God of War Ragnarok: the director discovered he suffered from aphantasia during development

God of War Ragnarok

God of War Ragnarok offers various new features for the saga and one of these is not directly related to the game. For example, the game had a new director compared to the previous one: let's talk about Eric Williams, who was interviewed by GameInformer. During the dialogue, the director also revealed a curiosity: during development he discovered that he suffers from aphantasia.

For those who do not know what we are talking about, aphantasia is "the condition of the mind that is not capable to visualize no mental image, as if the mind's eye were completely blind. " The question arose during a GameInformer question related to the magnitude of God of War Ragnarok.

Williams explains that he has a game management system in Excel in which all the fragments of each game sequence are organized, explaining them one by one and pointing out how they are connected and how much time they take to the player. This is a more "mathematical" approach, explains Williams, as he comes from that world (his background is astronomy and mathematics), unlike Barlog (director of the previous game) who from the point of view Williams is more of a creative, a writer and an actor.

Kratos vs. Thor Going on, Williams says his method was groundbreaking for the team. Then he states that his method derives from the fact that he suffers from aphantasia: he cannot visually imagine something, so he compensates by creating a lot of references and images for everything. An artist also told him there was no need, but Williams replied that he needed it.

He said, "I do, because I need to know we're looking at the same thing. I didn't even know it existed. I thought it was always just a saying." I see it in my eye mind. "And then I read it in Pixar's book, Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" and [the former Pixar boss ] Ed Catmull talks about it and I said to myself: Wow, is that real? "

" I started researching and then I started explaining it to people and they said, "Oh, there is no one wonders why you do it! ". Because I have a directory of animated gifs for all animators, for all fights. It's like 6000 gifs or something, because I got all these references. "

" They love it, but they said, "There's no need to do all this. We know what a round kick looks like. ". And I: "Yes, but not this". This was the strange thing. And then they started saying, "He's just obsessive about all these things." So I kept doing it. I thought, "Well, I'm already compensating, so I'll keep doing it more and more." Some people get angry because they say, "Dude, you're taking away all the creative fun because you just say" do this "", but then I discovered a different technique: I would come up with things that didn't seem to fit together and give them a description and they they understood how to put it all together. "

It seems that Williams was able to exploit his aphantasia to organize his work. If you too want to see things and not just imagine them, you must see the presentation at the San Siro stadium in God of War Ragnarok.

Source Have you noticed any errors?