When you do press junket style events, it can be a little repetitive. While you try really, really, hard to try and make each interview slightly different, when you are doing a dozen (or even more) over a couple of days is does get a bit, well, routine. So it was quite nice during the recent GDC sessions to do an interview with Steven Crews from MMO Gamer. He was on assignment and as he admitted up front to not really having played the game much (also refreshing to get an honest approach from the guy!) we ended up having a much more winding, and possibly more interesting discussion about MMO gaming in general. I don't usually link the interviews I do for work on this blog, but this one was a little different, and is much more about general design theory so I wanted to link it here too.
You can find the entire interview in two parts here and here
It's important to note though, I am talking about an approach to design, and I don't claim for a minute that any title I have worked, or work, on has mastered it! Like any noble intention it is more about keeping your goal in mind, learning from your mistakes and refining after every attempt to make the next try better. It is something you work towards and aspire to rather than neccessarily achieve all the time. I'd love to one day see us hit those marks everytime, we aren't there yet though (either individually or as a genre)!
I did have a lot of fun discussing it though :)
You can find the entire interview in two parts here and here
It's important to note though, I am talking about an approach to design, and I don't claim for a minute that any title I have worked, or work, on has mastered it! Like any noble intention it is more about keeping your goal in mind, learning from your mistakes and refining after every attempt to make the next try better. It is something you work towards and aspire to rather than neccessarily achieve all the time. I'd love to one day see us hit those marks everytime, we aren't there yet though (either individually or as a genre)!
I did have a lot of fun discussing it though :)
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