Many of us use video games as a way to escape from reality. Nate Simpson just made his own.

In 2009, Simpson, a veteran video-game artist, decided to pack in his day job (as lead artist at Gas Powered Games) and focus on other creative efforts. The end result? Simpson's new comic book, Nonplayer, which hits stores today. The book revolves around a fictional massively multiplayer online game and the people who inhabit it, drawing on influences as varied as animated film director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), author Neal Stephenson (Anathem), and Star Wars.

Simpson graciously took time out of his hectic pre-release schedule to answer a few questions for us via email.

Bitmob: First of all, what is Nonplayer?

Nate Simpson: Nonplayer follows the adventures of Dana Stevens, a late 21st-century college dropout who lives with her mom and delivers tamales for a living. Though her prospects in meatspace are pretty dim, she leads a double life as an elite assassin inside Warriors of Jarvath, a popular full-immersion MMO.

Unknown to her, however, the non-player characters have recently achieved sentience, and they're not all that happy about being hunted for sport. When she kills the wife of celebrity NPC King Heremoth, she ends up the target of a major blood vendetta that may or may not be confined to the world of Jarvath. 

Bitmob: Where did the inspiration for Nonplayer come from? Any games, works of art, concepts, themes?

NS: Well, the event that triggered my departure from the video-games industry was an encounter with a book of storyboards from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa. That book opened my eyes to the sort of world-building that could be accomplished by one person. Certainly that film, as well as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, had some effect on the way that I think about story.

It's pretty difficult to cherry-pick the individual ingredients that went into Nonplayer, but I'm heavily influenced by the artwork of guys like Moebius, Geof Darrow, William Stout, and Arthur Rackham. I'm also a big sci-fi buff, and my ideas about the future probably owe a lot to Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson.

And film-wise, it's hard not to acknowledge the influence of The Matrix, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings.

Bitmob: You essentially designed an MMO to serve as the setting for Nonplayer. What was that like? Is your in-universe "game" any fun?

NS: I think the best way to describe Warriors of Jarvath is to call it a fantasy-themed virtual reality with an emergent quest structure. The whole idea is that no two NPCs are the same, and when they die, they're gone forever. So no two players ever have the same experience, which is very different from current MMOs.

It's a parallel world with just as much variety as our world -- the only difference is that a player can act without fear of reprisal in a place where the rules are very different. Dana can't go around chopping up guys with swords out in the real world, but she can go nuts in Jarvath. And she can ride around on a giant flying cat.

NS: It's definitely a big change. Working in comics is a far lonelier existence, for one -- at a game company, you sit in a communal pit with other artists, and there's a constant exchange of ideas. But of course there's a flip side to that sort of collaboration -- new ideas have to not only pass muster among managers and designers, they must be adaptable to myriad technical, budgetary, and scheduling constraints.

Comics, by contrast, are very liberating. Someone said that drawing a comic is like making a film with an unlimited budget -- you can cast any actors you like and place them in any conceivable setting. That's pretty intoxicating!

Bitmob: Talk about the importance of art and visual design in video games. Where does the medium need to go artistically?

NS: Just over the couple of years I've been away, the technology has taken so many leaps. Dead Space 2, for example, is a jaw-dropping accomplishment! [But] I have noticed that, as the technology has become more and more capable of replicating the real world, the visual design for many games has moved in a more generic direction. I don't know if that's a function of having such large art teams now, or perhaps there's just some confusion going on between the words "realistic" and "quotidian."

I'd like to see more being done with interesting silhouettes and color schemes, both of which seem to have fallen by the wayside as teams have focused instead on density of detail and realistic lighting.

Bitmob: What are some of your favorite games, either visually or just in general?

NS: Half-Life 2 and Portal are huge milestones in world-building -- especially Portal, which implied so much richness while showing so little. I'm a total sucker for Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, too. I still can't believe how much beauty those guys managed to squeeze out of a PS2. And I've really enjoyed the Katamari Damacy games -- I love everything about them, from the music to the art design. Now I've got the Katamari theme stuck in my head....

Bitmob: What do you think gamers can learn from comics and vice versa?

Nonplayer #1's first printing hits comic book stores in the U.S. today and the UK on Friday, but Simpson says to grab them quickly, as both retailers and publisher Image Comics drastically underestimated the demand. But don't fret -- a second printing is soon to follow.

In the meantime, you can visit www.nonplayercomic.com, where Simpson is also selling poster-sized prints of some pages from the first issue. And his blog, Project Waldo, gives some great insight into the making of Nonplayer.