Blizzard's Rob Pardo

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Rob Pardo is probably the most powerful game designer in the world. In his position at Blizzard he's responsible for the overall game design on all their products, and for hiring and firing the talent that has produced some of the most successful games in history. His twin passions: games, and ensuring that the people that make them are working to their best ability.

It sometimes feels like the games industry is backing away from the PC, yet Blizzard have the most successful game around, and it's a PC exclusive. What's going wrong?

Rob Pardo: I totally understand why so many companies aren't developing on the PC... From a hardware perspective, you're developing for a moving target, it's becoming more and more expensive to develop technology, and you have to be careful with system requirements... From a financial point of view, you get more money back from PC games, but you also have to spend more money on marketing and getting shelf space: you need to be working with a strong publisher.

Something else that's been well documented, but I think depends on the game, is the whole piracy element... But I don't subscribe to the notion that the PC is dead. Until consoles have the same sort of inputs as a PC, I see no reason for it to go away. PCs have the biggest install base of any game system. As long as that remains the case, you're going to see a lot of PC games. It just might be a different business model.

A WoW dungeon isn't just a cave with monsters, it's always a temple for someone who's been kicked out, or the bottom layers are occupied... is that a carefully considered template?

Rob: It's not, actually. We have an organic model for game development. The lore informs the game mechanics, and the game mechanics inform the lore... we get a lot of back and forth. We come up with many ideas that we don't present to the players, but it makes our job easier, and ultimately delivers a better product, because it feels cohesive.

Even if you don't know the lore behind a dungeon, at least it feels like there is lore. That there's a story behind it. It feels like someone really considered why these different factions are inside the dungeon and why these bad guys live in this room... We don't expect every player to read up on every quest, and read up on all the lore of, say, Auchindoun. I still really believe, though, that it comes across if you don't read a single word of text.

You have around 140 people working on WoW now...

Rob: It is big... Every time we go to a new tier of team size it does cause us ripples for a time. We have to come up with a new way to build a creative and organisational structure for the team. Certainly, the creative process for a 140 person team is vastly different from a 20 person team.

Who has the final say, then? Who is the boss?

Rob: Here's the funny thing. When I bring people from certain types of cultures, it takes them time to understand the answer to that question. Everyone on the team has the power to veto. It's the team that's approving the game. If I veto something or approve something by myself it's only if the team allows it to happen.

On one of my games, I had one of my designers kept coming to me to approve stuff. I had to say, "Yeah, I like it, but you should talk to person a, b, and c, to see if they like it." He replied "But you like it, can't I just put it in the game?" I said "you can, but it's at your own peril, because if they don't like it, we'll go back and change it."

That doesn't necessarily mean that every single decision is one that everyone loves: that way, we wouldn't get anything done. What I am saying is that there's different people on the team that look at games in many different ways. If you come up with ideas that appeal to those different perspectives, then you really hit on the gold mine.

It depends, too, on the team's dynamics. I've worked with the Starcraft II team for nearly ten years, and I know who the creative and social cliques are, and I know which groups I should bounce ideas off of. I know that if I have a user-interface idea, I know who on the team cares about that. I know who's going to complain if it's not good... so I go to those people... If I have an idea for a new dungeon encounter in WoW, you start to learn who on the team is going to care most about it, and so you go to them... Just make sure you're talking to the people who are passionate about the areas of the game.

In most places I've been to, a lot of the design is laid down early in a long design document, and everything fits into that.

Rob: We don't start with a monolithic design doc. We come up with "what are the fundamentals of this game? What are the top three or four things that this game should be about?" We know that as soon as you can start running a character about on a screen, change is going to happen. We just prepare for that, and prepare our people for that, as best we can. We playtest, get opinions, get feedback, iterate... and then 10,000 times later, we'll ship a game.

Can you remember the first game you ever designed?

Rob: It depends on how you want to classify that. I used to master my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for my friends - that was probably the first time that I was doing game design.

Did you know then that you wanted to do game design?

Rob: No. Definitely not. That was when computer games were first coming around. I got into them fairly early on. It was something I enjoyed, but there wasn't a game industry per se. There was the film industry, the music industry, the law profession... but when I thought of all the things to do when I grew up, it didn't occur to me until later on in life.

University courses have sprung up around the games industry - and I know you've given a few lectures. Do you think such courses are valuable?

Rob: I think the schools are getting a lot better. This isn't a criticism of any particular school, but one of the things I've noticed in the newer game design programs in particular is that they tend to teach skills that are more useful for a lead game designer, rather than getting an entry level design position in the games industry.

I've seen curricula and topics that ask students to think about the overall game mechanics and how to construct an entire game: I think that's appropriate for a entry level course on game design, but the more advanced courses should be teaching you how to be a level designer in RTS, or a quest designer, or something like that. What I think is happening is that kids would come out of their programs with a four year degree with not many more skills than what a mod-maker has. They should be far, far superior to someone who is just learning on their own, and that's just not the case at the minute.

Have you hired anyone from these courses?

Rob: We've brought in interns. I don't think we've hired anyone with a degree from one of these colleges. I've hired people from the mod community, and I've also hired people straight out of college, but never from a dedicated place like Digipen.

There's a quote from Raph Koster that 'the singleplayer game is an aberration.' Historically, games have always been played together.

Rob: I think that's wishful thinking on his part. I think when you look at Raph, all the games he's worked on have been multiplayer games. I think maybe, to him, that might be true. But I don't see any sort of trend that leads me to believe that we're not going to see Half-Life 3, or God of War 3, or any of those kinds of games. Those games are awesome, amazing experiences.

For me, games become exponentially more entertaining when experienced together.

Rob: Don't get me wrong, I love multiplayer games, and from a Blizzard perspective, all of our games have a hefty multiplayer component, but I just don't see them as mutually exclusive. Even games that are traditionally singleplayer, like Super Mario. Nintendo added some pretty interesting co-op gameplay to Galaxy. I totally see that there's going to be more and more multiplayer functionality in games. To say that 'singleplayer epic games are going to disappear because of MMOs...' I think that's a reach.

We actually ban our writers from using the word 'gameplay'. We think we can make a better and more precise point than that. Do you agree?

Rob: To me, a game mechanic is something that's in the game that allows players to have fun. But gameplay is 'what a player does'. It's where they derive fun from the game design. There's lots of things that people enjoy in games. It might be technology, it might be the photorealism, it might be the visceral mechanic... gameplay is just one of those things. Gameplay means quite a bit to me as a game designer... It's really interesting too. I think a lot of people think the way you do: younger designers often come in and I'll ask them, "what do you think was fun in that game?" and they'll talk about things I wouldn't consider to actually be gameplay.

So can you describe what gameplay actually is?

Rob: It's the player's interaction with the game mechanics.

Tim Edwards