“Players are selfish”:Fallout 2’s Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy

Chris Avellone wants you to have a good time.

People often ask creatives—especially those in careers some dream of entering—”how did you get started?” Video game designers are no exception, and Avellone says that one of the most important keys to his success was one he learned early in his origin story.

“Players are selfish,” Avellone said, reflecting on his time designing the seminal computer roleplaying game Planescape: Torment. “The more you can make the experience all about them, the better. So Torment became that. Almost every single thing in the game is about you, the player.”

The true mark of a successful game is when players really enjoy themselves, and serving that essential egotism is one of the fundamental laws of game design.

It’s a lesson he learned long before he became an internationally renowned game designer, before Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment were twinkles in the eyes of Avellone and his co-workers at Interplay. Avellone’s first introduction to building fictional worlds came not from the digital realm but from the analog world of pen and paper roleplaying games.

Table-top takeaways

Avellone discovered Dungeons and Dragons at the tender young age of nine, and it was a formative influence on his creative life and imagination.

“Getting exposed to the idea of Dungeons and Dragons early was a wake-up call,” he told me. “‘Oh, wow, it’s like make believe with rules!’—like putting challenges on your imagination where not everything was guaranteed to succeed, and that made it more fun. However, what I noticed is that I wasn’t usually altering the systems drastically; it was more using them as a foundation for the content.”

At first, Avellone wasn’t interested in engineering the games and stories himself. He wanted a more passive role, but life had different ideas.

“I never started out with a desire to be the game master,” Avellone remembered. “I wanted to be one of the players, but once it became clear that nobody else in my friend circle really wanted to be a game master—to be fair, it was a lot of work—I bit the bullet and tried my hand at it. Over time, I discovered I really enjoyed helping tell an interactive story with the players.”