Interview With a Puppet and Drakengard 3 Director

In an interview that is more than a little surreal, game director Taro Yoko conducted an interview via hand-puppet on his work for the Drakengard series and the role of violence in gaming.

The interview is part of a series by PlayStation to hype Drakengard 3, the latest installment in the franchise, but Yoko took it as opportunity to look more deeply at what he sees as the limitations of current video game design and his own influences for Drakengard; the director also chose to conduct the interview via hand puppet because...well that's not entirely clear, other than he's not very fond of doing interviews.

As the interview was conducted pre-release, Yoko avoids dwelling too much on the specifics of Drakengard 3, and instead takes a more meta look at how violence is used in video games as part of a competitive structure, often in ways that are absurd or macabre upon closer inspection: 

"It was about 10 years ago when we were working on the original Drakengard that I thought about the meaning of "killing". I was looking at a lot of games back then, and I saw messages like "You've defeated 100 enemies!" [...] it hit me that gloating about killing 100 people is strange. I mean, you're a serial killer if you killed a hundred people. It just struck me as insane."

Yoko also notes that the traditional price of industry-made video games can potentially stagnate the kinds of games produced. When players are paying $60 for a game, studios must guarantee that they'll feel they've gotten their money's worth, potentially sacrificing more experimental and potentially riskier game ideas to ensure the consumer's satisfaction.

While the Drakengard series is not one that's familiar to a large western audience, Yoko's somber view of mainstream video game design provides an interesting look at the logic and methods behind developing big-name games.