Opposing principles on writing clash in Split Fiction. Here, the protagonists are led through the fantasy writer’s digitized simulation. (EA)
As a former filmmaker now directing video games, Josef Fares is taking the hard road to creativity.
“If I want to make another movie, it’ll be like going on vacation,” said Fares, the Swedish Lebanese founder of Hazelight Studios. “I’ve made five feature films. This is my fourth game as director. There’s no denying at all that gaming is so much more challenging.”
His most ambitious project to date is Split Fiction, published and released March 6 by EA on PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC. It’s the studio’s third game to require two players to play.
In hopes of getting work, the game’s two budding young writers, Mio and Zoe, get contracted by a dubious publisher who throws them into a virtual simulation based on their stories. Mio is a cyberpunk gearhead obsessed with laser swords, while Zoe is a country girl who dreams about flying around as a fairy battling trolls. The game pits the two visions against each other as they learn to work together to survive a glitchy system that threatens their lives, and worse, to take credit for their work.
The game is a bewitching, action-packed roller coaster that plays with camera perspective, with Mio walking on walls while Zoe is upside down, all on the same screen with the two players using the same controls. It’s a dizzying flourish of design that expands on the strangest ideas from Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy, whose sequel is one of Fares’ favorite games.
Winner of the 2021 game of the year award at the Game Awards, It Takes Two has sold more than 23 million copies. It’s about a soon-to-be-divorced couple who become trapped in their daughter’s toys as they work through their relationship. (EA)
“We get inspired by a lot of different games. If I had to choose one thing, I would say Nintendo games in general,” Fares said. “We like the simplicity of it, the variety, the speed of the form.”
Fares is becoming a master of his chosen format. Split Fiction continues his experiments into creating games that require two players to work together to overcome obstacles. It Takes Two, a lovely tale about two soon-to-be divorced parents forced to work together, has sold 23 million copies since its 2021 debut, Fares confirmed. The game won numerous awards, including coveted game of the year trophies from the Game Awards and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. His 2018 prison escape tale, A Way Out, has now sold 11 million.
It’s hard enough to create games. But Fares has been determined to hone his unique spin on multiplayer games. Split Fiction is about how creatives insert themselves into art, so the two protagonists are named after Fares’ daughters. The story also involves a tech corporation “extracting” ideas from writers, an unsubtle critique of how generative AI might steal from creatives.
“I don’t believe AI is in a state where we can actually use it in development for real,” Fares said. “On the other hand, gaming has been using AI for a long time … so we can look at it like a tool. At the end of the day, you just want to make greater games, but it’s not that right now. It’s terrifying and exciting.”
Fares said his story is about human connection and bridging understanding. It’s a far cry from shooting dehumanized, anonymous targets in popular multiplayer games. Jamie Madigan, a psychology PhD and author of several books about gaming psychology, said Fares’s games offer a deeper awareness and “social presence” of the other player.
“Psychologists study a lot of different kinds of presence, like do you understand where you are in a virtual space, and do you feel immersed in there,” Madigan said. “Social presence is a similar concept, but it’s whether or not you feel the degree of awareness of other people in an interaction.”
Fortnite became the most popular shooting game in the world by pitting one person against 99 other players. The new and popular Marvel Rivals, a team-based shooter, is a middle ground, said Madigan, but still doesn’t quite offer the same experience.
“It does seem like you’re just playing in parallel to other people, and once the match is over, you rarely think back on that interaction,” Madigan said, specifying that emotes and “ping” systems in those games help with a little social presence.
The existential longing for connection can motivate people to play all kinds of games, Madigan said, referring to the psychological term “relatedness.”
“The idea is that we’re motivated to engage in activities such as playing a game to the extent that it makes us feel important to other people, and that can be done in a lot of really abstract ways,” he said. “There’s some research done that even getting quests from computer-controlled characters in a game can give you that sense of relatedness, like being important to the blacksmith in the village. But what really scratches that psychological itch is when you’re important to people you know.” When each person has to do something different to help beat a level or defeat a boss, they feel relevant to other human beings and their shared goal.
Fares achieves this in Split Fiction. A showstopping early fight requires Mio to mount a massive robot to expose a weak point only Zoe can attack. Playing a Hazelight game is about dependence on the other person, forcing cooperation and communication.
Split Fiction is a game that reinvents itself in almost every scene. It is constantly creating and throwing away new ideas at a dizzying pace. One moment, Mio is doing the “Akira” slide on a cyberpunk motorcycle. The next delightful scene, the pair are trapped in an early-childhood story Zoe wrote regarding her love of hot dogs, and her horror when she finally discovered how the sausage was made.
Fares seems to be a master of pacing, letting moments breathe after grabbing the audience by the collar through explosive action sequences. But it remains his biggest worry.
“Movies have had over 100 years to talk and figure out their stuff more in production,” Fares said. “We’re still figuring things out, and one of the key things in pacing.”
Before becoming an award-winning director, Fares was most famous for a viral moment at the 2017 Game Awards, where he offered some unkind words (and a gesture) about the Oscars. He said the outburst came from excitement but also some frustration that the awards were constantly called “the Oscars of gaming.” To him, video games don’t need to be compared to other forms of art to have validation.
“I don’t even take the argument that gaming isn’t art, because it’s so stupid,” Fares said. “It’s like reinventing the wheel every time you make a game.”
