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Ken Levine - Wii Sports is the 'ultimate gateway drug'

by rawmeatcowboy
28 February 2008
GN 1.0 / 2.0

A portion of a GamesIndustry interview with BioShock creative director, Ken Levine…

GI: Why do you think that is? We heard so much about the market expanding to focus on casual game players last year, but I wouldn’t characterise BioShock or any of the award-winners as casual games.

KL: The way I look at casual games…I think a lot of people view it as a threat.

I love playing Peggle. I’ve got Peggle on my iPod and I play it all the time. It’s great. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to go play WOW. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to play Call of Duty.

I think, what it is, it’s a nice gateway drug. It makes people understand the principles of gaming.

Let’s not kid ourselves. When I grew up playing on Atari - those are the casual games of today. Pac-Man is a casual game, Centipede…All those things would be considered casual games now. Tetris is a casual game. There was no concept of a casual game back then…

I think it is a nice gateway drug. I think it is going to strictly expand the market, which doesn’t scare me very much.

I think what BioShock did was, we said if we’re going to have a complex game we have to invite the gamer to explore that complexity rather than just throwing it in their face and saying “Deal with it.”

I’ve had a lot of women coming up to me and say “Look, I don’t play shooters. But I saw that beautiful world, I saw that mystery, and I wanted to get in there.” And that’s great.

Nothing on the scale of a Wii Sports, but again, Wii Bowling is like the ultimate gateway drug and God bless them for figuring that out because there is no barrier of entry. “Hey, can you go like that?” [swings arm] That’s what you do in bowling, that’s what you do in Wii Sports.

It’s not that [casual gaming] scares me. It excites me.

GI: Do you really think the Wii will be a new gateway into the industry? Gamers who grew up with the NES moved on to other consoles as they got older, so younger Wii gamers might move on anyway. And it is hard to imagine a grandparent who plays Wii Sports suddenly checking out a first-person shooter…

KL: I think there’s a much better chance of people who wouldn’t normally be interested in games going in and thinking “I’m interested in the history of Rome. I’ll buy that strategy game,” whereas before they would have been overwhelmed by the very concept of it.

Full interview here