The founder of Giant Sparrow says creativity requires pushing boundaries. Its next game will explore “the strangeness of organic life.” Ian Dallas

A Game Designer Who Wants to See Ideas He’ll Hate

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-07 14:30:04

The founder of Giant Sparrow says creativity requires pushing boundaries. Its next game will explore “the strangeness of organic life.”

Ian Dallas, the founder and creative director of the video game studio Giant Sparrow, happened to be talking about food, but his gastronomical tastes are similar to his design philosophy. “I’m always interested,” he said, “in what’s the strangest, new intense experience that I can have.”

Giant Sparrow’s most recent release, What Remains of Edith Finch, is one of the more piquant fusions of narrative and game design of the past decade. What became a collection of short stories about a cursed family of storytellers living in the Pacific Northwest began as a scuba diving simulator.

From the rough prototype to the finished game, Dallas strove to evoke the rush of the sublime; while searching for ways to conjure that feeling, he made one prototype after another. By the alchemy of art, he and his small team ended up with a game that uses a different mechanic for each of the stories it tells about the last day of a character’s life. In one scenario, a little girl turns into a cat, an owl, a shark and a man-eating sea monster; in another, a man working at a cannery becomes lost in an internal fantasy while working over a fish-slicing machine.

Dallas’s approach to a project can be summed up as experimentation within a given set of parameters. He likes to tell new colleagues that he wants to see things he will hate.

Leave a Comment