Studio at one point created emotion-driven Kinect game

Mar 26, 2012 20:41 GMT  ·  By

Tim Schafer, the leader of the development team at Double Fine, has pleaded with video game developers to use comedy more often in their titles both as a way to connect with players and as a means to transmit emotion.

The developer was speaking at the New York University Game Center and he acknowledged that comedy was necessary for video games, but that it was also risky because it can be hard for some developers to create actually funny gameplay and stories.

Schafer talked about his classic The Secret of Monkey Island, saying that the scene where Guybrush Threepwood and Governor Elaine Marley fall in love was humorous because he had no other way of delivering the emotional impact with the limited resources he had available.

The developer said, “You can’t write a serious scene that has a pirate and a governor fall in love in five lines. Humor is a tool to cover up the fact that this is not a solvable problem. If you don’t have anything funny to say about a situation, the player will realize something’s fake.”

As part of his presentation at the Game Center, Tim Schafer has shown the prototype for a Double Fine project that was set to use character emotions as a way to solve puzzles, inspired by a number of Japanese titles like Katamari Damacy.

The developer suggested that Japanese titles are better suited for emotional expression because they rarely take themselves as seriously as Western developed titles do.

The Double Fine emotion game was set to use the Kinect motion tracking system from Microsoft as a way to track the feelings of the player via specific gestures which would create fear, love but also anger.

The game was canceled by the publisher and it’s unlikely that it will ever be revived.

At the moment, Double Fine and Tim Schafer are working on a Kickstarter-funded project that will follow the classic adventure template.