> “It took me so many years to realize that the power of all games are not with the characters but instead the actual environment.”
This is an interesting thing to read from the co-creator of a game franchise with a deep enough lore that multiple novels have been published in its universe. The characters in the Myst series are not insignificant – certainly the specter of Gehn in Riven, even though you actually meet him only briefly at the end of the game, is ever-present as you explore the world he ruled and bent to his will.
And yet, that seems to be exactly what Robyn Miller is talking about there: The character of Gehn is important, but the player gets to know him not through direct interaction, rather through exploring the environment. Gehn's screen time is an afterthought to the character development that derives from observing the obsessive details of the places he frequented and shaped. The environment is the character development.
Myst marked a turning point in environmental storytelling, and its effects have been felt all the way from the golden age of first-person shooters into the modern age of "walking simulators." Even when today's games take the overused shortcut of audio logs to fill in the details, the stages they set all track back to those curiously broken chairs in Sirrus' study that made you ask "wait, what happened here?"
This is an interesting thing to read from the co-creator of a game franchise with a deep enough lore that multiple novels have been published in its universe. The characters in the Myst series are not insignificant – certainly the specter of Gehn in Riven, even though you actually meet him only briefly at the end of the game, is ever-present as you explore the world he ruled and bent to his will.
And yet, that seems to be exactly what Robyn Miller is talking about there: The character of Gehn is important, but the player gets to know him not through direct interaction, rather through exploring the environment. Gehn's screen time is an afterthought to the character development that derives from observing the obsessive details of the places he frequented and shaped. The environment is the character development.
Myst marked a turning point in environmental storytelling, and its effects have been felt all the way from the golden age of first-person shooters into the modern age of "walking simulators." Even when today's games take the overused shortcut of audio logs to fill in the details, the stages they set all track back to those curiously broken chairs in Sirrus' study that made you ask "wait, what happened here?"