dwlt.thinksOutLoud

Bad GameCity, No Biscuit

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:14:48 +0100

GamesIndustry.biz reports that “GameCity have launched the GameCity Prize, which it hopes will be the “Turner / Booker / Mercury Prize” of the industry.”

Brilliant - I’ve argued before that we need prizes to celebrate the best of British talent. That’s what the Turner (best British visual artist under the age of 50) and Mercury (best album from the UK and Ireland) prizes are about, and the Booker prize is for Commonwealth authors writing in English. The jury for the prize is fantastic, and the announcement comes with the following comment from Iain Simons, the brains behind GameCity:

The GameCity Prize is about videogames gaining cultural confidence and expressing their value in something other than financial terms. If games are worth almost £3 billion a year in the UK - then surely they’re worth thinking about too.

Yes, absolutely! Let’s make a fuss and show off the best of what’s made in the UK! Let’s show that we’re not just about GTA.

Except. Except except except. The finalists announced for the GameCity prize are from the following countries: Norway, Denmark, USA, Japan (twice), Canada and Sweden. All worthy games, no doubt, and they’ll all win countless awards from other places. But they’ll all win countless awards from other places.

TIGA and UKIE spend all their time talking up the UK industry to anyone and everyone who will listen, and yet neither BAFTA nor GameCity (arguably the only other UK organisation that could give such a prize the credibility and platform it requires) are taking the opportunity to celebrate the industry.

Or is our industry not as good as we claim?

Happy Quarrel Day!

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:54:02 +0100

Finally. A full year, four months and three weeks since Black Easter Monday, Quarrel has seen the light of day, and you can now actually buy it for iPhone and iPad (Xbox next, with other platforms to follow, I believe). You should do that now.

The first time I saw Quarrel was almost exactly three years ago today. I was in the process of leaving Slam, and I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I paid a visit to Denki to see what they were up to, since I hadn’t been for a while. Colin and Gary showed me a few of the pilot games they had (just about) secured funding for, one of which was of course Quarrel. Every single one blew me away, and I knew I needed to be working with them. Thankfully for me, they agreed.

Things clearly didn’t pan out exactly as we planned three years ago, but Quarrel is a game that I’m incredibly proud to have played a tiny part in the creation of. The fact that I still love to play the game after being involved with it for that length of time should say something about it’s quality and longevity. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I do.

Sacrificing IP

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:26:31 +0100

There was a bit of a stramash last week regarding who gets to own the Intellectual Property (registration required) rights to games when someone other than the creator is paying for it. Good way to get publicity for a new publisher, some might say.

As you might expect, there was a mix of outrage, agreement, indifference and factual error in the comments that followed the article. Given that the most common question I’m asked in my role at the Cultural Enterprise Office is “Where can I get money?”, there were a surprising number of people prepared to turn down the chance to get their product made.

There’s a truism thrown around that game creators must maintain control over their IP at all costs. It’s certainly true that the only way you can build a sustainable games company is to retain as many rights to as many things as possible, but you also need a plan that actively builds that value. Simply making a game and releasing it will technically provide you with some IP, but if no one knows it exists is it actually valuable?

Sometimes, it’s worth sacrificing IP to reach your ultimate destination. Pixar never owned the IP in Toy Story. It was all transferred to Disney in the funding deal for the film. Pixar did retain several royalty streams as part of the deal (including merchandise, which for some reason no one at Disney thought would be a big deal in a movie about toys), but Disney had full control over when or if a sequel would happen, for example. The clue that there was a masterplan at work is the clause that stated Pixar’s logo would be given equal prominence to the Disney logo in all promotional materials.

When Pixar filed to go public (their IPO date was the week after Toy Story was due to open), they explicitly stated they wanted to build the next big consumer facing movie brand of note. A brand that acted as a stamp of quality and expectation in the same way as Disney, for example (the only other example). I’d say they certainly managed to achieve that, given that more than five years after Disney acquired them, the name “Pixar” lives on above the film name.

Not owning the IP to Toy Story didn’t hold Pixar back, but they had a clear understanding of why it didn’t matter quite so much at that point. So, by all means negotiate to keep your IP, but make sure you have a clear understanding of what you’re negotiating for.

Are Game Makers Scared of Crowdfunding?

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:13:00 +0100

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site that can’t handle non-US projects, posted some stats from its first 10,000 funded projects:

Music and Film clearly dominate, taking 61.5% of all projects between them, but Games are way down at the other end of the scale, with just 180 projects: 1.8%.

Why? There’s an IGDA selected project page, after all. ~~I’ve asked IndieGoGo (which does handle non-US projects) how games figured into their stats, and I’m waiting for them to get back to me. I’ll update this post as and when they do so.~~ Update: IndieGoGo will only say that games are a “steadily increasing percentage” of their 30,000+ campaigns. That makes me think it’s a low percentage.

Are games creators deliberately avoiding this funding model? If so, why? Especially given that “lack of funding” is one of the main reasons given for not making something. Do they think they won’t raise enough money? You might not raise enough to make a big console game, but Urbanized (a documentary sequel to Helvetica and Objectified) raised $118,505. Are players not interested in supporting game makers? Do players even know who the game makers are? Are the rewards offered by games projects powerful enough?

Are game makers trying but failing? I follow a fair few people on Twitter from across film, games, music and theatre. I see lots of project promotion from all those sectors except games, which leads me to suspect that game makers aren’t even trying it out.

Clearly, I have more questions than answers about this, but given the fuss about this funding model in the worlds of film, music and art, I’m curious as to why more don’t seem to have taken this route.

What It Takes

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:58:29 +0100

Letters of Note is a site that collects “fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” There’s a letter from Pixar director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) originally posted last summer, but which I’ve seen doing the rounds again recently.

Mostly, people are picking up the closing line: “As John Lasseter likes to say, our films don’t get finished, they just get released” - a common refrain from artists - but it’s an earlier line that jumps out at me:

It takes a lot of work (and rework, and rework and rework) to get it right.

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:32:42 +0100

Ken Levine, of Bioshock fame, on raising industry profile (free registration required):

It’s not their fault. It’s our fault. As an industry we need to think of ourselves differently. We need to think of ourselves that way and present ourselves that way… We have a responsibility … to educate people who don’t think of games. Like the people booking those [chat] shows.

His point is that the games industry as a whole, isn’t that great at raising it’s own profile, or the profile of those who work within it. Unless, of course, it’s some sort of “video nasty” type story (e.g., Manhunt, Hot Coffee).

This is something I’ve been thinking about over the last week or so, triggered by a couple of shows on BBC Scotland’s Artworks Scotland strand. The first was about Scottish bands heading out to SXSW earlier this year. The second about Scotland’s comic book writers and artists. Why isn’t there a third show about Scotland’s games industry?

Anecdotally, I’ve seen and heard plenty of evidence over the last couple of years that school pupils and university students don’t have a huge awareness of where games are made in the UK, what games are made in the UK, and the fact that there’s an industry beyond EA, Activision, UbiSoft, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft or Take 2. Combine this with quality of life and workplace diversity issues (never mind the lack of creative diversity), and we have ourselves a bit of an image problem. And it’s no use talking to ourselves about it.

TIGA have done a fantastic job of raising awareness of the industry at a government level, and are rightly applauded for that. But I agree with Levine’s sentiments: it’s up to the creators of games to get out there and talk to the world, rather than just to ourselves. We can’t (and shouldn’t) rely on a trade association to do that, we can’t (and shouldn’t) rely on the media to come to us. If we don’t talk to the world about what we do, we have no right to complain about being misrepresented or misunderstood.

Australia's "Games" Tax Credit

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:32:00 +0100

Develop reports on Australia’s tax relief scheme:

That breakthrough scheme sets aside $1.9 billion for digital creative companies across the country.

Good for Australia, except… well, it’s not a tax credit for “digital creative companies” at all (and it’s also not $1.9 billion). It’s a pure R&D tax credit, according to the Australian’s Innovation Ministry:

The Gillard Labor Government’s $1.8 billion R&D Tax Credit will deliver more funding to innovative firms – including manufacturers, ICT and biotech.

From what I’ve read, this scheme for Australia sounds almost identical to the scheme we already have here in the UK. It’s not just some magical pot of gold that pours money into the bank accounts of games companies (or indeed, any company). That’s what the “credit” part in the names of these schemes means.

Meanwhile, Tony Reed, CEO of the Game Developers Association of Australia, says:

Our goal at the GDAA is to prepare Australia to become one of the top three territories in the world for game development within the next five years. I think this can be achieved.

I’m sure he does. I believe that the UK can achieve the same. What I don’t believe is that a tax credit scheme, however designed, is the singular basis on which that achievement will be made.

EA & PopCap

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:07:07 +0100

So the rumour du jour of course is that EA are attempting to buy PopCap for $1 billion (according to TechCrunch; VentureBeat also has coverage). I was looking forward to PopCap going public, for a couple of reasons. First, I was curious to see the inner workings of the company opened. Secondly, I think it would have been a great thing for the industry in general to step eating its own young and have a potentially hugely-powerful new pillar besides the usual suspects.

Both pieces linked above have some weird bits of reporting, though:

TechCrunch implies that PopCap is a “hot gaming startup” - whilst two paragraphs later noting that the company was founded in 2000.
TechCrunch claims that it would be a big deal for EA, clearly forgetting that they paid $680mn for Jamdat in 2005.
VentureBeat states “EA already tried buying a social gaming company”. Sigh. A) PopCap games are available on every platform you can think of; B) Given that PopCap are the number 3 games company on Facebook (behind Zynga, and yes, EA) according to the same report, this puts EA into a comfortable second place.
A later report from TechCrunch says this deal is a “Hail Mary pass from EA to break into mobile and social gaming”. Umm. But they’re #2 in social, apparently, and made $242mn from mobile in FY2011, a solid 29% of their overall revenue.

EA have gone on the record as saying they’re reinventing their business as fast as they can to take advantage of the opportunities available in digital. PopCap built their business in digital, and have a great track record of introducing successful new titles.

EA’s interest in PopCap is nothing to do with getting into markets they’re already doing quite well in. EA’s interest is centred around PopCap’s ability to continually introduce new games and to make money from them. That’s why they bought Chillingo rather than Rovio. The fact that PopCap have also making interesting deals in Asia can’t have gone unnoticed either.

There’s also some consternation over the price, and I’ve seen various people saying it’s a sign of a bubble. My take is that $1bn is basically the minimum price required to stop PopCap going public - anything less wouldn’t be worth their while. Given how well they manage to grow their revenue and take advantage of new platforms, I think it may actually be a relatively cheap deal in the long-term. PopCap may also be thinking that the impending Groupon IPO will actually screw up their opportunity, given all the concerns about Groupon’s ability to actually turn a profit.

From EA’s point of view, I’d say it’s a great deal. I’d (clearly) prefer that PopCap stayed independent. PopCap themselves provided an unofficial politician-esque response saying that “the company was not planning to sell to any other company for $1 billion” - so they might be selling for a different price, then. We shall see.

Teach Yourself Enough

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:37:05 +0100

Did Dennis Crowley write the original code for Foursquare (Dodgeball) himself?

Incidentally, if you’ve got an idea but aren’t particularly technical you should really consider the example Dennis set here. He didn’t really know what he was doing but he sat down, taught himself enough to crank out a prototype, and figured it out from there. Anyone can do this sort of thing with enough hard work.

The Business of Art

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:51:38 +0100

Mule Design: Getting Comfortable With Contracts:

I am a designer. I work for a living, I solve problems within a set of constraints, I hire people, I rent space, I pay bills, and I have payroll to meet. These things are not in addition to the job, they are A PART OF the job. None of this came naturally to me. I had to learn it all.

Jay-Z, writing in Decoded:

But whoever said that artists shouldn’t pay attention to their business was probably someone with their hand in some artist’s pocket.

Ed Burns explains why it matters:

For me, it’s about the ability to make another one.

Innovative Consumption

Thu, 26 May 2011 10:24:07 +0100

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

From a business perspective, the willingness of consumers to take risks means that new technologies can see profit faster here than they can elsewhere. That encourages inventors to invent, and investors to pour money into startups. (It’s no coincidence that the modern venture-capital industry got its start here.) And the speed with which successful products are taken up also allows companies to benefit from economies of scale sooner, bringing prices down and making it easier to reach even more customers.

Essentially, perhaps it wouldn’t matter if Facebook or Zynga or Dropbox were UK companies (assuming they were reliant on UK consumers only). In other words, the US is how to build your audience for something new.

Incidentally, yesterday Ian Livingstone asked how we could have the next Zynga be British. I’d say it’s already been and sold itself to EA for a large amount of money: Playfish. And related to the above, they focused on the US from day one.

PopCap's Hidden Gems

Mon, 23 May 2011 16:08:03 +0100

Amongst all the chatter about PopCap’s likely IPO later this year, and the success of games such as Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled and Peggle, one thing that’s missing is a discussion of what underlies PopCap’s ability to even consider an IPO: predictability. Games are generally considered to be a hit driven business (and by extension, a miss-led industry), so how do you mitigate those concerns? In my mind, that comes from an aspect of PopCap that I’ve seen zero comment about: their ability to manage their games and brands.

Everyone knows about the success of Bejeweled, Bookworm, et al, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about their many hidden object games. How many, exactly? Let us count them:

4 in the Amazing Adventures series;
4 in the Mystery P.I series;
2 in the Escape series;
Vacation Quest (I’m going to guess this is the start of a new series).

For those skipping ahead, that’s 11 in total, from their current line-up of 28 PC downloadable ‘favorites’ (source).

Given that these games can easily sell in their tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, and that PopCap have produced multiple editions within each franchise, something tells me they’re not doing too badly out of these games.

These may not be the games that win the plaudits and awards and press, but I’m pretty sure they contribute to PopCap’s bottom line in a reasonably predictable manner. They may well be the equivalent of EA’s annually updated sports games, but without the massive licensing fees attached.

An even more undiscussed (is that possible?) aspect of this ability is the way they take their games to as many platforms and sales channels as possible, including boxed product at retail. From everything I’ve heard over the years, PopCap’s games do phenomenally well in stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, etc. Bear in mind that not everyone has a broadband connection, even (especially?) not in the US, so this is still an overlooked channel for most game creators; one that PopCap’s games fit perfectly. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see retail forming a large portion of PopCap’s income.

PopCap’s ability to nurture their franchises gives their games a far longer shelf-life than is normally associated with the industry. The Bejeweled series is the prime example of this, having sold more than 50 million copies since it’s debut in 2001, but they’ve repeated the formula over and over. They’re amongst the best brand stewards in the industry, alongside Blizzard, Nintendo, and Valve.

All this predictability allows PopCap to then go off and experiment with any number of ideas. They can take an extra year to finish Plants vs Zombies, to make sure it has the right level of polish. It means they can introduce new brands, and invest enough to ensure success in the market, resulting in more growth as they take the game to the myriad platforms that exist today.

To an uninformed observer like me, PopCap’s business model seems perfectly designed to support being a public company. Actually, scratch that; whether public or private, they seem to have the model pretty much nailed.

"At its heart, making toys is about using existing technology skilfully to deliver a surprising..."

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:15:19 +0100

“At its heart, making toys is about using existing technology skilfully to deliver a surprising experience. It’s not a matter of whether or not the tech is cutting edge, but whether or not people think it’s fun.”

- Saturo Iwata, Nintendo’s President & CEO, quoted in Nintendo Magic

On Tax Breaks

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:41:15 +0000

[This has been sitting in draft for a while. I thought I’d post it in advance of the budget this week.]

Way back in June 2010, the government decided to axe the proposal made by the previous administration to provide the games industry with some sort of tax break, saying that the proposal was “poorly targeted”.

On the back of that, industry reaction was along the lines of “no, it’s really well targeted, look it says specifically ‘games’ on it”. However, it strikes me that “poorly targeted” actually means “too narrowly targeted”. Ontario’s much vaunted games tax relief isn’t games tax relief at all; it’s actually digital media tax relief. This gets around the “what is a game?” problem by allowing anything digital and interactive to qualify.

The other aspect of Ontario’s tax relief scheme that I never see mentioned in the UK debate is the fact that a company only qualifies for the scheme if they spend over CA$1 million per year on employment costs. That equates to around £625,000 in real money. If we assume that an average development company spends around £5,000 per month per employee (and that any system in the UK imposed an equivalent threshold), a company needs to employ a minimum of 10 staff. Given the transition of the industry towards smaller, one-project companies, how many in the UK would actually qualify?

In any case, I think the call for tax breaks won’t succeed this time around, or at any time during this administration. For one, the Tory party really don’t like to target any one specific industry over any other. For another, there’s the administration cost to consider - any such scheme would introduce more bureaucracy and paperwork at a time when David Cameron is ranting against such things in a speech to his party. Ideologically, there’s a belief that the best route to economic growth is to enhance the fundamentals for every business and industry, not just the select few.

TIGA’s recent call to expand the existing R&D tax credit seems logical and sensible, and may well gain support (though I’d be surprised if it happened this time round). However, I know that a number of games companies have successfully claimed on the scheme, so perhaps not that much would be gained.

At any rate, do I think tax breaks would be a good thing? They’d probably be useful to some extent. However, I don’t believe that they’re required to build successful businesses and a successful industry, and I certainly don’t believe that having them would somehow instantly and magically safeguard the UK industry.

Reading/Watching

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:35:35 +0000

Some stuff I’ve been reading and watching recently:

John Lennon on Songwriting

(via hitrecordjoe)

Nathan Martz & Tim Schafer on Once Upon A Monster

Frankly, I feel kind of the same way about video games right now, that we’re not nearly as creatively broad as we could be. We often stay very safe, and safe in some pretty often reprehensible directions, or at least thoroughly uncreative…. I think our medium can do many more things than that.

I heart Double Fine in a big way at the moment.

The Importance of Silhouettes

… a key method for making sure that a Pokemon truly doesn’t overlap with ones that have been created in the past is that they render it in silhouette completely black, and compare its shape with past designs. Each silhouette must be completely identifiable as different from others.

I’ve spoken with people about this in the past, and it’s one thing the games industry generally tends not to do that well. The characters of Team Fortress 2 are a great example of where it is done well, though.

On PopCap's IPO

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:51:59 +0000

A post on Gamasutra (misleadingly captioned as being ‘In-Depth’) discusses the possibility of PopCap going public later this year. I have some “issues” with it.

But the transition from a privately held developer/publisher into a public one usually results in some changes to the corporate culture …

Does it? Citation needed, I think. I honestly can’t think of any comparable example. Kuju and Warthog are two developers that went public in the UK a decade ago, but they weren’t masters of their own destiny. PopCap are.

Billy Pidgeon, senior analyst of M2 Research, then chips in:

They have sort of a Disney or Nintendo thing going on in that there’s a certain expected quality to their games. … I’d really be concerned about their growth strategy, as it could cannibalize the elements that have made them successful so far.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Disney and Nintendo are both public companies, aren’t they? Both companies growth strategies are predicated on exactly that “expected quality”. Why wouldn’t that strategy work for PopCap?

As the article notes, PopCap has gone from $0 to $100 million in 10 years, and is evidently making $1m per month just from Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz. It’s strategy appears to be working.

Pidgeon notes that despite the company’s growing reputation, it still takes pains not to rush titles.

I’d argue that the “company’s growing reputation” is exactly why it takes pains not to rush titles.

Clearly, I have no idea if PopCap will go public or not - I believe they’ve been preparing for it for a couple of years, though (based on who joined their board and the fact they started talking a lot more to the press). The success or otherwise of the LinkedIn IPO will be just one factor.

All I’ll add is that going public the week after Toy Story came out didn’t do Pixar any harm in terms of their culture and growth strategy.

Of Creativity and Counterfeits

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:28:21 +0000

The dilemma of copycat games has long been purely an ethical one and rarely a legal one, but perhaps we’re speeding towards a court-ordered stance after all these years of gentlemen’s agreements and surly acceptance. Patents, trademarks, code and artwork have been protected, but ideas haven’t. Should they be?

So begins an editorial piece on GamesIndustry.biz (registration required). This is another of these recurring issues for the industry, as this article by Colin from Denki in 2007 neatly illustrates.

As Colin noted, the games industry needs to be able take ideas and build on them, twist them around, and make something the creator considers to be one better. That’s exactly why you can only protect the implementation of an idea and not the idea itself, and it’s largely what “creativity” generally means. Games aren’t unique in relying on “weak” intellectual property laws in this regard: fashion, food, music, magic tricks, and in fact, design in general all work in this way. Without this setup, as a simple example, Gimme Friction Baby would not have spawned Orbital. It’s how genres such as “autorunner” come to be.

Where we run into real problems is in the situation of “The Blocks Cometh and, er, The Blocks Cometh”, where someone is selling an iPhone version of a Flash game without authorisation, using all the original graphics and design elements. That’s counterfeiting, a “fraudulent imitation of something else”, to quote the OED. And this is where the “strong” intellectual property laws of copyright, trademarks and patents come into play. If you own copyrights and registered trademarks, you can prevent counterfeit games trading off your success.

I’m not a lawyer, so this is most definitely not legal advice, but, as an IP owner the onus is very much on you to enforce the protection provided to you by law (it’s certainly not up to Apple, as GI.biz imply). If you choose not to enforce that protection, you’re giving tacit permission for the counterfeiter to carry on. Worst case scenario is if you ignore some cases and try to enforce others, you may well forfeit your right to legal protection altogether.

In short, if you have something you think is worth protecting, you’d better figure out how you’re going to protect it.

90% Of The Work

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:45:26 +0000

Neven, talking about The Incident:

A month into it, we were sitting on a surprisingly large chunk of the engine all ready to go, a concept well proven. It was everything else that took months and months more.

and

The pitch for the game isn’t half the work; it’s barely 5%.

In case you were wondering.

"Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can’t be (and never is) added later...."

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:16:23 +0000

“Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can’t be (and never is) added later. It’s an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.”

- Marco.org - We don’t question the power of the OS, but the…

Miyamoto Profiled in The New Yorker

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:27:26 +0000

The New Yorker has an in-depth profile with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto which is worth a read (all-in-one page here).

Overall, I’d call it a positive piece, although the tone veers between patronising and sincere. A few other things I want to comment on, in no particular order:

Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.”

So when can we expect the Panorama episode on fishing?

this is called “gamification,” or, more gratingly, “funware”

Seriously? “Funware” is more grating than that other word? Good grief. I’ll save my rant on this for another time.

games are typically considered to be commercial products, rather than creative works; consider the fact that game titles, unlike the names of, say, movies or songs, appear in most newspapers and magazines, including this one, un-italicized

This bugs me, almost as much as it bugs me that the Guardian Gamesblog is in the ‘Technology’ section. However, this line clues us into why the industry is approached this way:

There aren’t very many video-game auteurs, but Miyamoto is one.

and this quote from Miyamoto towards the end of the article nails it:

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell, from the looks and the play of the games, who has created the software.”

Most games companies take the Walt Disney approach, and create everything from behind one brand. There’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s not the oft-lamented lack of ‘auteurs’ or ‘personalities’ that’s causing the problem here either.

It’s a lack of distinctiveness, and not just in terms of the central character. Note that Miyamoto mentions both ‘looks’ and ‘play’.

The problem is that you (or, at least, I) can very rarely tell which company is responsible for a game. Off the top of my head, if I was to do a play test on a range of games from various creators, I think I’d probably only be able to identify a Valve game, a Denki game and, yes, a Nintendo game. Maybe a PopCap game.

Writers, filmmakers and musicians often talk about ‘finding their voice’, the distinctive tone or mood or themes that marks their creations out from the hundreds of others. I think many game creators still have a way to go to find their voice. And until games show greater diversity of theme and mood and tone, it’s difficult to provide a compelling argument they deserve ‘creative work’ status.

Anyway, asides aside, there are loads of great design tips in the article, too many to quote here, so just go and read it. I’ll just end with this comment from WIll Wright on Miyamoto:

“He approaches the games playfully, which seems kind of obvious, but most people don’t. And he approaches things from the players’ point of view, which is part of his magic.”