Notes from Games that inspired leading innovators GDC 2012

2023-12-30

Pinball construction set

Not constrained by technology – Tried to do many things, the most powerful tool is to stimulate players’ imagination. Made Pirates, Civilization and Railroad Tycoon after that.
What was cool as a kid – Inspired to take real world events and bring them to life, things he considered to be fascinating and cool as a kid.
Random maps – Adds a lot of replayability.
Mix genres – Wasn’t just an arcade, exploration or economics game, it blended together.
Open World – You are the boss, travel anywhere you want, and cool adventures would happen, your experience would be very different from others.

Ghosts with personality
Different from shooting and racing. [which was the focus of most other arcade games at the time]
Pills – They chase you, and then you eat them, but they come back.
limitless possibilities of game design – And it shows that game design can be anything you can think of, it just blew everything out of the mental box the whole industry was in..
Stealth genre

Danger of games becoming self referential – We built games on our experience as kids, now games are built on games that you liked. Encourage game designers to reach out to their experience, what do they think is cool other then other games they have played. That’s where I think other ideas potential can come from.
Relevance – Experience that changes the way you think of the world, you don’t need high res graphics, but relevance though, reflect back on your life. social games, user created.
Individualize games with metrics – There’s lots of metrics, which can be used to customize the games to each individual, the most powerful path for games that we haven’t really tapped into.

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