Mark Darrah, co-direktur Dragon Age: Origins, telah memainkan Riven selama 3 menit dan Factorio selama 832 jam: 'Jika Anda ingin tahu seperti apa programmer seseorang, biarkan mereka memainkan Factorio'

Mark Darrah isn't much for reminiscing about games he played in his childhood, but he does recall being struck by his first encounter with Command & Conquer in his late teens: "The thing that probably affected me for the longest, the most deeply, was that you could do storytelling for real," Darrah says. "It had cinematic storytelling, at least for the time [and] I think the original Command & Conquer had a branching storyline."

Two years after C&C's release, Darrah joined BioWare as a programmer, a role he'd perform for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. But Darrah is best known as the executive producer of the Dragon Age series, as well as being co-director of Dragon Age: Origins and the director of Dragon Age 2.

In 2021, Darrah departed BioWare after 23 years at the studio. Today, he runs a game design consultancy business and moonlights as a YouTuber, sharing his development memories and lessons on his channel: "I work with someone who now works at a college teaching game development, and they wonder why I give away so much information for free," he says.

Darrah took a break from sharing his wisdom as we delved into the deep roads of his Steam library, where we picked through ancient factories, (briefly) pored over obscure conundrums, and stumbled upon lost civilizations.

What game are you currently playing?

I play Factorio with my son. He likes Factorio a lot. That's what I was playing mostly for the summer. [We were playing] the new expansion pack—I guess it's not new anymore. I think it's called Space Age.

If you want to know what kind of programmer someone would be, have them play Factorio for 25 hours and look at what their base looks like. I'm a programmer who will keep it working, but also there's going to be a lot of binder twine and duct tape holding the thing together, and definitely you can see that in my Factorio bases.

I've played Factorio since before Inquisition shipped, so more than 12 years. It was one of the games that when [my son] got old enough to play games, I showed him and I think he just has an engineering mind, and so that complexity, that problem set, he definitely approaches it in a different way than I do. He sits down, plans it out, figures out how it should be arranged, deconstructs the entire base then reconstructs it … [whereas] my base has always ended up being these amoeba monstrosities.

The issue I have with Factorio is that I would say it's three games now. There's the beginning part where you're running around, which I actually find excruciating. Then there's the middle part where, mostly, I've automated everything, and then now you've got this third part where it's like "OK, now I've got multiple planets on the go, I'm building spaceships." And that's really interesting, but it is different because your little guy's presence in the game is almost irrelevant.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

It looks like it was Eternal Strands. Obviously, I have a certain amount of bias there because of my relationship with people in the studio. But I think it's a very good first game. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and I don't really mean it like that. But it shows the potential of the studio.

The game that it reminds me of—there's a game where you played a wizard and you combined different elements, and it was a top-down game—Magicka! The combat in Eternal Strands reminds me of Magicka in a good way. It's not like that, but it is like that in a way that speaks to me.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I have Riven installed. I didn't play Riven before, and I have only put three minutes into Riven, so I still haven't played Riven. I've heard people talk about it from a puzzle design perspective. I definitely feel like there's an art to puzzle design that I feel like I could develop. I've never done puzzle design. I wasn't responsible for puzzles that existed in any of the Dragon Age games.

But the BioWare philosophy since forever—partly because of leadership in the early days of BioWare—it's always been to make sure that all puzzles could be completed by all people, in sometimes heavy-handed ways. Like, "Here's the solution to the puzzle in a book right beside the puzzle." And obviously, a puzzle game like Riven cannot do that.

The reason I installed it was, "Let's play this game—which I have not done—and let's see what there is to be learned." Because it's come up in conversations at least twice in the last two years. So I think for a game that old, that's a good sign that there's something there to be learned.

If we exclude remasters, then it might be Dragon Age: Origins. I do not play games I work on after they come out [but] I played some on stream for my channel, and whenever I do a video where I'm going to talk about what I remember with the game, I play the game long enough to capture footage to use as background for the video.

I played through DA:O all the way on stream …. I'm not a streamer. I don't have that skillset. I think people find it sort of interesting to listen to me play a game that I worked on, but I think it can be disillusioning to some people because I think a lot of game developers, myself certainly included—and people can attest to this if they watch my Anthem video—are a lot worse at these games than the average player. Not everyone, but a lot of us.

Because of the role I've had on these games, basically since Dragon Age [and] even before, I play parts of it, random parts of it, and then I've seen a fairly wide tube through all the content. So with DA:O, it's like, "Oh wait, I remember a bunch of this, but I don't really remember how to play." I've seen probably 60% of all the content in the game. I've played probably like 6% of all the content. There's this weird disconnect of: I remember a lot, but I also have weird blind spots.

The other thing that I notice happens, which is really weird, is that I remember versions of the content that don't exist. My memory of a level is the version that was like five versions before the final version.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Factorio, I have 832 hours. Then I have two versions of Fantasy Grounds, which is a tabletop simulator, and then I have Civilization 6.

Often, I will play a game long enough to understand it and then move on. Balatro is a good example … I finished Balatro a couple of times, but I didn't obviously get all the content out of it. Maybe that's just because I've worked in games for, I guess we're at 29 years now, and I'm always trying to see what there is to be learned, which is why I often like a really short game. Like Unpacking is a short game. I roll credits on it, that's four hours. Four hours is enough for me to get, like, "I get what you're trying to do, and I learn something, and we can move on."

[But] I have a long history with Civ, because I played the one right before Alpha Centauri and then Alpha Centauri, and then I had a bit of a break. But I do love Civilization. It is a time sink for sure. I guess in what we were talking about [before], playing a game until I understand it. You have to play through Civ at least once to understand it.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

So I don't uninstall anything. But what I do is when I migrate PCs, I essentially uninstall at that point. The game that I would reinstall as soon as I got a new PC would probably be Factorio.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

EA is a company that communicates through PowerPoint. But not in the way that PowerPoint is intended to be used, more as PowerPoint as a way to make shareable documents.

So after I left BioWare, I bought a copy of PowerPoint rather than using Google Slides, rather than using whatever the free version of Microsoft is. I probably use it almost every day, and most of that is not stuff for other people.

Because of whatever weird bit of communication cancer got installed by the culture of EA, I actually use PowerPoint to make decks, almost like note-taking software for my own purposes. There are better pieces of software for that. But I think it comes from when I worked at BioWare, whatever you were working on was eventually going to probably become a pitch deck, so you might as well go into PowerPoint now.

Also, versus Word, PowerPoint forces a brevity that I think is useful.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I have 54 icons on my desktop. They're all on the left side, they are a literal random selection of things, and there are eight things where at some point I uninstalled or the link broke, so they're just dead file icons.

I've not cleaned them. I've never cleaned it up. I just don't put things on my desktop in the first place. It's tidy due to a lack of use.