Bethesda Softworks Inside the Vault Q&A

[GameBanshee News]

Bethesda's latest "Inside the Vault" feature profiles Jon Paul Duvall, whose responsibilities include designing characters and writing dialogue.

What is the best part about being a designer? The worst part?

I can honestly say that I have the best job ever, at the best studio ever. I still wake up in the morning giddy to come in to work.

Everyone here is amazingly talented, and truly wonderful to work with. I’m always on my toes, stepping up my game, keeping up with all the awesomeness going on around me. And these people are my friends as much as coworkers. Most nights and weekends, if I’m not staying to work on the game, I’m staying late to play geeky board games with my buddies. This is a studio that plays together as much as we work together.

I enjoy that the role of a designer is so varied. Some days I’m dreaming up people, places, and adventures for the player to experience. Other days I’m poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out how to tweak numbers to make some game system balanced and fun. Other days I’m abusing the scripting system making the game do things it wasn’t meant to do (winning stern looks from programmers).

Another joy that comes only after releasing a game is reading what players are saying about it. Making videogames is about giving agency to players, giving them an experience in which they can lose themselves, expressing their unique personalities within the world we’ve created for them. When we hear from them, it’s the best reward we can get. We make games for our players; it’s important for us to know what they think and feel about the experience.

Yeah, so I haven’t really answered the “worst part” of being a designer. While I can’t say there’s a “bad part” to being a designer, as in any creative endeavor, there are certainly painful but necessary parts of making a game.

There are always hard decisions that need to be made, some of which are controversial, and features and content which get cut because the game is better without them. At the end of the day, controversial decisions have always ended up serving the game as a whole.

Biting off more than you can chew is a time honored tradition here, but it can become extremely painful in the harsh light of milestones and deadlines. Learning where the line between more and better lives is probably the most important awareness to gain for any creative endeavor. It’s also something that one usually ends up learning the hard way.

We are also an extremely self critical group, especially the designers. More than one of us has come out of a Peer Review meeting bloody and exhausted. But the game is better for it, and likewise are we as designers.

[fable]

Quote:

I can honestly say that I have the best job ever, at the best studio ever. I still wake up in the morning giddy to come in to work.

I think we have a winner in the Best Suckup of 2009, although the year is still young.

Come to think of it, he sounds like he works for Bioware. I wonder if they've got him on a timeshare arrangement?