Warren Spectordraft

“Problems, not puzzles. It's an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle.”

Why it matters

Spector ranks here for a genre and a vocabulary. The immersive sim is the clearest case of a design philosophy, not a mechanic, being handed down through studios: Looking Glass to Ion Storm to Arkane to the indie scene. The philosophy fits in a sentence, treat every obstacle as a problem with many answers, and the levels in this atlas from that lineage are the evidence it works.

Lessons

1. 01 · systems

   Problems, not puzzles

   The Deus Ex team's rules of roleplaying begin with a distinction: a puzzle has one answer the designer knows, a problem has many the designer never saw. Every obstacle in Deus Ex has a stealth route, a hacking route, a talking route, and a loud one, and the game does not rank them. The rule is the working definition of the immersive sim, and it is why players of these games tell stories about what they did rather than what happened.

   • Multi-route paritytopology
   • postmortemWarren Spector, Postmortem: Ion Storm's Deus Ex (Game Developer, 2000)
   • gdc-talkClassic Game Postmortem: Deus Ex (GDC 2017)

2. 02 · space

   Always show the goal

   The first commandment on the same list: the player should be able to see what they are trying to reach. Freedom of approach is worthless if the player does not know where they are going, so Deus Ex levels put the objective in view and let the player plan the route. It is the same lesson the atlas calls foreshadowing the destination, stated as a rule for a systems-driven game.

   • Foreshadow the destinationguidance
   • Sightline controlguidance
   • postmortemWarren Spector, Postmortem: Ion Storm's Deus Ex (Game Developer, 2000)

3. 03 · process

   An inch wide and a mile deep

   Spector's unbuilt dream game is one city block simulated completely: every character with a story, every object usable, nothing painted on. He frames it as the opposite of the open world, going an inch wide and a mile deep so the player can try anything they think of. As a lesson it is about scope: depth of simulation is what makes freedom mean something, and depth is bought by narrowing.

   • interviewThe director of Deus Ex and Epic Mickey has plenty more wild video game ideas (Kotaku, 2018)

4. 04 · process

   Name your tools: intention and perceivable consequence

   Doug Church, Spector's Looking Glass colleague, wrote down what their games were doing: let the player form an intention, and make the world's response perceivable so the next intention can be better. Spector's games are the working proof and he has argued the case for the vocabulary ever since. The lesson is that a shared design language is itself a design tool.

   • articleDoug Church, Formal Abstract Design Tools (Game Developer, 1999)

Known for

• Ultima Underworld1992 · producer
• System Shock1994 · producer
• Thief: The Dark Project1998 · producer, early
• Deus Ex2000 · director
• Epic Mickey2010 · director

Levels in the atlas (0)

Derived from level entries, not maintained here.

No level entries credit this designer yet.