Soapbox
Masq’s creator on the future of interactive drama

By revolving around characters, moral choices, scandal and relationships, but keeping you in the thick of the story rather than watching from above as in The Sims, Masq fills the soap slot on the PC. It's a genre that's going to be unstoppably popular one day.

“The idea,” says creator Javier Maldonado, “was that moral dilemmas, dialogue-based choices and a wider range of actions such as flirting, betraying, lying or loving means interesting characters could be at least as exciting as solving puzzles or destroying aliens.” Maldonado’s theory has already been vindicated in one way: 50% of Masq players are female; exactly the gender split you’d expect from a game with universal appeal.

He’s also right in another way: playing with Masq’s characters is at least as much fun as conventional violence-based gaming, even for battle-grizzled hardcore players like us. The level of meaningful freedom here puts Deus Ex to shame, and the characters and relationships are far from boring. There’s sex, death, kidnapping, robbery, espionage and blackmail, none of which have to happen, and all of which are direct results of your actions if they do.

Masq is off-puttingly basic-looking. Does the future of interactive dramas lie in doing this stuff with full-motion video or a 3D engine? Maldonado is skeptical. “Even when you can add video, animation or recorded dialogue,” he says, “it has to be done very carefully or it can destroy the whole experience.”

Budgets would also limit filming time, restricting the game design to a smaller number of eventualities, which would rob Masq of its endless intrigue. Maldonado thinks a different skill set is needed to move interactive drama forward.

“It is just a matter of time before a new kind of talent, and I mean interactive screenwriters and game designers, enrich our virtual lives.”