When you put players in control, obviously you get very, very different results. And the, the challenge becomes -- uh, I, I think there's a -- there's a few challenges, actually. The first one is, how do you convince the player that they are in this world? And it's, it's -- I believe it's not as much of a challenge in other games. But in Dead Space, we said, if we're going to make the scariest game of all time -- and that was our goal -- then (1) you have to be convinced. You have to believe that you are there and you're in danger. And so we did things like we took away the UI in the HUD that's usually in there. It's a reminder that you're in a game. Uh, we did things like we said that you are -- you're not a space marine, you know, because a space marine would sort of be like, you know, hey, we got this, you know? And think of all the cliché lines that you hear about, uh, you know, sort of ass-kicking, you know, big guys in space with big guns. That you, you were playing a, uh -- you're playing an engineer. You're just -- you're just some poor guy stuck in space, uh, who has, you know, um, futuristic tools at his disposal and that that was the way that, if we gave you control, that you didn't immediately start thinking about what it's like to play other shooters, that you wouldn't sort of fall into those clichés of I'm just a guy with a gun, and bring it on, you know? Um, so, we wanted to, to make you believe that you were there and make you look and feel and walk and do the kinds of things that just a regular person would do who might find themself a little bit helpless and a little bit unfamiliar with that -- with that kind of scenario. So, another thing that we had to think about, though, was that it's oftentimes really difficult in a game, because a game lasts a long time -- let's say your game is ten hours. Pacing is incredibly difficult because you can't just sit down and play through a game in ten hours. I mean you could, but it's incredibly difficult, and who has the time to do that when you're developing a game? And pacing is very difficult because you can't hit on any one emotion or any one tone for too long - that any kind of experience taken to the extreme and taken for too long, you become desensitized to. So, I think films have it slightly easier in the sense that you have a, a, a much smaller experience that you're trying to create. So, for us, it was -- it was really important that we didn't get lost in the weeds as we were trying to polish each gun and each mechanic and each level, that each piece was being worked on individually. But there had to be someone who stepped back and said, well, let's look big picture. You know, is this convincing? When this all comes together, is it -- is it creating tension? Is it creating a storyline that I'm curious about? And, um, am I going to be terrified to know what's around the next corner? So, the process -- the reason we had to have a horror producer is because somebody had to keep their eye on that particular part of the game when other people had their eyes on a lot of the details. Um, there's so much polish that has to go into a game. And it is really easy sometimes to forget about the big picture.
