Halo and Destiny Creator Breaks 11-Year Silence, Talks Design Philosophy

Three Part Interview Part 2
Bungie co-founder Jason Jones’ humility shows again as he considers the philosophy of design, and it’s clearly a passionate subject for him: “I can’t digest any simple change in design philosophy over the years. I think there are all kinds of mistakes that you can make as a designer building a game either for yourself as a player or for yourself as a designer – both of which are total mistakes.

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Building an experience through the eyes of someone else is incredibly challenging.

“I think one of the most important attributes a designer can have is…not only the ability, but almost the unconscious constant experience of putting yourself in other people’s heads and watching them as they have an experience. Building an experience through the eyes of someone else is incredibly challenging. I think that’s what makes great designers. A bunch of my meta-points that I’ve drawn out over the last 20 years are about that, how you put yourself in other people’s shoes.”
It’s becoming clear that Jones is a brilliant game designer. Halo was no fluke – something the devil’s advocate in me quietly wondered before I sat down for this interview. And the more Jones speaks on the subject, the easier it is to see how he inspires his team to achieve what it does. And fortunately, he’s got plenty more to say on the subject.

I ask Jones to share more about his 17-point design philosophy, which he hinted at earlier. Is there a specific example he can point to?
“Sure,” he says. “The guns on the [Halo 1] Ghost were balanced by making them really inaccurate. If you aim at something in Halo 1 with the Ghost and shoot at it, your shots are going all over the place. That balances the weapon, because it’s not overpowered. But it wasn’t balanced in a way that was empowering for the player.
“I think one of the ways that I describe that is that every object, every player-facing verb, needs to be a power fantasy in some way. And so the Ghost was correctly balanced numerically, but it wasn’t that fun. It didn’t make you feel awesome. It wasn’t something you jumped on and thought you were going to tear the place up with.

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The [Halo 1] Ghost was correctly balanced numerically, but it wasn’t that fun. It didn’t make you feel awesome.

“What we should have done was balance the power of those weapons with something like overheating or something like ammunition… I’ll stick with overheating. We should have balanced with overheating instead of with inaccuracy, because then you could have held back to line up a target and then pounded it, rather than experience now where you just hold down the trigger and you basically can’t hit it. You feel the opposite of empowerment. You feel disempowered.
“So of the 17 points, Point 6 or Point 7 or whatever it is [says] that every player-facing verb should be a power fantasy. I think [Bungie COO Pete] Parsons says it in a different way. He says ‘Balance for awesome.’”
Speaking of balance, I shift gears and ask Jones about how he balances his need to create with the realities of being the leader of Bungie. I mention Peter Molyneux and how he ascended the Microsoft corporate ladder up and away from the Lionhead studio he founded – ultimately topping out as the head of Microsoft Game Studios in Europe – before quitting outright and resetting himself as a small, indie developer because he could not ignore his innate desire to roll up his sleeves and make video games.

“I don’t think the people that do this well do it for the money,” he says in response to his progressive increase in responsibility at Bungie over the years. “They feel like they’re supposed to or something. They do it because they have to. They’d be doing it somewhere, right? You’re either doing it at home in your spare time, or you’re doing it for your job, or you’re doing it in your mind as you do the rest of your job. I think some people are just driven to create experiences for others. So yeah, I do that. If I had a job that didn’t let me do that, I would have to leave it, or ignore my wife so I could do that at home. I totally get Peter and what he did.”
This perpetual need to create leads to a natural follow-up: how many games does he actually play these days? He cites Sid Meier as an industry figure he admires, and names Dishonored as his favorite game of 2012. “It surprised me,” he explains of Arkane Studios’ first-person genre-blender. “It entertained me. It was different enough that it kept me going.”
What’s his Gamerscore on Xbox 360?

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[My Xbox 360 Gamerscore] stinks. It's like 13,000 or something like that. I'm definitely a tourist.

“Oh, it stinks,” he says with a self-deprecating laugh. “It’s like 13,000 or something like that. I’m definitely a tourist. It got reset at some point. I used to have Herr Jones. That used to be my gamertag. Then I let it lapse and lost it.”
I ask Jones if it’s possible I’ve played Halo with him at some point over the past decade and not realized it. He laughs again. “That’s definitely possible. I’ve played a lot of Halo…Wow, nobody knows my gamertag? That’s funny.”
The subject turns to families. I learn that Jones has three young children and tell him about my two-year-old, and we discuss how gaming still fits into our busier-than-ever lives. This leads me to wonder how he avoids going all Spielberg on us, potentially losing his creative edge and making watered-down games for his kids. But first, does he play games with them?
“It’s fun to play games with the five-year-old,” Jones says. “He loves it. It’s amazing. He’s drawn to it.”

What games?
“Just random stuff. Destiny, we play that.”
I jokingly ask if he had his son sign an NDA. “We’re working on a turn-based tank game, an Advance Wars type of game together, which he thinks is awesome,” he answers. “What else have we done? Tons of iPhone stuff…”
Back to Destiny and his co-op time with his young son. What about the violence? It is a first-person shooter, after all…
“There are guns and there’s violence in Destiny,” he replies after a thoughtful pause. “It’s very interesting to see my son’s reaction to violence. But I’m very happy that he can play Destiny. It’s not over the top or scary for him. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s something that…” He pauses to consider the question again. “Maybe if it wasn’t a game that I made, I would have waited another couple of years, but I’m very proud of what we’re doing in that we… What am I trying to say? That it’s not violently pornographic or something.” [Editor’s Note: Bungie has publicly stated that they are aiming for a “T” rating from the ESRB for Destiny.]

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The money and the people and the time and all that [spent on Destiny] is pretty crazy.

Maybe it’s a bit strange that we’ve only just now touched on Destiny after speaking for roughly an hour, but it’s not often that a designer stays quiet for 10 years, so there’s been a lot of other ground to cover. I ask what the biggest gamble he’s ever taken in his career is, and his answer surprises me.
“Making Destiny?” he laughs. “I mean, the money and the people and the time and all that is pretty crazy. Compared to that, the decisions we made – to spend $10,000 in six months making a game 20 years ago – maybe that was a gamble, because I dropped out of college, but I think this is bigger. I think it would be impossible to find any more – what’s the word? Foolhardy? Brave? Arrogant? Fun? – thing that I’ve ever done in this.”

I tell him I wrote that question expecting him to say, selling the company to Microsoft in 2000. “We had a lot of offers to buy the company back then,” he tells me. “We were pretty careful about what was compelling to us. We didn’t want the money. We wanted a different situation. Microsoft gave us that in spades. I wouldn’t say that was a risk at all. To have a game, to have an IP built, and to have a year to launch it on a new console, that was… I don’t know, maybe that was a risk, but I don’t think it was. I didn’t think it was at the time. I didn’t think we were gambling with the future of the company.”
But Destiny is?
“Entertainment is all a gamble, right?” he starts. “What you’re doing is incredibly arrogant, which is, ‘I believe that this group of people [at Bungie] can make something that millions of other people will not only enjoy, but will enjoy so much that they’re willing to pay for it.’ You have to be f------ stupid to do that. So I think every time you launch a new project, you have to be a little bit stupid.”
Natural segue: at what point after Halo blew up did he wake up and realize that his life was different?

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[I remember] standing in line with people at a movie and [hearing] them talk about Halo. That was cool.

“I hadn’t thought about it in that way before,” he says, surprised. “That happened some time earlier, where I realized we had employees and we had fans. I think it was after Marathon, where I realized, ‘My God, we’re going to make another game. People are going to want it. There’s this company and people come to work here and they have wives and children and they depend on that. We’re paying for their insurance.’ That was when it got real.
“The Halo 1 experience was just really fun. We reached a bigger audience. [I remember] standing in line with people at a movie and [hearing] them talk about Halo. That was cool.”
This led to a chance to ask about something I’m curious about with all game developers: becoming a victim of his own success. Remembering Bungie’s previously unheard of cessation from Microsoft in 2007, I wonder if the thought of working on Halo for the rest of his life terrified Jones.

“I was never worried that that’s what I would have to do, personally,” he says honestly. “I believe that there are always going to be people who are really excited to work on Halo, so that was never an issue. I don’t think anybody who gets their primary satisfaction by creating wants to create the same thing over and over again. But I was never worried about that.”