“Players are selfish”: Fallout 2’s Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy

Like many of the engineers and developers of that era, toiling in their garages and quietly building the future of computing, young Chris Avellone used other creator’s work as a foundation.

“One technique I tried was dissecting existing game engines,” he recalls, “more like an adventure game framework, and then finding ways to alter the content layer to create the game. But the attempts rarely compiled without a stream of errors.”

The shine moment

Every failure was an opportunity to learn, however, and like his experiences telling collaborative stories with his friends in Dungeons and Dragons, they taught him a number of lessons that would serve him later in his career. In our interview, he returned again and again to the player-first mentality that drives his design ethos.

First and foremost, a designer needs to “understand your players and understand why they are there,” Avellone said. “What is their power fantasy?”

Beyond that, every player, whether in a video game or a tabletop roleplaying adventure, should have an opportunity to stand in the spotlight.

“That shine moment is important because it gives everyone the chance to be a hero and to make a difference,” he explained. “The best adventures are the ones where you can point to how each player was instrumental in its success because of how they designed or role-played their character.”

And players should be able to get to that moment in the way they want, not the one most convenient to you, the game master or designer.

“Not everyone plays the way you do,” Avellone said, “and your job as game master is not to dictate how they choose to play or force them into a certain game mode. If a player is a min-maxer who doesn’t care much for the story, that shouldn’t be a problem. If the player is a heavy role-player, they should have some meat for their interactions. This applies strongly to digital game design. If players want to skip dialogue and story points, that’s how they choose to play the game, and they shouldn’t be crushingly penalized for their play style. It’s not your story, it should be a shared experience between the developer and player.”