Use Questions on Developer: A Ron Gilbert Retrospective

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USgamer: So I've been watching videos and looking at screenshots of the game in its current state, and I've noticed that you're keeping the whole sentence-building mechanic of the earlier LucasArts games instead of the more icon-based ones. Is there a reason you're sticking to that specific means of input over a kind of a more streamlined one?

Ron Gilbert: I think a lot of the charm that Gary and I were musing about is because of those verbs. I miss the verbs a lot. When adventure games started to move away from those verbs and they moved to icon systems and pop-up wheels where you're selecting things, eventually I think the verbs were considered extraneous. But I think the verbs are part of what imparts the charm of those [old] games.

The other thing I think the verbs do is, they're kind of a nice way to help direct players. You understand what it is you're doing with something. If you have [an adventure game with an icon-based interface], all you can really do is poke something. In your head, when you poke something, you may think you're pushing it, but the game thinks you're using it. There's this layer of abstraction and maybe even confusion, because the players don't really understand what poking is. They just have to trust that maybe the game will do what they think when they poke it.

With the verbs, you really are saying, "Well I want to push this. I want to open this. I want to pick this up." I like that it's just a little more concrete to players when you're doing that kind of stuff.

USg: Since Thimbleweed Park is a period piece that takes place in 1987, will it reference the real world in any way?

RG: That's a really good question, and it's a question that's come up. I don't know that we've decided that. I tend not to do that because I worry. It's definitely not such an issue when you're doing a period piece, but I tend not to reference current events because it dates things. You may think making fun of something is contemporary because it is at the moment, but 20 years from now, it's just not. So I tend to try and shy away from that.

But I think this game is a little bit different because it is set in a time period. It's set in 1987. So we can make references to who the President was, or Madonna, or stuff like that. But we haven't really completely decided on that stuff. I think I've shied away from it more for legal reasons than creative reasons. Games are just really weird. TV shows and movies can get away with offhanded references to things like that, but games just always have a real problem.

USg: So in terms of difficulty, how would you compare Thimbleweed to your past games, if you can comment on that? And do you feel more obligated to be aware of where players can get stuck and maybe even nudge them in the right direction?

RG: I do feel this obligation to make sure that everything is fair, but the thing I’m not going to do in this game is I’m not going to have a hint system, and I’m not going to have pop-up hints that go “Hey, it looks like you’re having trouble, why don’t you try the wrench with the whatever?” It’s like I’m not going to do that stuff; anything that helps the player and helps focus and direct them, to me, always has to come from within the fantasy of the game. You know, if the game detects that somebody might be having trouble, then it should be a character in the game that makes an offhanded hint about something or offhanded comment that helps focus the player in the right direction. So, that kind of stuff I think I’m a lot more conscious of these days than I was back during Monkey Island and stuff—just being clearer to players about what is happening.

USg: So you’re developing this game 25 years after Monkey Island, and I’m just wondering: Do you feel that the game player as an entity has changed in those 25 years, in terms of expectations, and are you tailoring Thimbleweed to these modern expectations?

RG: I do think players have changed quite a bit, and I think it’s because there are a lot of different types of people who play games. The type of people who played games back then was a very small pool of people, and now everybody plays games. There’s just nobody that doesn’t play games in some form, whether they’re playing on their phone, whether they’re doing hardcore first-person shooters... I think just everybody plays games and so you’ve got a much, much broader audience and you’ve got people whose expectations of what a game is is just really diverse right now, and I really don’t think you can please everybody at some level. I mean, some people are going to like stuff and some people are not going to like stuff.

And for us, Thimbleweed Park is a game rooted in that nostalgia and it is a classic point-and-click adventure game, and we’re not going to move away from that. So I think if you’re somebody that just never would’ve enjoyed those games, you’re probably not going to enjoy this game, either. And I think that is something that we’ve been very, very firm on—I think there are going to be people who do not like this game, but I think that’s totally okay. We’re not trying to make a game that the masses are going to like, we’re trying to make a game that fans of point-and-click adventures are going to like.

USgamer: With the success of the Kickstarter, could you see yourself conceivably just continuing to make adventure games in this style? Or would you need to turn to crowdfunding again?

RG: Well, I really love making adventure games and I really love making point-and-click games. I think some of those things we talked about, like the verbs and the things that I think kind of make them charming are the things that I enjoy designing as well. And I would love nothing more than to just keep making these types of games. And I think whether we make another one is going to be really dependent on how well this game does, and I mean if it does well, then we’ll have potentially made enough money to just go fund the next one ourselves, we don’t need to go to the crowdfunding to be able to do it.

If the game doesn’t do well, I don’t know that we could go back to crowdfunding; I mean, if the game didn’t do well, it probably didn’t do well for a reason. Maybe all that charm and nostalgia that we were so fond of just really doesn’t resonate with people. Maybe it doesn’t even resonate with the people it used to resonate with back in the day. I think that there’s a little bit of an experiment that this is, and I think that whether the game is successful or not, it’s kind of validating the experiment. And I think if the experiment is successful, then we will hopefully have made enough money to fund the next one ourselves and not have to worry about the crowdfunding.

USgamer would like to thank David Oxford for transcribing the interviews within this retrospective.