Give gamers tools, says EA's Entis

Giving gamers tools with which to create their own content is one of the most important aspects of developing games today.

That's according to Vancouver-based EA senior VP Glenn Entis, who was discussing the subject of real-time graphics in a session at Imagina 08 in Monaco.

"More than half of those that play The Sims spend more than half their time building their houses," he said, going on to point out that videogames are competing for consumers' hours — if not quite yet dollars — with the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, and even new technology such as iPods.

He cited on application which EA had worked on in the past, called Virtual Me, which was a partnership with TV production company Endemol, revolving around avatar design.

Made for a mass audience, there were plans to use the avatars for reality television shows in which participants would choose prospective dating partners by their avatar, for example.

He also talked about Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore as another example of a unique toolset, in that it generates physics and animation on the fly as people create their entities.

Entis also discussed the difficulty of marrying visual realism with emotional engagement and, that while it was ever-more possible to attain one, there was a significant barrier to getting them both.

Toolsets are finding ways to approach that particular Mecca, however, and he demonstrated one application being used by EA's studios to model a character reacting to multiple objects - each of which can have a different emotional response mapped to them.

Entis explained that this was important because it avoided the use of animation sequences in the form of loops, which can quickly become tiresome and lose their effectiveness.

Imagina 08 is taking place in the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, through February 1.