienced games from their very earliest examples with very few pixels, I think it's really understandable that somebody may not look at a game and say, this is helping me understand the human condition. And cinema has had 100 years to develop, and games are catching up really quickly. And, you know, I would say... In the beginning when you had, you were struggling so hard to just get anything to work on the computer. It's understandable that it was pretty basic, you know, but we've had more time to become more comfortable and to have more people contribute and to more intention. And so, you now, it's like games grew up. And I think that's the kind of thing that can be hard to accept if you saw it in its infancy. To say that, you know, somebody was interested in more than just making sort of like the boxes jump over spiky turtles, and you know it's like that kind of thing it takes time to develop. I think sort of another interesting thing looking at games is a lot of people look at the most well-known games and then sort of assume every game is that way. And it would sort of be like saying, I don't watch movies. Because you don't like comedy. Like, well, comedies were really popular at one point, so it's like, ah, they're too silly. There must be no film art. And I think now there are games that are so different from one another that it's really funny to talk about them in a group because there's a lot of non-artistic games, just like there's lot of not-artist movies.
Speaker 2 [00:19:18] There are lots of artful games.
Chelsea Hash [00:19:21] Yes, there are. And I think that trying to let people find artful games can be a harder thing. I think I've been really lucky to work on way more of them now in my life than I've worked on both. And I both have their own place. It's hard to talk about even things that people just enjoy. As not artistic fundamentally as well, you know. I think there's things that people spent a lot of time with. One of the first games that I, actually the first game where I went from being sort of like a, just a content processing person to a designer was this gymnastics game. And I knew we didn't have a lot time, you know, or like a infinite budget to just iterate and make this like perfect experience, but. Went online and I realized that these girls that were playing gymnastics, like games, or they loved gymnastics, and I was like, you know, super hobbyist gymnast growing up, was they just, they were so interested in the, knowing everything about all of these gymnastics routines. And I was, like, You know what? I want to make it possible for them. To recreate these things and design their own gymnastics routines in a really accurate way. It was a really small, casual game for girls, but years later I saw people with YouTube videos of having recreated and crafted, like, used this as a tool to become super fans, and it's like, I don't even know that that's not a valid use of that space. So I really have a hard time with the, sometimes I have a hard time of the art, like what is art, because I think. I think something that can be a focus for something that you're interested in, where you get to explore it, has an essential value. I think deciding that specific kinds of emotional states are the only valid ones is also really hard. And I think that there's a lot of things that we spend our time doing that are not super artful. That we're more okay with, and I think it's funny, like games sometimes get a bad rap, as if their stories aren't as good as the average story, and I would say this has changed.
Speaker 2 [00:21:56] When you start a new game, or when you're thinking about a game, either, I guess, for you to develop, or now that you're an executive, or somebody else's idea, what do you start with? You start with a mood, a storyline, a mechanic, I mean, what are you, how does that work?
Chelsea Hash [00:22:14] I feel like it's a good different answer for a lot of different developers. But for me, I really like to think about the mechanic and how you're going to be spending your time playing the game. And then finding a story where the more that you understand that thing that you're doing, the better you start to understand the story itself in the world. I think. Yeah. Mood always plays really quickly into that. Like you kind of need the both of them. And so. For something like Solar Ash, when the team was starting, we knew that there was like this contrast. There was contrast between this super high energy movement, super fast action, you know, sort of dealing with heavy subject matter. But it was just like contrast between this beautiful world and yet trying to maintain an intense tone. And so... There's something about like taking a mechanic for like how you want to be spending your time and the tone and then knowing like, oh, am I doubling down or am I creating this contrast? And like, you know, a lot of your energy is going to be sort of like drawing the connection between the unexpected.
Speaker 2 [00:23:37] So Seller-Ash was, it's interesting because I think a lot of people imagine, and you know the history much better than me, that games are sort of making this progress to becoming more sort of photorealistic, to make it more look like a real thing. Where does something like Seller Ash is not playing that game?
Chelsea Hash [00:23:55] Yeah. So Solar Ash is incredible because it was sort of the second game from the studio that, you know, like Alex Preston had established is this sort of like incredibly vivid, super intentional, like heavily art directed piece that like completely stood on its own, but like in two dimensions. And so, you know like when I joined the team, we're going to be like, how do we take this vision that is like so carefully crafted and laid out? And then like explode it into 3D, you know? And I think that was this experience of trying to take all of these like painterly concepts and make them work in 3D was like something we spent the entire project iterating on. And I, think it's one of these things where there are a lot of tools that exist in the world where there's a lot of people interested in being able to recreate. A realistic object, you know, in a virtual space. And I think trying to do an interpretation of an art style, like an interpretation of a painting and to have it move and have a lot of the same essential, uh, properties that it had as a 2D form and 3D was, you know, like just really fun. Uh, I mean, I think especially from, let's say the, there's something A long time ago called like the tech, like the demo scene, where you would turn math into art. And so we had these premises of, you know, nothing out of the box just works. Everything had to be just so. So the main character, Ray, had a cape. And there are all these different math systems that can simulate the way that a cape moves. But if you look at sort of like the real world, even a real world cape doesn't live up to the vision of like what a comic book cape lives up to. So, you know, like we worked with an engineer to help us do this abstraction of a cape. It wasn't the whole cape that was moving. It was just sort of the line that it drew in space. So okay, we have that. We have a flat plane and we can bend it to the line. And they said, okay, like this is good. It follows the character. But it doesn't have that essential, like the perturbing, like flapping like a curtain. And we did that separately. We were a character artist set with a material artist. And they just made different shaped meshes and different materials, with the material can do everything. Materials decide what color it is, materials decide how it reacts to light. And ultimately, you can also do deformation. So we used a combination of simulation and math to get a version of the cave that looks like a comic book. And that was just one little piece, and we just did that over and over again for all the different pieces in Solar Ash.
Speaker 2 [00:27:12] No, no, no. That's great. We want to let these guys chat in with some questions. When you finish with the game, how do you feel?
Chelsea Hash [00:27:27] It has been my great privilege for when I ship games. I get to be pretty universally jazzed that somebody's going to get to play it and it goes into their hands. I think it can be really hard for some devs to feel like they've run out of time and they don't get to change it anymore. I feel like I really love shipping and I love being able now with video streaming, I then go get to relive it through their eyes. I think the moments right before ship, where I have a hard time playing it, are much worse, but then immediately you get to see everybody enjoying it, and you get like, but you don't have to do anything about it. They like, you know, you see it in people's hands and you know at least you always get to find somebody who's having a good time with it. And you know it's like, I'm fine if somebody doesn't like a game I worked on, but seeing the people that really like it, that's, I don't know, it's my favorite thing.
Speaker 2 [00:28:33] It's funny, because we talked about... Just lean into the camera a little more. Lean in? Right. Oh, sure. Do you want me to move the whole camera? Yeah. Do you wanna hop over there? Yeah. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. No, no, no. There you go. We talked to a lot of artists who... And actually, we filmed this one ourselves. Oh, you can't watch it. No, well, no, it's fun to watch with an audience. But there are a lot of artists that tell us that there's kind of a sense of loss. Like, you must love going to the gallery over to see it. No, I'm really depressed, because the painting's no longer have potential.
Chelsea Hash [00:29:05] Yeah, no, it is, and as I say, it's like my, I feel lucky that I like the act of getting it out there is so. It feels like such a big effort. It has a nice combination of, it's like somebody else's like experience to have and I don't wanna say burden to carry but there's definitely something like it gets to live on in their minds and it's not something that I have to continue to reconsider and contend with. And I've definitely worked with a lot of people that have the sensation of, you know. I had to let it be. I think there's a really interesting moment before the game shifts where you realize you have to let it become the thing that it wants to become. And I don't know if that's sort of like a, you know, it's like your dynamic of like, is this my thing or is it's own thing? But I sort of see it's the game is growing up and now it hits this point where I don't get to decide everything that it is. So, I don't know, I see that this is a very joyful thing where it gets to sort of leave the nest and go out and, you know, it just has to contend with the world and how the world is going to see it.
Speaker 2 [00:30:35] And how the world is going to treat it. Yeah, exactly. Games are unique. I wouldn't go to a museum and look at a Picasso and take out a paintbrush and start improving it or changing it. But your art form is a little bit different.
Chelsea Hash [00:30:49] I mean, I think there's something funny if you go on the internet and read how people talk about games. There's a lot of people that think it's really easy to just add multiplayer and extra levels and everybody thinks about the game they want to play. And, uh, there's this, there is this, uh sort of joke I have with my, um... The tech director in the studio where we work together, and they say, accept limitations. Where we really try to let the game live within it, the plan that you were comfortable with. But I would not say the world accepts those limitations very well. Uh, when I was, uh, you're talking about making a game when you start to make a game. You get this feeling of maybe I could add one more thing, and maybe it should also have a mini game, and maybe the character's costume should change over the course of the game, and maybe there should be two players. And every time you add something, you sort of have to accept that the team has a certain amount of brain space to... Make decisions and every time you add something you make it a little bit harder to change something. And so I feel like a big aspect of how games become art is you get really comfortable with having a very specific set of colors to paint with, so to speak. And then you try to make really interesting choices, like look at all of these interesting choices I can make with this very small set. And I think... If there was anything I could share with people ingesting those games is that having a huge team that has to make all those features that people think they want, it's really hard to include somebody's whole heart and mind when there's so many colors to choose from and so many gradations. I think this is really... It's funny. I don't know if... I mean, I don't have a huge art history background. But I don't know of any particular art styles where you sort of like, you have this entire faction that are trying to make games more detailed and then you have other factions that are tying to use as few of the features as possible. And I think that's like. When I, like, am the most excited about a game, it is the biggest game you can make with the smallest number of moving pieces. And the way that those pieces sort of, like can interact with each other, I feel like the player can see that, and it's sort of like, like look how interesting this system is that we've, like assembled, look at all these interesting things you can do and how they interact, and anything you can think of, you know, like every action has reaction. And when you get to really huge games, things just sort of, you have a laundry list of having very small, shallow experiences where they can't possibly, all those combinations can't possible exist. And I think that's where, if you say like where does things get boring, it's when you don't see sort of like this, like sort of magic between two interactions, you're just seeing a very shallow request for more, that just, oh, now I guess I have to do that. Hundred more times and then I'm like I don't want to that that's uh the kind of work that I'm glad that I don't
Speaker 2 [00:34:40] Guys, you want an edit? I'll have a follow-up to that. Yeah, sure, go ahead. And you should be looking at me.
Speaker 3 [00:34:48] I'm wondering, more and more year to year there's sort of more tools to modify games and I'm wonder if you could comment on on one hand you give your game up to somebody to rip apart and rebuild as they like, but is there a positive to that in terms of young people getting into finding their creativity and having more access to do that. And I'm wondering if you, if there's a version of you from years ago that was maybe doing that as well.
Chelsea Hash [00:35:22] Absolutely. So basically, when a game gets released into the world and then, you know... Very good chance, if it's popular enough, people will be interested in modding it, and I think the modding community is one of the coolest aspects of people being game enthusiasts. You know, it's not just modding. There's speed runners and people that sort of like post-hacks, people that write walkthroughs. I think the active engagement in games, like games as art, but also games as these hobbies that teach you to be creative is like one of the biggest powers. You get this feeling of getting to contribute to something and that you understand the system well enough that you're going to build something and it fits into that world. It's so cool. And it's also where I love to work with people from. Like this really long-time collaborator, Nate Grove, got his start working in Source Engine. And the modding community around Source, they have like some of the best sort of design sense. On the internet. It's really, really cool.
Speaker 2 [00:36:46] I'm going to ask you very quickly, in three words, to find modding, modding is, and then speedrunning is.
Chelsea Hash [00:36:55] Okay. Yeah, sorry, yeah, there was this thing.
Speaker 2 [00:36:56] Ben talked about speed writing, he never actually explained it, until you came up with it.
Chelsea Hash [00:37:01] Okay, yeah, of course he did, it's totally worth he just speed running too, so yeah, the modding community...
Speaker 4 [00:37:10] Yeah, okay.
Chelsea Hash [00:37:13] So modding is the process of taking a game that has some rules about how content gets made for the game. And people use a wide variety of tool sets, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, to change the way the game looks and feels. Some games, you can really change the design behaviors. You can make. Game objects, you can make new collectibles, you could make new inventory, you can change costumes, and then, you know, other times you can just design levels, and so there's like a huge range of what's possible for modding.
Speaker 2 [00:37:53] That's great. That's good. Sounds of speed right now.
Chelsea Hash [00:37:56] Alright, so speedrunning is taking a game and then trying to beat it as fast as possible. Speedrunners use a bunch of different rules. You can do any percent runs, you can decide, which means you beat the game as fast as possible, you don't have to do X, Y, Z, or you have to beat bosses, but you don't thing is... Half of it is the speed and just how quickly you can beat the game. But then the other half is like, how does the game's rules work so you can find crazy ways of beating it really fast. And Solar Ash, the game I worked on, had a really fantastically, we were aware of speed running, we were huge fans, and we specifically designed the game so that when you were trying to run it as fast as possible, that it was the fun kind of speed-running. And not the boring kind where you have to turn off the console or reload your save data because sometimes that's the fastest way. We did some really interesting things with the boss levels where it was impossible to do something called sequence breaking and that is you do something in the game that's It's so different that it doesn't expect that it can't recover. And so we specifically designed it so that there was no way to beat the game without beating every boss and that you couldn't sequence break. If you're ready for that.
Speaker 2 [00:39:36] When you're thinking about new games, how much of it, innovation and technology are such a huge part of what you do and the speed. Like when you're making a film, even today, it's like you're still working with principles that have existed for a long time. How important is it for you to say, this is going to be the first game that does that, or this is the first thing that's going to look like that. Is that it or are you looking for other things?
Chelsea Hash [00:40:04] I think it's really interesting with new games and like what's the hook and what are you like what gets you excited about a game. I think a principle that comes up a lot for me is like what something really interesting you can do that takes the pressure off of all of the different pieces of an idea to be the new best thing ever but you sort of understand there are some things where it's really easy to be the first and other things or it's not. So... For Solar Ash, the design featured these incredible, massive, moving monsters, and there are very few games that have done things like that. And so, it takes the pressure off of it also having to have... Say elaborate crafting system that you don't need or you know it's like you can do an adventure game and there's like other things you don't have to do if you really know what you're focusing on. So I think there's something about being the best and then there's something about the most selective and you can focus without having to Completely invent something new and I do think that's like where art styles can really you like you do something in a really unique art style Where you're not just chasing a really well-developed problem You're just creating a completely new problem and I think people are really Generous with somebody exploring a new problem or a new subject matter a new story in a way that if you're like here's an idea. You have a sword and a shield, you know, and it's like, and you're going to run around and swing it around. I'm not saying that that's like not a fun game, but there's a lot of people exploring the space of being a fantasy guy with a shield and a sword. And, uh, you, know, I think making new games with new ideas, you have a very generous audience. Like people will spend a lot time in it just to the the very first explorations of something they haven't done before.
Speaker 2 [00:42:17] An artist can sit and paint in her studio and then unveil the painting. People will love it or hate it or whatever, maybe show it to friends and things like that. Games don't work like that because of the playtesting, right? And that strikes us as sort of similar to how science works. I don't know if that's a parallel you've ever thought about where it's always iterating and failure is probably guaranteed, but people are going to like it. Oh yeah. Oh, they're going to love this.
Chelsea Hash [00:42:50] I think the process of iterating on games has some... I think there's something interesting about making a game and sharing it with people, and depending on what you're trying to do, you'll get... A very different range of things you can test and things you just have to trust for your gut. What remains of you did finish in the middle of it? We did lots of testing because we wanted to see how some of the more challenging things, you know, see it through someone else's eyes because we were struggling with really hard stuff. Maybe there's really easy stuff we can fix. And, you know, and to that degree... We could write questionnaires and we had like really targeted problems we wanted to fix, but we had to be really creative about how they got selected. So there was like one moment where people were confused about the story we were trying to tell. And we decided we want to do a play test and we're going to make changes. We're going. We're gonna keep changing the content until the average player retains. The names of the characters and the family, and it was a very oddly reductive question to try to just make sure that people understood enough of the details that they were able to follow the plot and that we weren't getting sort of like a false negative, which is like very mathy. But then on the other side, we were really trying to refine people's understanding of how all of those peoples were connected. The final version of voiceover, like the final version of the dialog, nobody heard until the game was released, and it wasn't playtested at all. So it can be a little bit of both. Bold. Yeah, it was very scary. I don't want to overstate. But you're trying to fix the problem early, but I do I think, uh, when it comes to shipping games... You go through these different phases, like in pre-production, it's like a blue sky and anything is possible. And I've met developers, they love each of the different phases. Some people love the possibility and the lack of constraints of pre- production. Other people love production because you basically, the open questions feel a lot less scary and they just have this delightfully long list of consistent work to do. Then other people really love, uh, the shipping process and the bugs because, you know, you just have to solve the bug. We don't have to debate it anymore and the window is closing and you just have to make a bunch of final decisions. Um, but I think narratively that happens too, because you're like, yeah, we were trying to make that work, but maybe it didn't work out. So, uh. Now we just have let it be what it's trying to be. That's my favorite part where it's like at the very end. And I don't know if that's like a... Again, because I've come in more as like editor and technical artist and sort of like animation and VFX. You're just trying to get something that's like, that has a good reaction that, that speaks to people. And I do think there's something about. If people see something else in the work that wasn't your intention, I'm like, oh, but they see this thing and they love it. I'm, like, Oh yeah, let's do that. And you're like, That's not what I wanted. I tend to not have that reaction. I'm like, oh, they got so like, you know, let that be it for them then, you know, or there's this principle. I finally learned there's a word for it. Um, negative capability. And it is a term from like, it's a poetic term and it talks about being okay with the lack of specification and that many things that are unlike each other could be contained, like within a finite definition. I think it's the, it's not the same thing, but like when people love a song and they have the wrong lyrics, but they still love the song. I feel like games have a much wider like space for like this negative capability where they bring their own experiences to it. They're going through a process. That sort of, it's like a ritual that puts them into a head space. And I think the flexibility of the narrative to not just be a series of cutscenes that have a specific interpretation, but you have like a system, you know, that somebody operates within is like, to me that's like the best part. In fact, I love it when somebody loves a complete misunderstanding. As long as they love it, I feel like it made sense to them. In enough ways that it turned out, so. Maybe that's why I love when it chips and I'm fine with it. I'm like, oh wow, look at that, you know? Especially when people love it and they have drawn a very different conclusion from the story.
Speaker 2 [00:48:13] It's like they're collaborating with each other.
Chelsea Hash [00:48:15] It is! I mean, thank you for saying that. I mean I think that's the... I feel like...
Speaker 2 [00:48:21] Can you just say that back?
Chelsea Hash [00:48:22] Yeah, right, yeah, it's, oh man, let's see that again.
Speaker 2 [00:48:26] I said, well, I said it's like they're collaborating with you, and you can just say that it's like they are collaborating with me. Yeah, yeah.
Chelsea Hash [00:48:33] So it's like I love when people like have their own super unique reactions and they're understanding things that like I'll admit are in there. It's like they're collaborating with me. I think the, I think overall the process of, you know, there's many people that make a game, including the player is like true now more than ever.
Speaker 2 [00:48:57] I just had one more question, okay? So, I know you sit on juries to evaluate suit stuff. Yeah. And you obviously, in your position as a studio head, a lot of stuff comes across your desk. What, when you see a game or the idea of a game, if it hasn't been done yet, or a demo or whatever, what's the thing that makes you excited? What are you looking for? What makes it art?
Chelsea Hash [00:49:24] I think the most exciting thing for me when I hear about a new game idea, if I see a pitch or I'm playing a game on a jury, is the idea of something that is so simple but complex enough that it's filled with possibility. It's sort of a rare thing and sometimes somebody has a really great idea, but they're exactly sure how to develop it. Or you'll see in a student game where, you know, they've really like thrown everything at an idea and it's like, oh, this is so great. You could just edit it down to like the examples that understand that the most. But a lot of times, like even when I'm working on a game, you sort of see it, it starts with this seed of possibility and it it's this like wide, it's a wide cone. And as you develop. You know, like the options get narrower and narrower, but I think the ones that end where it's still pretty wide, but you can completely understand, you know, like what am I supposed to do? Who am I? And now what's possible? That's like, it's the best thing.
Speaker 5 [00:50:36] One thing that we kind of haven't talked about a little bit is writing.
Speaker 4 [00:50:41] Oh god, yeah, no, it's good. No, it's good.
Speaker 5 [00:50:44] Because, you know, obviously collaborative process and all of that. I have a lot of thoughts. It's the hardest thing in the world. So many of your cities are actually writing out the possibilities, right? I mean, writing out which might be modest, if something might happen to them, you know, there might be a collaborative part of it. However, you're still sitting there going, okay, but there's option A, there's option B, there is option C. How does that play into your kind of your thinking about in particular.
Chelsea Hash [00:51:09] The really interesting thing with writing for games is that you have to be comfortable with the player's reactions, what they're going to do with your options, and thinking about your writing as existing, as staccato interspersed moments between long spans with the player having their own thoughts and feelings, and different writers tackle that different ways. You know, there are games that are just dedicated branching experiences. You choose an option and all the other options fall away. Experimentally, I think there's a lot of fun things to do with that, but it's really hard because it means there's a lot the game that you're probably not going to experience. Other games handle, you know, it's like sort of cinematic. You have really big moments that are planned in a very filmic way. And then all of the game in between the two don't matter. You just have like, you play between cut scenes. And so I think, you know, like working on Edith Finch and sort of like watching like Ian as the writer, uh, it was like, and the creative director, he'd approached it. Like, I'm playing- I'm- making a game that feels like reading a book. And so it was designed and laid out so that moment to moment you were absorbing things in roughly the same pace. And I think that's like writing for a writer who has not been in game development. I think the shift for lack of control is really hard. And then I think to me, the best writing in games happens when you allow yourself to rewrite it completely after the game is done, which is scary, but it's not really rewriting everything, but its saying, well what did this game become under the heading of attempting to write it, and then is there a way that now I can negotiate with the game to become its best version of itself. And I think that best version, it's having the intuition to know when to let it take over versus you getting it back on track. It's like, which one of you is more mature in this state? And to some degree, the game grows and has its own weight.
Speaker 2 [00:53:41] I was talking about, you know, the characters. Oh, really? Oh, good, yeah. No, Davos always says that. Right, it's like I'm not in control of everything. The character's not going to let me do that. Right. I hate the character. I really wish I could. The character is not allowing it because it doesn't feel right. You know? And so, yeah...
Chelsea Hash [00:53:57] The hardest thing is just this, and I don't know if films have solved this, because it's like, I'm really not a filmmaker, and actually, there was an article that was written for Edith Finch, where they talked about Ian Pogost wrote. He was like, oh, it was very clear that the developers wanted to just be making a movie, and I'm reading this, and I love his ratings, and he says he's like challenging things, but I was like ah, we never could have made a movie version of this, like we weren't sitting in front of a script. We were all. Contributing, you know, we were all trying to make a game, but we were also trying to negotiate the story that it wanted to tell, and I can't imagine, like, the game was, the game and the players were equal, were equal entities negotiating how that was going get figured out.
Speaker 2 [00:54:51] I would say that. We're done. We made a film proposal and it was all about accents, and the most annoying thing that, like, executives would say to us is, well, it's really a radio show. It's like they're downgrading it. Right, yeah, yeah. Oh, it could be a movie. Well, yes.
Chelsea Hash [00:55:08] Right, yeah, exactly. I was like, ah, if only, yeah. I think like, the whole reason I had a strong reaction to the writing is that writers are in control of everything when they're writing. Every single thing, every word is equally challenging to, I don't wanna like speak too much for writers, but at least all of the words are available at your disposal to choose to include or not include. And games have that same film problem of like budget and time. And then they have the, you know, I think film deals with it. There's also this like, it's impossible to do. You know, we tried, we've been trying for a long time and it's not working. You know. Is, it is science though. You know it's like the writer's like, well let's write this perfect ending and now it's done. The only problem is me. And that's like a very like. Personal like hardship, but for games we're all like, you know, like fighting over trying to fix it.
