Lessons in life, brought to you by Prince of Persia

1UP sat down with Prince of Persia (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, DS) producer Ben Mattes and level designer Michael McIntyre and talked about the hidden meaning behind the game. While they understand that some gamers are just fine with simply playing, they’d also like gamers to pause and reflect as they play.

They’re more than just games, apparently they’re also sources of epiphanies and life lessons. Ubisoft‘s Prince of Persia (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, DS) producer Ben Mattes and level designer Michael Mcintyre don’t want their games to be just games – they also want gamers to pause and reflect as they play.

“I think one of the things we really want people to take away from this game is that there’s more to it than meets the eye,” said Matters. When we take bad guys down, he’d want us to think about how corruption affects us. When we save the world, what does it mean to us? When this noble savage helps the guardian of light, what does this represent?

While that’s what they would prefer, Mattes also said is alright if you don’t. In fact, he cites The Simpsons as an example – you can laugh along to it, and you’re not required to process any more than that. “We’re really conscious of not hitting the player over the head with a sledgehammer about that kind of stuff, maybe they’ll get it, maybe they won’t,” he said.

I think what’s kind of neat is that you don’t have to care about that, and you don’t have to get that, and you can still have lots of fun. But if you do get it, maybe, just maybe, you’ll ask yourself a question about your own life after having played this game and feel like you’ve learned something. Maybe. And if you have, I think we can pat ourselves on the back as developers by saying we’ve allowed people to grow just a little bit — just a little bit — as humans solely through entertaining them. Not many mediums can do that.

They don’t want to reveal exactly what they have in store so that players won’t be on the lookout for anything in particular. In fact, they’d prefer that gamers come up with their own theories about what the devs are sending across.

They do have a point. Plus it’s extra satisfying to play a game knowing it made you think, at least for some of us. But it’s also fair to those who prefer to just aim and shoot to not require for them to enjoy the game. This is one of the reasons some people didn’t like Xenogears back in the PS One. Some found that it’s too much to process, and it dragged the game between long intervals of long processing and not fighting.

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Buy: Prince of Persia [(Xbox 360), (PS3), (PC)]

Via 1UP