Yesterday was the last day of 2008’s Game Developers Conference, which for the first time in several years I was able to attend without any preexisting press commitments. I didn’t go to any press conferences, announcement-oriented sessions, or spend much time in the press room (where I have overheard such classic video game journalist statements as, “That talk sucked; it was, like, targeted at developers or something”)–I just went to lectures and presentations, learned a lot, and met a bunch of interesting people, which is what’s best about GDC.

One of the more interesting lectures I attended was by Patrick Redding, narrative designer on Ubisoft Montreal’s upcoming Far Cry 2, whose creative director is Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). Hocking also gave a fascinating earlier talk on how to qualify (and, by extension, better define) the rather vague term “immersion.”

Redding gave a great deal of insight into the remarkably ambitious dynamic African setting of Far Cry 2. Interestingly, at least as I see it, while Far Cry 2 and Crysis are both essentially followups to Far Cry, they have gone in drastically different directions–Crysis took Far Cry’s player choice in gameplay style and amplified it through the nanosuit, while Far Cry 2 takes Far Cry’s focus on open-ended environments and blows it up into a systems-driven, semi-autonomous ecology. Hence Redding’s rather unusual title, “narrative designer.” As distinct from a writer, Redding conceives not the dialogue itself but rather the underlying systems that allow Far Cry 2 players to (supposedly) participate in a dynamically-driven narrative, one that is largely shaped by gameplay choices.

In the narrative of the plot, Far Cry 2 takes after Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness or Coppola’s film adaptation Apocalypse Now–”a journey into the depths of Africa and into the mind of a madman,” as Redding put it. Meanwhile, the narrative of the gameplay is more based on the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest or Kurasawa’s classic film Yojimbo (arguably inspired by Red Harvest), in which the protagonist (here, the player) pits brutally pits warlord-led factions against one another. (more…)