Fumito Ueda, creator of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, said in a talk with Eric Chahi that the idea of holding hands in ICO grew out of a game he played at a friend’s house in college. That game was Chahi’s Another World, also known as Out of This World.

The talk took place at The Tenth Mosaic, an event that refers to games as “the tenth art.”

Read moreOur earlier digest on The Tenth Mosaic

The influence went beyond the hand-holding. Ueda recalled that Another World made him realize a world doesn’t have to be built around the needs of the game. It can exist for its own sake.

Both creators stressed evoking emotion through actions and gestures rather than dialogue or text. They also shared the view that technical constraints give a work its character. The examples that came up were the fog in ICO and the memory limit in Shadow of the Colossus.

Ueda also worked on The Last Guardian. Ueda said that on that game, moving players emotionally was not a direct goal. What mattered, he explained, was getting players to feel the environment as real. A metaphor came up in the talk too: a film is more like a finished dish, while playing a game is more like being given the ingredients and cooking the dish yourself.

So how does Ueda decide what to make? Ueda said that when making design decisions, he asks whether he would want to pick up the game if he were a player. Chahi talked about his own standard as a player. He said he keeps a personal ranking of the indie games he plays, and a game that pulls him in within the first 20 minutes is one he keeps playing.