Ken Levine recently spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about the matter end of year discussion on storytelling in video games, where he shared many of his ambitions Peepholehis first post-BioShock project, which he is working on in his up-to-date studio.
Ghost Story Games was formed in 2017 following Levine’s restructuring of Irrational Games, which saw him establish himself as one of the industry’s leading artistic directors for over a decade. All but 15 members of Irrational’s staff were fired a month before the finale premiered BioShock Infinite expansion in 2014, when Levine wanted to “launch a smaller, more entrepreneurial venture” focused on “narrative-driven games for core players that are highly replayable.”
Many questioned Levine’s decision to burn everything down to essentially continue making games like BioShock, and criticism only intensified as years passed before the studio’s first project was publicly revealed. The team kept their heads down until the moment Peephole was finally revealed at The Game Awards in 2022.
“It’s very easy to show the player the story,” Levine told GamesIndustry.biz. “The hardest part is getting them to participate and respond to the way they participate. I don’t think there’s one way to create games, but personally, as a narrative game developer, I’ve never been a big fan of cutscenes because they’re not interactive. One of the reasons Peephole takes so much time trying to figure out how to make the game much more responsive to player decisions. This is a really difficult problem.”
What we saw Peephole so far, it bears many of the hallmarks you’d expect from a Levine-led project: social commentary, a fallen society left to its fate in a hostile environment, and first-person shooter mechanics backed by flashy superpowers. After its debut, people once again asked why Irrational Games had to die and its vast staff had to be left to their own devices so that Levine could develop another BioShock in all but name. While speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, the artistic director went to great lengths to keep the two properties separate from each other.
“BioShock AND BioShock Infiniteif you look at them from a development perspective – which may be a bit off-putting to some readers – but they are basically a corridor. A very, very long corridor with lots of trigger points that make story elements take place. Peephole “It’s created very, very differently, which makes it hopefully more reflective of player agency, but it’s also much, much more hard to execute.”
The essence of storytelling in Peephole– Levine explained – is the way it recognizes the player’s actions and reacts to them accordingly.
“Even regular characters observing the player’s actions from a distance and commenting on them,” Levine said. “Hey, you saw this and you did that and then you did this and that was interesting because that caused this” – now we do something like that. It’s really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that might react to different types of things. It’s a huge amount of work because you have to think about all the things the player can do and then write character reactions to those actions for different characters in a way that feels organic.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like Ghost Story Games is interesting in filling in the gaps in the writing process the so-called artificial intelligence. Levine pointed out the AI’s terrible understanding of persistence: “You look at Sora, the ChatGPT video generator, and you see a woman walking down the street, and the street is beautiful, but if she turned around and walked backwards, it wouldn’t be possible. I don’t remember where she was” – which is the main drawback of his creative potential. The studio also avoids using generative models in concept art due to legal issues that may arise from AI’s liberal use of other people’s protected works.
Peephole will be released initially on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC once before March 31, 2025
