Actually one of the very first books I ever read about computer game design was The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford, um, and it’s a very small book. It’s very simple. It has a very programmatic approach to thinking about mechanics and how games work. Bu in that book he says something really critical, I think, which is that if you have data in your games just hanging out, and it’s not changing, it’s not being motivated by the player’s actions to do something, then it’s just kind of a waste of data. And this comes from a time when, you know, you had to really be focused on how much data you were using. How many little tiny bits and bytes were in the game. But, that philosophy of thinking that everything in the game should be touched by the player and transformed by the player, um, I think it’s fundamental, this idea that your interaction with the space, um, is what makes it have meaning, you know. When you look at a game like Journey versus a game like Minecraft, let’s say. In Minecraft it’s about providing enough landscape and enough tools and resources for the player to really express themselves through their actions, right? Um, anticipating what the player wants in that case is about building the systems from the ground up so that they have the right [combinatorics] and they feel explosive and really [combinatorics] and huge, um, but not so huge that you’re intimidated. When you look at something like Journey, anticipating what the player wants is about understanding the feeling of being lost in a big space. And designing the environment so that when I wake up and I see the mountain, I go there. And then in the middle you have this potential to be building a game that’s actually dynamically creating content based on what the player does. And I think for that we have a lot of blue ocean. There are a lot of places we could be going with that. And I do think that in the future games we’ll do more and more of it. Um, we’re getting better at it every year. It takes a little bit longer than maybe an AI, you know, person would hope. But I believe that in the future we will begin to really understand through watching lots of players interact with the system or paying a lot more attention to the data that comes in through controllers and interfaces what players really want.
