Why a Game Designer Outgrew Video Games

Posted by Brice on March 13, 2010

Image: sean dreilinger

[This article is from my original blog at BriceMorrison.com.  Looking back over it, the content seemed to be something TGP readers would be interested in as well.  I'm still alive, I promise, and the book is coming along great!  Enjoy!]

My mother was never interested in games when I was little. Looking up from her newspaper, she would give a soft smile as she saw my brother and I engrossed in Super Mario Brothers before slipping back into her reading. “Mom!” we called. “Come play Mario with us!” We happily tossed her the controller, only to grimace as we watched her plummet poor Mario off a cliff accidentally. “I don’t like these games. You boys have a good time,” she would say, handing the controller back to us. With a sigh, my brother and I would take back the controls and continue on.

Try as she might, my mother could never get the hang of moving that “tiny man”, as she called him, around the screen. To her, games were toys; children’s play things, a skill not worth investing time in. Games provided no lessons, no useful knowledge, no reward that interested her. They were fine for us, but to her, an intelligent adult, they were a waste of time.

Only entertainment

It was only a few years later when I myself began to share my mother’s point of view. I was disappointed to find that as I matured, I was leaving games behind. While my interests in other media grew substantially more adult, from Nickelodeon to CNN, from Dr. Seuss to George Orwell, games did not seem to have a more intelligent counterpart for me to move to. As I entered college, I became less interested in mindless entertainment and more interested in encountering new ideas. I didn’t want to kill time; I wanted to take advantage of it. I wanted to challenge myself with profound concepts, to learn of new paradigms, processes, and possibilities. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »

What Game Designers can learn from “Avatar”

Posted by Brice on January 21, 2010

Avatar recently became the second highest grossing film of all time, bested only by James Cameron’s previous blockbuster, Titanic.  I was skeptical at first when I saw the trailer, but the box office numbers pushed me over the edge and finally got me in the theater seats, and I was certainly not disappointed.

A film this successful accomplishes so much; whether you are a western anti-mainstream individualist or not, you must appreciate how difficult it is to make a single film that can touch the hearts of so many millions of viewers around the world.  The special effects and artistry put into the world were of course breathtaking and the story…well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avatar offers some great lessons to game designers who are looking to reach a broad audience through an magnificent work of art.  While there is much to learn from Cameron’s masterpiece, there are two main aspects that struck me as particularly timely to today’s game development landscape.  Indie developers are especially encouraged to read on.

[Note that this post is full of spoilers.  Proceed at your own risk if you haven't seen the film.]

You Don’t Have to Always Be Original

When I was younger and more foolish, I used to think that in order to create something great, to design a great game, to tell a great story, it had to be original.  It had to be made up of things that no one had done before, all my own ideas.  If everyone else was making first person shooters, I would make a 2D puzzle-adventure mash up.  If the industry was telling stories about love, I would tell a story about existentialism.  Go against the grain, as they say. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »