Um, my family, my tribe, uh, started out with the Looking Glass crew in Boston. So, I went to Looking Glass’s last party, their wake, in like 2000, and I had some friends in that community, um, Doug Church, and Chris Hecker, John Blow, um, we were all sort of - we all met around that time, at least I met them around that time. And then participated in the Indie Game Jam in Oakland. Um, and I was just a grad student then, so I wasn’t really - I didn’t think of myself as a game designer. But that community of people that was interested in what games could be, um, the ideas of the Indie Game Jam that then became fundamentally, uh, focused of the experimental game play workshop which now I run at GDC every year. Um, those ideas were fundamental to my - to my introduction to the community. And I think there were two things about that community that I really resonated with. The first was that it was about what if. What if we put shitloads of guys on screen at once? What if you could just do anything with physics? What if, what if, what if. And that is part of that future thinking, the boundary pushing that I really like. And the other was just the openness of the community, um, I always felt really welcome and included, uh, I could say what I wanted to say and imagine what I wanted to imagine, even if it was really weird it was like part of the dialogue. Um, Daniel [Van Merike], Chris, and John, and Doug, uh, Warren Specter, and Will Wright have all been incredibly kind to me, um, and incredibly inspirational to me, um, as a designer, and I think as a person who is trying to see what we could be doing with the industry. I actually have the box for Thief and I keep that in my little cache of objects that I keep in my office to inspire me to do better.
