Over at the Japanese O’Reilly site, there’s another interview of me conducted by Masaya Matsuura. The Japanese link is O’Reilly Village / オラの村: 『「おもしろい」のゲームデザイン』の原著者に松浦雅也さんがインタビュー, but here’s my original replies in English:
I’ll be at Living Game Worlds 2006 in February… looks like an interesting day of sessions, plus seeing Will and of course the Georgia crew of Janet, Amy, Ian, and the rest is always nice.
Has anyone ever noticed that captchas (the thingies that make you type in a nonsense sequence of letters) can sometimes make great tools for alien-name generators?
I just got one that asked me to type in “Eerep.” I immediately conjured in my mind someone green, with flippers, nice big black eyes, rubbery skin…
(The image is one of my old doodles…)
I saw this comment tossed off in a thread on Evil Avatar responding to the Moore’s Wall post.
That is the problem with Raph Koster’s ideas. No other entertainment media is iterative. Before a movie starts shooting, they have the entire film written, storyboarded, cast, locations rented, sets made, etc. Books have a complete story outline and usually a sample chapter written before getting a publisher’s go ahead. None of this is left to chance. . . none of it is left to a simulation.
Lost Garden: Creating a system of game play notation is a fairly direct application of music notation towards measuring gameplay flow. Interesting. I am guessing that DanC hasn’t seen my own Grammar of Gameplay” stuff.
There’s a group out there (they’re operating kinda quietly, so I don’t want to say who or where) that has elaborated the grammar-and-syntax idea to the point where they say they can actually spec out games with it. I am supposed to hear more sometime soon. 🙂
