Why was “Resident Evil” such an important video game?

It was the first game that for me personally was a story more than a game. It was hideously inadequate as a story, but it did everything else so well: atmosphere, the feeling of being embedded in a fictional world, the sense of tension, and the sense that this game had just jumped the trellis.

So why do so many video games have unsatisfying storylines?

The way games are designed is you create a story and then you create an obstacle course inside that story and the player has to endure it to see more. So it’s artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

I think a really viable model is for the storytellers to create characters of such vividness and intensity that you actually find yourself wanting to portray them in a way that feels true to the fiction that they’re in. So if the game gives you the freedom to go around shooting people in the face, you actually don’t want to because you care about that character too much to see them do that. That to me is where really cool game storytelling should be headed. Because you’re never going to be able to control some jackass who just wants to piss all over what you’ve done. So my view is that rather than trying to figure out ways to outsmart that guy, why not just forget about him?

It seems like the challenge when creating a compelling game is also to allow gamers to feel like they have a lot of freedom — but still rein it in so there’s a sense of narrative. 

If a game wants to treat player agency and openness seriously you have to create this illusion of choice. For instance, in games where you go around shooting everyone, there’s a friendly character and when you raise your gun, you have three choices. You can kill them and then they die, and then the mission restarts because the game literally can’t function without that character. Or you pull the trigger and the gun lowers just automatically. I think that’s a pretty elegant way to do it. Or it lets you kill that person and then that branch of the story just closes off, which is really harsh.

There’s a game called “Demon Souls” that came out last year that is designed with this level of harshness. So I put about 25 to 30 hours into it and something catastrophic happened late in the game that I couldn’t control. Characters I needed died, therefore making it almost impossible to finish the game. I was seriously considering writing letters to every member of that company and berating them for their inhuman game design practices. At the same time I kind of admire it. They’re kind of just saying, “Oh, you want to fuck around? You want to not pay attention and blithely shoot people? OK.”

The biggest cultural conversation around video games in the last few years has been around games like the “Grand Theft Auto” series that are incredibly violent and misogynistic. Are video games too violent?

Some games choose to handle it responsibly, some don’t. In a lot of popular entertainment, the violence is stylized to such a degree that you almost don’t notice it. Video games are different because it’s you pulling the trigger. “The Iliad” is pretty much about guys chopping each other’s arms off for 10,000 lines. It’s not as though literature has been immune to the sensationally compelling scenarios of violence and horror. To me the next big step in game design is going to be someone who figures out how to make an involving game that does not revolve around physical confrontation.

But people assume that these games are still being made for kids, just because they once were. One of the “Grand Theft Auto” producers, Lazlow Jones, did an interview a couple of months ago where he says, “Any parent who buys one of our games for their kids is an idiot.” And I just loved the bluntness of that. We make these games for ourselves, for people our age. We make these games for adults. These are not kids games. Period.

The demographic seems to have changed a lot, but the culture surrounding video games does seem to very heterosexual white male.

I think it’s changing slowly. And I think it needs to change a lot. The sooner the better. I’m really sick of the black character in games that say lots of black character things like “hot damn!” I think black voice over actors should just actually boycott. Any game that they come in to read for where they have to say that.

But there are games right now that let users play with issues of gender and race.

There’s a game called “Oblivion” and there are all these different races in that game. And the first time I ever played it, I picked the Argonian race, which is these lizard-like people that are hated by every other race. So when you go into a shop to buy something, Argonians get charged more. It was trippy. I was so constantly angry at how shabbily I was treated by other people. I felt a lot of Argonian pride after I had finished. Isn’t that a cool thing? A game that actually took its time to figure out the fictional implications of the races within its game world.

What game has had the greatest emotional impact on you?

I think “Grand Theft Auto 4″ for the reasons I write in the book — not only because of the game but because I was strung out on coke when I was playing it. In terms of terror, there’s a game called “Dead Space.” It’s like “Alien,” except it’s in space. You’re an engineer and have engineering weapons like cutters and bolts. There’s these basically space zombies jumping out at you and it’s like all about enclosed space and terror and being outnumbered. It’s just one of the most pants-crappingly scary games I’ve ever played.