Email: Young and naive is spreading

Hi Malstrom,

yesterday, I was reading an interview of guys from Crystal Dynamics concerning the next Tomb Raider game. Here is the link: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/12/09/a-survivor-is-born_3a00_-the-new-lara-croft.aspx .

But here is the interesting part:

“We knew we wanted to make a young Lara Croft, and we wanted her be a blend of someone that has a level of vulnerability and inner strength. She has this aspirational quality. She wants to be someone and to pull away from the perception of who she is because of her legacy of being a Croft.”

When I read that, I immediately thought they were interviewing Sakamoto about Other M. Just as if the next sentence would be: “We wanted people to believe was young, young and naive.”

I don’t understand why game developers these days want the characters they create to be vulnerable? When I play a game, why should I want to be vulnerable? I want to feel powerful, doing some things that I just can’t do in real life. Imagine if Lara Croft begins to freak out when she’s in front of a cliff because she’s afraid. Way to pull you out of the game!

When I play MineCraft, I know my character is not very powerful. Without any character development, I feel vulnerable when I walk outside at night. That kind of gameplay is much more powerful than having the character reacting to things when I don’t want him to react. It’s like they want to impose emotions on you.

Thanks and continue the good work,

It is because they are in love with the character. Remember Sakamoto saying how he feels as if Samus Aran is ‘his daughter’?

Imagine a stage show where the director is in love with an actor or a character the actor plays. There would be problems when the final show appears.

The entertainer and the audience is like the hypnotizer and the hypnotized. The entertainer becomes compromised if they fall under the spell of their subject material.