Role-playing games are just an organic improvised space for storytelling.
Matthew Mercer
Society, in general, has taught for many generations that when you reach a certain age, you have to learn to stop playing.
For a lot of people, 'Dungeons & Dragons' has been a hard thing to describe. I can't tell you how many social environments I've been in where I say, 'I play 'D&D,'' and a bunch of normies will be like, 'How does the game even work? What's that like?' I didn't have anything to really describe it that didn't make me sound like a crazy person.
Time and time again, the players constantly surprise you and often not do at all what you expect and completely muck up your preparation, and that's kind of the beauty of the game. It wouldn't be as fun to the DM if everything worked out exactly how you thought it would.
A lot of gaming and a lot of interaction is no longer physical; it's all digital and at a distance. There's this innate, tribal need of the people to have face time with other people and play together in person. I think there's been this rediscovery of the joy of playing with people around the table.
There aren't a lot of entertainment-based mediums, the visual or recorded mediums, that empower the audience to go off the next day and create it themselves. You can't watch a movie or a show and the next day say, 'I want to make that.' You have to go to school.
I'm not a writer.
Role-playing games have been a huge part of my life and a huge part of my training as a performer - learning social skills, meeting friends, and being a generally competent person - so I owe a lot to role-playing games.
There's an old-school gatekeeper mentality to some of the RPG community: 'It's unfair that somebody out there can make money on something that I worked so hard to make for free for my friends.'
The rules - I think that's one big thing that people seem to get caught up in is that I have to know all the rules... But, one thing you have to consider as a new Dungeon Master is you do not have to know the rules like the back of your hand.
A lot of games and voiceover projects, they're not giving the actor a lot of context. The actor, no matter how good they are, might not be able to deliver a performance that fits the action.
It's always hard when you're working on a project, and you're seeing it in bits and pieces, whether that be film, television, video games, animation - you only really have perspective of what you're interacting with.
'Dungeons and Dragons' has evolved over the years, and so has the community that played the game. It had a lot of lingering stigma from the anti-'D&D' movement of the '70s and '80s - this kind of idea that 'Dungeons and Dragons' is only played by the lowest of the low basement dwellers - that has kept people from being comfortable talking about it.
I try desperately to try and figure out how they'd react to different scenarios. That's part of what the DM's job is: to try and know their players well enough to where they can build encounters, challenges, and be like, 'I think they would do this in this scenario, so I will go ahead and prepare a few options based on this.'
Whenever I'm driving through an area of a town, and it gets really foggy, my brain immediately starts having anxiety because of 'Silent Hill.'
For me, the very first video game I ever played would have been 'Return of the Jedi' on the Atari 2600.
I played the first 'Resident Evil' on a PlayStation in high school. I remember, those were the beginning of the survival-horror genre; I've been following it for a very long time.
I've worked on a lot of fighting games, so I was very used to the idea of combat sounds.
The difference between 'Resident Evil: Damnation' and 'Resident Evil 6' is in 'Resident Evil 6' we did facial mo-cap, along with the voice over. We had these little reflectors glued to our faces and these head pieces in this room filled with light with about 40 cameras.
I prefer ensemble casts, but with games like 'Resident Evil 6,' where there's just so much dialogue and recording mo-cap, or with 'Resident Evil: Damnation,' where the story pace is already set by a previous set of mo-cap actors, it makes more sense to do it individually.
'Resident Evil: Damnation' was physically mo-capped and recorded with the mo-cap actors first, so there wasn't a whole lot of flexibility with timing, so it was more stringent. We had to go in individually.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
I consider myself a better storyteller than a Dungeon Master.
