Hideo Kojima shares his thoughts on game design

Death Stranding director and Metal Gear creator, Hideo Kojima is famous for walking the line between game developer and film director, making sure the player knows his games are directed by him at every turn. To his fans, Kojima has quite a presence on Twitter, this time posting a series of tweets detailing the difference between the two.

Using a simple hallway scene to differentiate filmmaking from game design, Kojima explains that in both, the hallway “has meaning in the plot” but in game design you must think “can doors be opened? Who else walks down the hallway? How does player feel at this moment in the game? There is a never ending stream of revisions based on the plot, gameplay, the map layout, as well as dealing with technical hurdles.”

Kojima makes no mention of his next game, Death Stranding, but refers to action games in general by saying that they “can never be completed by ordering from a blueprint and assembling parts off a factory line.” This rings true in that it can pose problems when delegating and outsourcing certain task with such a large development.

“If decision making and supervision are delayed, production efficiency drops, and that leads to redoing work. In order to avoid this trap, one must make small daily adjustment on site while creating the game. When everything is outsourced, the parts that come back just don't fit together. That is why it's important to take charge of the little details every day.”

Game creation is different from film making. Let’s say we imagine “a hallway the player is meant to walk down according to the game design.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) September 5, 2017

Death Stranding is still without as set release date, however Kojima has teased that the star studded game will arrive next year. Little is known about the game since the trippy trailer dropped last year at E3 aside that it will be an open world action game starring Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelson and Guillermo Del Toro.

KitGuru Says: Both filmmaking and game design certainly have a lot of components in motion at once, further complicating yet enhancing the final product. Maybe the mention of a hallway scene was just to get us all upset about PT again. Needless to say, despite the vagueness, Death Stranding has me excited.

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