God of War Ragnarok offers various novelties for the saga and one of them has nothing to do with the game. For example, the game got a new one director compared to the previous one: Let’s talk about Eric Williams, who was interviewed by GameInformer. During the dialogue, the director also revealed an oddity: during development, he discovered that he was suffering from it patterned.
For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, thepatterned it is “the state of mind that no mental image can visualize, as if the mind’s eye were totally blind”. The question came up during a GameInformer question related to the size of God of War Ragnarok.
Williams explains that he has one Game management system in Excel in which all the fragments of each game sequence are organized, explaining them one by one and indicating how they are connected and how much time they take the player. This is a more “mathematical” approach, Williams explains, since he’s from this world (his background is astronomy and mathematics), unlike Barlog (director of the previous game), who from Williams’ point of view is more of a creative, a screenwriter and Actor.
Kratos vs Thor
Next, says Williams his method was innovative for the team. He then explains that his method is precisely because he suffers from aphantasia: he cannot visualize something, so he compensates by creating lots of references and images for everything. One artist also told him it wasn’t necessary, but Williams replied that he needed it.
He said: “Yes, why I need to know that we’re looking at the same thing. I didn’t even know it existed. I thought that was always just a saying. “I see it in my mind’s eye.” And then I read it in Pixar’s book, Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. [l’ex capo della Pixar] Ed Catmull is talking about it and I was like, Wow, is that real?.”
“I started researching and then I started explain it to people and they said to me, “Oh, no wonder you’re doing that!”. Because I have a directory of animated gifs for all animators, for all fights. It’s like 6000 gifs or something because I have all these references.
“They love it, but they said, ‘None of this is necessary. We know what a round kick looks like.” And I said, “Yeah, but not that. That was the weird thing.” And then they started saying, “It’s just that obsessive about all these things. “So I kept doing it. I was like, ‘Well, I’m already compensating, so I’m going to do it more and more.’ “Some people get mad because they’re like, ‘Dude, you’re taking all the creative fun out of it by just saying, ‘Do this,’ but then I discovered another technique: I pulled out things that didn’t seem to go together, and I gave them a description and they figured out how to put it all together.”
So it seems Williams knew use your imagination to organize work. If you too want to see things and not just imagine them, you must see the God of War Ragnarok presentation at San Siro Stadium.