Feature By

Thom Moyles

Filing into the auditorium for the Game Developers Conference 2005 Game Design Challenge (theme: make a game based on Emily Dickinson), most people could have been forgiven for wondering who the third member of the panel was. Will Wright and Peter Molyneaux are two of the more high-profile Western game designers, each with a history that deserves recognition as industry leaders and visionaries. In comparison, Clint Hocking was an unknown.

It would then come as a shock to most of us when Hocking's game design won second place in the Challenge. More impressively, his design was arguably the most coherent and feasible of the three, combining a creative concept (use the DS stylus as an analogue to Dickinson's pen) with the pragmatism necessary to coalesce said creativity into a manageable project. In fact, Wright's cult of personality was really the only reason that Hocking didn't win the Challenge outright. Clint also talked at the GDC 2005 International Game Development panel and again displayed the qualities that mark him as one of the up-and-coming Western game designers.

In his short time in the industry, Clint has been the game designer and scriptwriter of the original Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell as well as winner of the first-ever Game Developers Choice Award for excellence in script writing. Now the Creative Director of the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise and fresh from the release of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Clint took the time to sit down (if email could be considered "sitting down") and talk with us.

To start things off, how did you first get into the videogame industry?

I was working in Vancouver as a writer, principally doing contract work for web companies while finishing my MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. I was also fooling around with UnrealEd and ended up getting involved with a mod, and shipping a game level. On a lark I sent a resume to Ubi, and got my first industry job as a level designer on the original Splinter Cell. During Splinter Cell, the game designer departed the company at Alpha, and I took over that role, and the Scriptwriter left the project at Beta, and I took over that role too. After we shipped it, I took on the role of Lead Levl Designer and Scriptwriter for Chaos Theory. About a year into Chaos Theory, they made me the Creative Director. It's been kind of a whirlwind ride so far.

What were your favorite videogames when you were younger?

Depends what you mean by younger… I remember playing Intellivision games with a few friends in elementary school. The Intellivision Dungeons & Dragons game, their sports titles, and some of their naval games were awesome. I got into PC gaming young with a Vic20 and started my level design "hobby" on Lode Runner for the Vic20—I had over 100 levels I made, all of them saved on cassette tape. I also learned to program in Basic and made my own text adventure game. It was a while before I graduated to the "silver age" of gaming, and got very interested in PC games like Lemmings, X-Com, Civilization, Doom… I never really considered myself a huge videogame player as a kid, but they were always around and I got to play great games from every generation.

Do you think of yourself as a writer first and a designer second, or the other way around?

I don't see a priority. In my mind, the two are inseparable. My writing has always moved towards formal experimentation, and even writing that I've done on paper has tried to break the barrier between reader and author. My design work focuses on enabling, and trying to improve the innate capacity of a human being to structure a narrative out of their experience. I really find it hard to design without imagining the narrative context—whether that means the authored narrative context, or the kinds of emergent narrative that the player will be creating when he engages the systems. The two fields are the same for me.

Who are your favorite writers?

Because my "writing" is so experimental, I've had a hard time finding writers who I strongly identify with. I read a lot of non-fiction. Simon Singh is great. For fiction, I prefer the classics: ancient epics, Greek and Roman plays, Shakespeare. I'll occasionally read some oddball kinds of fiction I find in a bookstore, the weirder the better—some MIT grad's first and only novel about his love affair with a baseball card or something. I like absurdist fiction. Hunter S. Thompson is great.