You touched on your previous tenure with EA a little and, earlier in your career, you worked at Id Software on FPSes like Doom, Doom II and the first two Quake games. Do you have any thoughts on how the genre’s changed since you worked in it?
American: You know I moved away from FPSes pretty violently when I left it Id… It was because I saw a lot of the humor going out of it. I saw that the technology was being used to recreate reality in a way that I thought was less about the art and more about trying to sell the violence in a higher quality. And these days, I see lot of FPSes and I walk away from them with feeling of post-traumatic shock. I mean, they are so visceral, so immersive and so focused on putting you in to that [violence]. And just for me personally it’s not the place I really want to be when I am sitting down to play a game. I don’t find that that relaxing.
So we can pretty much rule out you revisiting that genre creatively?
American: If ever there was an opportunity to do something with humor in it, [then maybe.] That’s one of the things I like about the way that the Valve guys have approached their first-person games and also, you know, Ken Levine and the BioShock experience. That’s a truly narrative experience; the violence is a sort of secondary to the narrative. Same thing with the Valve games. Those are character-driven and story-driven experiences. And so if it was ever an opportunity like that, then I think there could be a chance.
Going back to Alice, you said that she’s a globally known character. And she’s been around for more than a hundred years. Why do you think Alice Pleasance Liddell–as compared to other fairy-tale protagonists–is such rich territory that you can continue to mine her for games? You could have ostensibly you know go in the Dorothy/Wizard of Oz direction or with Snow White. What about the character makes you return to Alice?
American: We actually spent a lot of time when working on Grimm to tear apart a lot of other fairytales. And I have done quite a lot of work trying to tear apart and try to do something with Oz, as well. What’s really truly unique about Wonderland is that it is an environment driven truly by the imagination of a single character. In a sense, she and that story is the closest thing that they had a hundred years ago to Neo and The Matrix. I think that it’s really interesting in that respect, because it’s a world in which she can–the same as we can on our dreams–accomplish and do almost anything. Especially, things that are sort of driven by her own personal experiences. Whereas in Oz, there is a certain sort of ruleset, that’s held together by a range of characters and it’s a world unto itself and Dorothy is just a visitor. And the same is true of the lot of the other fairytales. They are very simple tails, and there is only enough there in terms of characters and locations to just present the moral and then to step away. Alice and Wonderland both were landmarks in terms of surreal story telling, in that they didn’t necessarily want to tell you a moral or finish in a way that felt like beginning, middle and end.
(More on Techland: Alice in Wonderland Review: Burton’s Finally Having Fun Again (B+))
Right.
American: And so I think that’s why it’s been fun to play with them with now.