I think a lot of games are starting to think more about a kind of unified tone and meaning. And certainly the games I've worked on I like to think, "Ok what is this about? What is this really about?" Something like, for example, HEAVENLY SWORD what is was about for me as the writer of it was very much about things like faith vs. belief, and religious belief vs. self-belief, and also about families. I tend to look at families a lot in my video games and for some reason I always tend to write sisters, even though I'm a completely only child, I think I've written about three pairs of sisters, and HEAVENLY SWORD is very much about family and it's how family pulled apart and pushed back together again in very extreme circumstances. So you've got one family on one side which is Nariko and her adopted sister Kai and Shen, and they're kind of the warrior family and what it meant to be a warrior, and that was a central part of my thinking behind Nariko was she's a warrior, she's got a curse of her head, she's got this giant sword, she's killing people and what does that mean for her soul, what does she have to give up to be able to do that? Also, on the flip side of HEAVENLY SWORD you had King Bohan and his henchmen and his very strange, sort of giant baby son and there were certain mirrors in the different ways the families interacted and I wanted to play around with the screwed up nature of families and familial relationships. And so that was, for me, what HEAVENLY SWORD was about and certainly the relationship between Nariko and Kai became very central and the players actually got to play as both characters and I think that really helped invest them in that relationship because they got to see the world through Nariko's eyes and they got to see it through Kai's as well so that they really felt that relationship which I think was very important. Personally I always like to think back to F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote that "Action equals character" and so when I look at a character I think, "Well what are they doing all the time?" And again, "what does it mean for Faith to keep running away, what is she really running from?" And, as I just said, "What does it mean for Nariko to be a stoic warrior, what is she giving up?" And I think looking at what the character does in the game is informing the writer and the player about what sort of person they, it's very fundamental, and I think it can help create stronger characters.
