So, when you - when you talk about the creative process in games, um, it’s really difficult because first of all there are so many different creative processes. If you’re talking about the creative process on a triple A console game, uh, that’s going to be very different than talking about the creative process on a mobile game that’s done by a, you know, two or three person studio, right, uh, in their garage. Um, if you talk about the process of a game like The Night Journey, which I made together with a media artist, Bill Viola, um, that game had a completely different creative process than any other game that I’d been involved with up until then. And that was because you had the bringing together of, uh, you know, Bill’s artistic sensibilities with a game design sensibility. And, uh, so, for me, you know, defining the creative process of games I - I kind of just sort of - I - I kind of roll my eyes back. But if I’m going to generalize then I would say that, uh, first and foremost, uh, games require a kind of - almost like a band like mentality when you’re making them. There are different people. They have different instruments and they’ve got to get in sync with each other and that means, to some extent, they have to understand each other’s language. So, you’ve got a programmer who’s thinking about the absolutes of what the computer needs to know, um, you know, to be told what to do, right? And you’ve got a visual artist who’s thinking about how it needs to look and feel. And you’ve got a game designer that’s trying to interpret, ahead of time, what it is that the player is going to want to do and what they should be able to do and how that game is going to perform. And all of these folks have to get together and really have this, almost, you know, Vulcan mind meld, if you will, about how all of their pieces are going to fit into this engine that’s going to, you know, create this possibility space of play.
