Editor's note: Louis continues his interview with BioWare Senior Writer David Gaider. Catch up with the first part, where he covers the writing process and working for the role-playing game studio. -Rob
Louis Garcia: What influences you creatively?
David Gaider: That’s a big question. A lot of things can influence me. I read books. I mentioned off hand on the [BioWare] forums that George R. R. Martin novels were a big influence, but that was mainly because I think at the time -- this was five or six years ago when I started working on Origins -- I was a little burnt out on fantasy. George R. R. Martin’s books...I found them influential because he did fantasy in this different way.
I’m sure there are other authors who did something similar to him, but it was the first one I had seen where he took fantasy and put this more realistic spin on it and it focused more on the political elements as opposed to the big, operatic high fantasy that I’ve read before.
I thought that was really different, and I like things that are really different. Like team behind the new Battlestar Galactica series, who took something that had been done before and put their own spin on it. I think that was sort of my piece of Dragon Age that I like to call my own.
My vision for fantasy was to take an element of the genre that people have seen before and on the surface it will look familiar, and put another spin on it that tries to do something that people might find intriguing.
“I tend to be inspired more by characters than even by the overall story.”
I think that some fans like to go and make a big deal of clichés, too. They seem to categorize clichés as anything they’ve seen before -- ever.
The familiar can be good -- one person’s cliché is another person’s archetype. If you do an archetype badly, then it’s a cliché. But It’s possible to do archetypes well and present them in a fresh way.
I tend to be inspired more by characters than even by the overall story, especially if the characters are particularly intriguing or something I haven’t seen before.
If a game has really good dialogue, I find it fascinating. The Lion in Winter is quite an old film now. It’s probably my favorite movie of all time, and that rests almost entirely on the dialogue being absolutely fascinating.
LG: What do you think about the video-game medium and its story telling ability?
DG: Well, it has a lot of limitations that you don’t necessarily deal with in other mediums. Like in a book.
I’ve written a couple of novels now [Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and Dragon Age: The Calling]. When it comes to a book, I can put down on paper anything that’s in my imagination; however, in a video game, you have physical limitations in technology and of what you can actually show.
Where games are excellent is in the interactive part. You don’t get that in passive entertainment.
In those, you watch a character, but I don‘t think you would identify as strongly as in a game where you’re the one who directs the action. You have agency in a video game, whereas you don't in a movie or a novel. I think that changes the nature of the entertainment substantially, and that’s where the opportunities come in.
Anything that gives the player more immediacy in their agency will cause them to feel more of an element from it. And it’s not necessarily an element of choice. I know that’s intrinsic to a role-playing game, but I think stories are possible in genres other than RPGs.
Lots of games have stories. I played Uncharted 2 recently, which had a great story, and it didn’t matter that I made choices. Developer Naughty Dog still presented it in such a great way that I felt that I had agency. That’s always going to be an allusion to an extent, but the fact that I felt it and got involved in the story made me feel more entertained than if I had been watching a movie.
