Never judge your player and other game design tips from Warren Spector

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Warren Spector recently gave a talk at the DevGamm gaming event in Cascais, Portugal. He talked about “Thoughts I Live By” in his craft of game development, which he has done for more than 40 years.

The 68-year-old game designer has left his mark across gaming with immersive sim games, which give players a wide array of choices.

At Looking Glass Studios, he was involved in the creation of titles like Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Thief: The Dark Project and Deus Ex (while at Ion Storm). At his own studio, Junction Point Studios, Spector created Epic Mickey for Disney Interactive. He is currently the creative director at OtherSide Entertainment.

He grew up wanting to be a film critic and played lots of board games like the Avalon Hill games, Ogre and he became friends with sci-fi writers who were Dungeons & Dragons fans. He also became a computer game nut.

Spector has strong opinions when it comes to game design. He’s not a fan of games on rails or narratives where the outcomes must strictly follow a single storyline. Rather, he is a fan of emergent gameplay, where a player has an objective and has many different ways to achieve that objective. The player must live with the consequences of those choices. We talked about his tips for emerging game designers. That included ‘Never judge your player.’

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How did your talk go?

Warren Spector: You know, it’s funny. People ask me how things went and I never know. I’m into measurable success. So what I always say, because it’s true, is, you know, I had fun. It was enjoyable. It