Jenova Chen - Influences and Philosophy

Influences and Philosophy

Chen plays a wide variety of video games, but he names his greatest influences as Katamari Damacy, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. He also names Final Fantasy VII as an influence, and the game that he took his adopted name from. He personally plays games "competitively", including titles such as Street Fighter IV and StarCraft. He feels he has a competitive nature, which he has turned towards "winning" at being a game designer by creating games that are unlike what is in the market rather than towards creating competitive games. As he was raised in China and works in America, Chen feels that he cannot fully relate to either culture as a game designer. As such, instead of trying to make games that fit perfectly with one culture he tries to make games that tap into feelings that are universal and independent of culture.

When Chen quit Maxis to re-join Thatgamecompany, he did so knowing that it would mean taking less pay and having a less stable career. He felt, though, that it was important to the industry and medium as a whole to create games that provoked different emotional responses in the player than just excitement or fear. While Chen is not opposed to making action games, and his company has made internal "exciting" games that were well received at Sony, he feels that there is no point to Thatgamecompany commercially producing games like that instead of working for existing game developers, as they would not be making anything new that justified the cost of remaining an independent studio. Similarly, Chen does not intend for Thatgamecompany to make "big budget blockbuster games", as the pressure on profits that that entails would stifle the innovation that he wants Thatgamecompany to focus on. Chen believes that for video games to become a mature medium like film, the industry as a whole needs to create a wide range of emotional responses to their games, similar to how film has thriller, romance, and comedy genres based on the emotions they provoke. He feels that there are only three ways for video games to impact adults in the same way they do children: "intellectually, whereby the work reveals a new perspective about the world that you have not seen before," by "emotionally touching someone," and "by creating a social environment where the intellectual or emotional stimulation could happen from other people."