Posted by: Jane Douglas

David Cage, the game designer behind Fahrenheit and upcoming Heavy Rain, called for the video game industry to “stop making stupid games” at the Games Developers Conference Europe in Cologne.

In a keynote speech, Cage referred to the immature missteps of the industry in days gone by, including the GTA: San Andreas' Hot Coffee (a sex minigame which wasn't officially accessible in the finished game).

Game makers as a whole are still being judged and restricted by such mistakes, says Cage, ridiculing the rules in place around explicit, though non-gratuitous, content in games.

If the texture map (the graphical skin applied, in this case, to a game character) for a nude girl has breasts, even if there is no way for the player to directly view it in-game, then under the right (or wrong) circumstances, “you can go to jail,” says Cage.

Referring to his own (occasionally explicit) game, Fahrenheit, Cage explained that in certain countries a swimsuit had to be placed on a female character because of a partial mirror-reflected view of a breast – even though she was taking a shower, and even though it was an adult-rated game.

“I would like the same rules to apply to games as do for TV and for movies,” says Cage. “If we do things with taste and there is nothing gratuitous… you shouldn’t be able to tell me what not to write.”

Forget about the technology

On the topic of storytelling in video games, Cage says: “I hate game designs written by 20 people… It’s not the great ideas that stay in the end. It’s the ideas of those highest up [the chain of command].”

Creative work needs to be reserved for creative people, says Cage – script writers, not marketing departments. Moreover, the industry needs to let go of its fixation on technology: better physics engines, better graphics and the like. He compares the current situation with movie-makers building their own camera for each film they want to produce.

“Forget about the technology. It’s a tool, not a goal. No-one writes a great book because he has a great pen.”