I’ll give you an analogy that I often use for game design. I often feel that game design is very much like cooking, and a lot of what we do as designers is, uh, creating a recipe, and then helping other people follow it, um, and to take that analogy, it’s a bit like asking, is food universal and global, and it is, but then you ask, is South Korea always going to be different from the U.S., and probably so, and, you know, will kimchi ever catch on in the U.S. and everyone wants it? I doubt it, but on the other hand, 30 years ago, I grew up in Chicago, and if you had told me at that point that pretty soon, pretty much all over the U.S., people will be eating raw fish from, you know, Japanese-style sushi, I would’ve just laughed out loud. It was the last-I mean, it almost would feel like the least likely thing to go global, and yet I’ve had sushi all around the world, and I’m amused at how similar the experience is, even when a Japanese, you know, kimono-clad waitress was speaking to me in German in Berlin, having, you know, serving sushi. It just was very familiar that way. Or Italian food - it’s one of the things I like to order when I travel, because often, you know, I can order it using the Italian names, no matter what country I’m in even if I can’t speak any of the rest of the language. So, in a similar way, there are certain styles of games that cross over and, much like sushi in fact, a lot of the Japanese games have gone global, even though, much like Japanese cooking, within Japan they pretty much only consume what they do internally - they don’t bring in a lot of stuff from the outside. There are a few examples that sneak in there. And I really think that that analogy holds, that any group, even people who have never seen a computer or phone before, they will get interested in games, and certainly games, of course, long predate any of those technologies. Even board game technology is a very new invention compared to the ancient games that are out there. Um, but that need for some kind of game, I really think games are an evolutionary uh, answer to having a really safe but challenging way to practice survival skills, and I believe it is literally part of our genome that we’re - we have a tendency to enjoy them for that reason. All humans everywhere in the world, but much like food, uh, there are regional preferences that are pretty deeply ingrained, and I love the variety in the world. It’s going to be a sad world when we’re all eating exactly the same thing, and I hope that day never comes, and I hope we always have fresh, different games to play all the time as well.
