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David Jaffe is in the business of unleashing people's ids. As director of such adrenaline-soaked games as the Twisted Metal series and God of War he provided catharsis for a generation of PlayStation 2 owners. He also served as creative director on God of War II, and recently released the downloadable multiplayer-focused game Calling All Cars. Playing against type, Calling All Cars consists of only four levels and features neither bloodshed nor demented clowns, but is nevertheless pulse-pounding and highly addictive. Jaffe is also a brutal critic of the industry and his own work. We spoke about God of War's shallow game design, the severe shortcomings of today's video games and the joys of scrambled cable porn.

Playboy: There seems to be a visceral quality to the games you make. They create a very intense engagement. How deliberate is the process of making that happen?

Jaffe: Keeping the player fully focused on the game and not having his mind wander is something that I'm constantly aware of. There are a lot of top-tier game designers who are really good at the underlying component of games: game systems. Those guys don't need a lot to keep you engaged in even a simple game like Uno or poker. Games like Civilization IV are so well designed that they don't need a lot of the kinetic energy that we put into our games. I don't think I'm that good of a designer or even that kind of a designer. I have to rely on sleight of hand. When I'm watching a focus test and I get the sense that a player is starting to get bored, my first instinct is to throw something else at them. It really comes from a lack of security in my own game design skills.

Playboy: So you just pile on more monsters whenever you feel their attention is lagging?

Jaffe: Exactly. Of course, we tune and polish our games to the point that we still end up making really good, compelling games. But in an ideal world, I would like to have the game system itself be what keeps the player engaged instead of a number of simple things being thrown at the player one after another to keep them engaged.

Playboy: Do you think you got closer to that with Calling All Cars?

Jaffe: I do. Calling All Cars is such a simple game we couldn't rely on the variety of a game like God of War to keep players interested. It came down to the game system itself and if that was broken, the game wouldn't have worked. And while I think the game worked well, it didn't work as well as I intended because the game system wasn't as strong as it should have been. But ultimately that game reflects on where I'm going as a designer and where I hope to improve as a designer, which is really focusing on the core mechanics instead of the flashy surface stuff.

Playboy: And you felt like God of War was a place where you had done a lot of flashy surface stuff, a lot of screaming at the player?

Jaffe: That's all we did in God of War. If you take the individual pieces of that game apart, with the exception of a couple puzzles I'm particularly proud of, there's nothing inherent in the core game that's really special or unique. It's just that we executed it really well and we had enough time and money and talent that we could throw enough of these minor elements at the player to create a major experience. But the individual elements, you can take the platforming in Mario and it's better; you can take the combat system in Devil May Cry and it's better; you can take the puzzles in Ico and they're better. None of the individual pieces we did were so amazing on their own, it's just that we executed a lot of small pieces really, really well.

Playboy: The pacing is phenomenal. It's one of the few games where we completely lost track of time while playing.

Jaffe: That's absolutely intentional. We looked very closely at why players stop playing games. We constantly play-tested the levels to see where people got stuck, to see where they died, see how many times they died, and integrate that data into the production process to make adjustments. One of my ex-bosses made fun of me after we won the Game of the Year award a few years ago, I showed him the award and he said, "Big fucking deal. You had all the money in the world and all the time in the world." And he was right. There was nothing we were doing that was really magical. If you have a good idea and talented people and you put the time in and spend your time responsibly and you apply the feedback from your play-testers, you're going to end up with a good game.

Playboy: Would you say that the core innovation of God of War was this titration of attention, rather than the fighting system or the quick-time events?

Jaffe: Actually, the innovation in God of War was that we never set out to be innovative. We set out to entertain the crap out of players and we didn't care if we had to do sleight-of-hand or less-robust game systems. Our game-design colleagues might have pooh-poohed our game systems because they weren't very deep, but we just really wanted to be the Jerry Bruckheimer of video games, something that's really there for the mainstream, that's entertaining from the get-go. Everything else went out the window and we were just totally slaves to making the audience happy and nothing else really mattered. I think it's a very noble thing to be doing. I don't cringe at that. I'm very proud to have worked on a series that lots of people actually finish.

Playboy: Do you think it's possible to create a visceral experience that also has depth or meaning behind it all, or at least some core mechanics you can be proud of?

Jaffe: It's definitely possible, but I struggle with that issue, because I always start with the end experience in mind. Today I'm working on a document for a new game, and I have a vibe in mind for the way I want the player to feel when he sits down and plays the game. It's a two- or three-line vision statement of what I want the game to feel like. With God of War I wanted the player to experience what it feels like to be 10 years old watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I'm struggling with your question because is that my only goal when I work on a game is to achieve that vision statement. I never sit down and say, "Is this an innovative mechanic?" or "Is this a populist mechanic?" It's more, "How do I achieve the feeling?" I haven't backward-engineered the process. We just keep coming up with ideas and keep asking ourselves, "Does this fit into the goal?" If it does, we keep it in and if it doesn't, we kill it.

Playboy: So you take a direct path to the viscerality. As opposed to starting by saying, "I want to tell a story about a guy who does X, Y then Z."

Jaffe: I'm not a big believer in the idea of storytelling as a huge aspect of games. Certainly games can have stories and they can be successful in part because of the stories, but if somebody comes in and says, "I want to make a game about a guy who has this feeling" I'd say that guy should probably write a book or a screenplay instead. What you can do is say, "Okay, let's put the tits and violence in, and then once we've got them hooked, we can try to do a little more than that." And we put some of that into God of War. We tried to tell a story that was poignant and was emotional and dealt with putting family first and what happens when you lose yourself to your work, which sort of paralleled our experience making that game. How many people picked up on that? Probably very few.

At the end of the day we're still up against the low level of fidelity you have in terms of interaction with video games. You can put a great cut scene at the start of the game, but ultimately when it comes time to control the character, there's very little you can do besides jump, climb and hit. This medium is just in such an early stage right now. I read something the other day where someone were saying Pac-Man was like an early Chaplin film and Atari was like RKO, which implies that where we are now is like where movies were in the '50s. And we're not even close. If you're talking about the level of emotional resonance that our work has, we're not even where they were in the days of silent films. The medium will get there but by the time it does we'll all be dead and it will be hard to recognize the things we do now as being related to what this ultimately becomes. That's one of the reasons I've gone back to making what I call pure games, because they're what games do really well right now. I've sat in too many meetings where somebody watches a great emotional movie over the weekend and they come in on Monday all piss and vinegar ready to take the medium to the next level. I've read article after article with all this hyperbole about how games are going to be the next great entertainment medium and games are more powerful because bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I was profiled in a magazine with a number of other game designers and in the article they compared game designers with film directors. And for me, because we had just come out with God of War, they said, "This is the Ridley Scott for video games" because he had just done Gladiator. Which is ridiculous. And I felt like saying, "Please stop." I hate the idea that non-gamers are going to pop a game into a console and expect to have an experience that moves you like a film, because they're not. They're going to be looking at their inventory screen and they're going to be stuck trying to solve a puzzle and they're going to be trying to figure out, "Okay, if I stab the cyclops in the eye three times he goes into that motion and that's when I can use the medusa head on him." That's what games are right now. At the end of the day, what you're doing is walking around a level that looks like World War II trying to find a fucking key to open a door. I heard someone say that the most average television show has more emotional power than the best triple-A video game that's trying to tell a story. I mean, I love Metal Gear Solid, but from a storytelling standpoint it has less emotional resonance than an episode of Murder, She Wrote. That doesn't mean I don't love Kojima's work, because I can't wait to buy Metal Gear 4. But I popped Blood Diamond in the other night, and it wasn't a great movie, but it was a hell of a lot better from an emotional standpoint than any game I've played. That's the reality of it. I think that ultimately all of these prophecies will come to be and that the interactivity in what we call video games now will be called something different, and it will become much more powerful than film. But right now a lot of us seem to want to talk like we're doing really important work when I think the most important work we're doing is stuff that's about having fun.

Playboy: And that's what sells. It seems like games that make the player work hard, either making heavy decisions or having to mine the world for information to succeed, don't tend to put up the big sales numbers.

Jaffe: No. Because not only do they require a huge investment of time, they require a huge suspension of disbelief. When you play an engaging game like a SOCOM death match or Wii Sports or Calling All Cars, you're swimming with the current. You're not trying to do more than what the game is capable of. When games embrace the true capabilities and strengths of the medium, that's where you see your commercial successes. When a game tries to do more than the medium is capable of, you get some critical accolades and you get some fan boys on message boards who say you're a great artist. But you don't get big sales.

Playboy: How about Guitar Hero?

Jaffe: I loved Guitar Hero.

Playboy: They didn't try to do story.

Jaffe: But they did though. That's what's brilliant about it. I went to this panel and they had this guy from LucasArts on stage and he was like, "We don't feel story is all that important." And I wanted to say, "You ass. Your games are successful because people bring their knowledge of this huge epic story that is Star Wars into your game. Trust me, if you were just making a space flight game nobody would be buying it because those games don't sell unless they have the Star Wars name attached to it." Guitar Hero benefits from the same thing. Everybody has, or most people have, the fantasy of being a rock star. There is a story there, there is a fantasy there, it's just that it's one that you bring to the table yourself. And that's much more powerful than, "Here's Billy, he's a guitar star wannabe." Who gives a shit about Billy? You have your own guitar hero fantasy, and the less they say that's going to clash with your own personal fiction, the better.

Playboy: Would you say that the best Star Wars games have been the ones that did the least amount of storytelling in the game?

Jaffe: Exactly. Like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. You already have the story and you can fill in the blanks. I can imagine that's Darth Vader there and whatever, but you're not really being told a story. I'm going to get crucified on the message boards for saying this stuff. There are guys out there who live and die by telling me video games have stories and they cried during Final Fantasy VII. And more power to them. Maybe they're just more in touch with their inner emotions than I am.

Playboy: How does the writing process for games differ from writing books or screenplays?

Jaffe: Game making is very high level and very detail level. And that's the way my mind works. I'm good at having the high-level visions and the mechanics and things like that and then giving that to a team and working at the very low tinkering level to make it come to life. I never enjoyed the process of writing novels or screenplays because it was so isolating and there was no-one for me to give the parts I'm not good at. Maybe it's laziness or maybe it feels easier because that's how my brain works, but my head gets itself around the game-making process because you don't have to be responsible for every detail at all the levels all the way through. I'm good with the high concept. I'm good at pitching, I'm good at getting excited. And then I'm good at the other end of the process, tweaking and editing and adding things, but when it came down to sitting there and thinking what happens in Act Two, my mind goes, "God I'm so fucking bored. Let me go to 7-Eleven and get a Coke and play Mortal Kombat."

Playboy: So you're like a writer who comes up with the idea for a book, then you have someone else write it for you.

Jaffe: When you describe it that way then it sounds lazy.

Playboy: Not if it's a 5,000-page book that has to be done in six months. There are scale issues here; we're talking about giant undertakings.

Jaffe: That's actually something I've been getting away from recently, these giant epics. I really don't want to make those anymore. I feel like I did that with God of War and we needed a team to do it. The desire to do that is certainly out of my system.

Playboy: You have no desire to go back to that?

Jaffe: None at all. There are a number of reasons for that. Some of them are practical, like never being able to be home with your kids or never being able to get to a gym. It's a serious lifestyle impediment. You really are living and breathing your game for three years. That's okay, but it's not like you make a huge game and you're set for life and you can pay off your mortgage and all that stuff. It's just back to the salt mines after a two-month vacation. It's one of the things I feel is most wrong with the industry. Sony's been a great company, and Sony benefited from my contributions to that game, and I benefited because I got to work on a game I always wanted to make. But now, to do it again, there's no incentive. I've already gotten it out of my system and there's no kind of structure in our industry to motivate people to keep working that hard.

Playboy: Was Calling All Cars easier?

Jaffe: For a game that really is more mechanics-based, we didn't have to worry about cut scenes and voice actors and we didn't have to worry about 30 brand-new sets and monsters. It's just a smaller scale. So while we had spurts of crazy activity, it just wasn't as big. It's like making Lawrence of Arabia and then going off and shooting an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. From a quality of life standpoint, I'd rather shoot Everybody Loves Raymond.

Playboy: We can completely relate to it not being exciting to do the next 20 God of War games, but even with a completely different topic, you're just not interested in that large scale?

Jaffe: Certainly not right now. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've already done it, I've already achieved that personal goal. And there are easier ways to make a lot of money. And the reality is I'd like to make a lot of money.

Playboy: What was your first job in video games?

Jaffe: Right out of college I was a games tester for Sony.

Playboy: Do you feel like that gave you valuable perspective as a game designer?

Jaffe: It's very easy for teams to get seduced by a piece of technology, by the engine or a shader an artist comes up with, or a program that makes the reflections really cool or whatever. Even a production pipeline where all of a sudden it's quicker to get animation into the game. All of those are great production successes and it's very easy to get sort of tricked into thinking your overall game is a success as those successes come online. Programmers or artists tend to put value on those production successes, but they don't necessarily translate to the player on a level they're aware of. When you come up from a tester standpoint you really are trained to look at things from a consumer standpoint. And that's a really great advantage I have. People don't buy technology, they buy entertainment.

When it came down to, for example, Do we run at 60 frames per second for the whole game or do we put more monsters on the screen to create the vibe that I want to have in a certain sequence?, we always put more monsters on the screen, or did a bigger set piece. Beyond the hardcore contingency that posts on Internet message boards, I don't think the consumer cares if the game runs at a stable 60 frames as long you don't get a headache from it. Players just want to be entertained

Playboy: Do you feel like next-gen and high-def graphics matter to the player?

Jaffe: I don't think they matter all that much to most players. For the longest time, my wife and I had this 22-inch, piece-of-crap TV she had in college. We would put movies in and within four or five minutes I would stop bitching about the fact that we were watching movies on this tiny screen and you would either be engaged in the film or you wouldn't. The other night we were watching something in high-def and I was like, "Isn't this cool, it's high-def." And five minutes later we forgot it was high-def and I turned to my wife and I said, "I'm not going to spend $30 on high-def movies anymore. I can't even tell the difference after the movie starts." For me personally, it doesn't matter all that much. I mean, I get off on a big screen TV as much as the next guy, but it doesn't really bear on whether you engage in the movie or you're bored of the movie. I would much rather watch a great movie on VHS than an average movie on giant-screen HD.

Playboy: Have you seen a VHS-tape image lately?

Jaffe: You're talking to a guy who watched the scrambled porn channel on my parents' cable. I was fine with that.