Richard Rouse III

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Richard Rouse III is an American video game designer and writer best known as the designer of The Suffering games and the author of Game Design: Theory & Practice.

Rouse started out as a writer at Macintosh gaming magazines like Inside Mac Games and Mac Games Digest while attending the University of Chicago. This eventually led to the creation of his own company, Paranoid Productions, which produced two Macintosh games, the story-centric fantasy RPG Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis and the military first-person shooter and strategy hybrid Damage Incorporated. Rouse went on to work at Leaping Lizard Software where he was lead designer on the 1998 3D remake of Centipede.

From there he moved to Surreal Software where he worked on a cancelled western game called Gunslinger and subsequently contributed to Drakan: The Ancients' Gates. After that he was lead designer and writer on the action horror game The Suffering and creative director and writer on its sequel, The Suffering: Ties That Bind.

Currently he is the Director of Game Design at Midway.

Rouse has written extensively about game design, most notably in his book Game Design: Theory & Practice, first released in 2001 and subsequently revised in 2004. He has also been published in magazines including Game Developer, Develop, and Siggraph Computer Graphics, and has spoken at the Game Developer's Conference and E3.

Rouse is particularly interested in storytelling and the exploration of morality in games. From his book, Game Design: Theory & Practice:

"In fact, the dream of interactive stories is what drew me into game development in the first place. Imagine all of the power of a story in a novel, with its ability to grab hold and captivate the reader, to make her care about the characters in the story, to change her perception of the world, and, in some special instances, to change the way she lives her life. Now imagine how much more powerful that would be if, instead of reading about the actions of other characters, the reader was the main character in the story and was able to make choices that would affect the shape, direction, and outcome of the story. This interactive reader could see the ramifications of different choices made in different situations, and since it was her own choices that determined the nature of the story, the interactive story’s draw would be that much more compelling than a traditional story. The mind boggles at the possibilities."

This interest is evident in his games. In The Suffering the player starts out with amnesia about a crime he may or may not have committed. Throughout the game the player is presented with a series of moral choices that are woven into the story. The decisions the player makes end up determining whether they are guilty or innocent of the crime. The sequel similarly explored morality and the different sides of personality. Similarly, in Odyssey the player is faced with moral choices throughout the story, culminating in conflicting choice at the end, with no ending being completely "happy."