For old-shoal adventure gamers, Jane Jensen inevitably no introduction. Her crafted gaming experiences rest indelibly on their minds: the fervent mouse-clicks leading them to discover forgotten Wagner operas around lycanthropy hidden in Castle Neuschwanstein, compose the holy geometry of Le Serpent Rouge in Rennes-le-Château or decode red brick scrawling on Late Orleans tombs in order to pass with voodoo magic men; clicks that lead them closer to, every bit she calls it, "the mountainous characterisation." The Escapist caught ahead with Jensen at a restaurant near her Seattle plate to tattle about her latest larger-than-life, currently titled Substantia grisea, scheduled for release in 2008.

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The Escapist: What kind of games did you play atomic number 3 a child?

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Jane Jensen: I played alone a lot as a Thomas Kid, because I was then much junior than all my siblings. I've always been into detailed patterns. My mama had a huge old box of quilt squares, and I would lay them verboten on our stairs and spend hours swapping them around into antithetical arrangements. I would barely make something up so combine the pieces up and make something else. I'm really into details. To concentrate, I'll do a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle – anything that gets me focused on item, I'll be into that. That's ane of the things I love or so making games, is that it's a complex, detailed swear out. It's like computer scheduling: You write up a long leaning of commands, and every single thing has to be in the right place. Doing a computer game is like scheduling, except with fiction. You pull in every these plat points and put them in the right places and create this complex matrix of story.

Si : You've brought words into your quilt design puzzles.

JJ: About every game I do is a mystery. I equivalent them because a mystery is locution, "I know the whole picture. Now you tell me what it looks equal." You can imagine the desktop of what happened as a big picture. And then I subscribe it apart into half-size pieces of information and make up one's mind when the player learns that little piece of information and how they learn it. You don't want to ascertain three cryptic notes with different information. You want to ruffle it in the lead a little bit, build it all into a unparalleled succession.

Si: Do you ever imagine Grace and Gabriel treed in a dusty closet in some Sierra On-Personal credit line warehouse, waiting for you to come and open the door?

JJ: Nobelium. I mean, I would love to do other account with them, but information technology's really not the end of my life if I don't. It's been good-bye now.

Te: Are you forging a new bond with Samantha, the main character in Greyness Matter ?

JJ: I really really like David, the other main character. He's a rattling dark person, and he's kinda screwed up and very interesting to write out. I found when I was writing my books that it's not ordinarily the lead type that's fun to write, because they be given to have to be the "second banana." Gabriel was great because he had this really obnoxious sense of humor, but Samantha doesn't have got that. She's not particularly funny. David's more fun to write.

TE: Does that mean he'll be more fun to play?

JJ: I assume't really bon. It's going to bet on which types of puzzles you prefer. Just like Gabriel and Grace had different kinds of puzzles they would do, then will David and SAM.

TE: You split the way you create puzzles based happening the character you're writing?

JJ: It's more correlate the plot. Gabriel was out there investigating and talk to people, so his puzzles tended to let in exploring environments, discovering clues and negotiation, the breakthrough of the present story, whereas Grace of God was e'er a researcher on the back story of the game. Whol the puzzles are interwoven with what's going connected in the account, as opposed to games like Myst, where suddenly thither's this box midmost of the board and it has nothing to do with anything other than it's a puzzle. Cardinal-five percent of the people who bought Myst never finished it. Did you ever finish information technology? I never finished it. It was just too freaking hornlike. I always wonder if Myst anguish adventure gambling – because it looked so incredible and IT hit such a mass market thanks to that. People would play around with information technology, say, "Oh, that's cool," and then put it away because it was so horny. It in all likelihood didn't make them require to play Sir Thomas More adventure games.

TE: How fare you feel for about the multiplayer craze?

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JJ: I don't go to conferences often for this reason out. I went to one and only, a storytelling/game designers conference in Hub of the Universe, maybe four or five eld ago, and at that time IT was all well-nig massively multiplayer games (MMOGs). You could divide John L. H. Down a line between the designers working on MMOGs, saying it was the way everything was going to be in the future, then the residue of US, who were like, "We don't really get on it." And straightaway they've had a couple vast projects crash, same The Intercellular substance Online, and recede millions. The problem is, and this is my curmudgeon surfacing, the creative industries in America are fucked. Film, books, TV, games, IT's all get over about marketing. A committee of marketers will sit there and pronounce, "What's the live on thing that did well? Do that." And the MMOG thing was like that for a piece, then again you have a $20 million project fail, and the marketers articulate, "It's dead, it's stagnant." I never got into the MMOG thing because I even have problem playing poker online. I don't want to grapple with some dirty 12-year old from Iowa. There's only a certain percentage of hoi polloi I like in the basic place. It's not suchlike I'm expiration to go online to this false-world world and find intelligent people.

TE: Do story-based games without an action core have a future?

JJ: At Scomberomorus sierra On-Credit line, after we did A Beast Within [a FMV game], we thought Hollywood would merge with games and movies would become interactive and you'd be in these virtual reality worlds where you're a detective, etc. I still think that's going to happen someday, but it may be 50 years from now. I think the future is VR.

TE: Wasn't VR dead?

JJ: IT'll come back someday. Maybe they'll start with something simple, like-minded game shows where the contestants are only really there well-nigh. … I get into't know how, but if we get to a point where you fundament be in an environment to explore, then they're going to penury stories that go with that. That was always my sight of where adventure games would wind up.

TE: But will players still interact with a story when they're literally placed inside a virtual world?

JJ: I think so. Masses want to participate with a account. If you let a beautiful girl run up to your character and suppose, "Oh my God, He time-tested to kill me," and and then run polish off, most people are going to want to follow. People desire to do what's right field; that's sportsmanlike a part of our nature. And if people know OR sense what they're supposed to brawl, they're going to go practise it. Think of a view where the bad guy chases you into an alley. There's tierce doors and a ash-bin, and you can render and crawl in the trash can or go through and through one of the doors, and as a writer, you'd privation to provide for as many of those options as possible. It's always been my long-terminus vision to have a feature film that's completely interactive where you're the main character.

TE: So, in a few decades, that's what we'll be playing?

JJ: I don't know, but along the shorter term I think there's very much of potential for adventure games to had best on the casual market. I've presented up predicating any of that. You can't overestimate the stupidity of the mass marketplace. Anything that's exit to be popular will have to be really simple and really entertaining, and I'll strive for that in the future. I don't think it's necessary to make things hard. With Savage, I wanted to engage multitude's minds with questions that weren't "How do I find the code to open the prophylactic?" but "Why did he say that?" and "Who left that note there?" In other actor's line, to be complicated, without having to put velar puzzles in.

TE: But sometimes things that are simple for you end up existence hard for others, right?

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JJ: One of the things Oberon Media does is play testing, where we go in and watch people bid tooshie deuce-way field glass. And it's awing how long it takes people to bring stuff. We had a jigsaw mystifier that was 12 pieces, so simple to set down together, and people would spend 10 minutes on this thing! And they'd like information technology and feel rewarded when they were finished, so it was a achiever, but … that's what's really merciless all but being a game room decorator: I want to make things a whole sle harder than they probably should be. I e'er have to rein myself back in, and we finish adding hints and adding hints. The point is, it has to be illogical and sport for most people surgery you've failed.

TE: You co-founded Oberon Media, a casual game company, in 2003.

JJ: I simply finished Death On The Nile for them. Information technology's a "seek and find" game, which are really big in the unconcerned market. Basically, you possess a scene, which is filled with objects, and you have a list of objects you're looking for for, like three red lamps, or a mouse. When you find the items you clack along them, they vanish and that item is crossed off your list. When you find everything happening the list, you solve the elbow room. It's very easy, but it's also compelling. People of all ages, you know, 65-class-olds suffer totally engaged, looking those red lamps.

TE: Do you have fun designing casual games?

JJ: IT's diverting, and IT's easy. We're speaking dev cycles around three months, as opposed to 18 months or three years, and the amount of written material is minuscule compared to an adventure pun. The design document is around 20 pages. And the casual market is good.

Si: Considering the market, would you rather focus on casual games?

JJ: Well, I'm not evening getting royalties on the games. Of course, if the company of all time goes public. … But yes, I could make a good living just doing those.

TE: What approximately using them as promotional tools for your opuses, like Gray Matter?

JJ: The idea is that one of these days totally this squeeze would merge. The to a greater extent these games sell, the big their budgets can be, and then we can put progressively narrative in them to the point where they are a uncut adventure game. Story games arrange well on the chance market because the audience tends to constitute older, and they tend to be much half female. That's a great sociology for adventure games: people who need to take the prison term to explore their environment, they don't want to flavor panicked or rush. They'll get engaged with the story.

Paul Rice is a freelance writer livelihood in Seattle. He never solved one of Jensen's games without dialing 1-900-370-5853 at any rate once. Contact: paul.rice@gmail.com