A Designer's Imagination

This blog is actually a part of an email that i sent to my dear friend Nick Chionilos.

You asked whether the Microsoft offer was simply too good to pass up, or did I get frustrated with the limits of the handhelds, well to be frank it was both.

Microsoft’s offer was very good, and it gave me the job profile that I always wanted. The handheld games business is also very interesting from a technology point of view but from games and game design I feel it is still a rat race.

Mobile game mantra is “Make a side scroller for every IP in store”.

It will take sometime for the mobile gaming market to mature and realize people are no longer interested in playing Peters’ Jackson’s King Kong, who is barely a inch in height and couple of pixels in width.

I feel mobile is great platform to make games on, I would love to play the turn based Dungeons and Dragons on it; something that excites my imagination but still keeping the game form simple.

Game designers who presume gamers will do a 4 key combo in time on a mobile device TODAY are either not game designers or they are NOT GAME DESIGNERS.

Well I will be lying if I said the same is not true on console and Pc side as well.

As a game designer I feel the strongest, most adaptive and a highly stable tool a designer has is the imagination of the gamer, and we should never fail to let it wander.

People say Immersive is what makes you believe and I think immersive is what makes you imagine.

The former is forced upon your brain but the later is by choice.

Next Gen consoles and games will make you believe what you see; you will see the most realistic bomb explosion, with millions of physics simulated particles taking out a 100 story building in real time physics controlled mesh deformation. It will *watched* with awn.

Not to my surprise as I already imagined this almost 2 decades back while playing super contra.

But it was my imagination, it was pure, not governed and it was mine.

I live in a world which is not made by me, I follow the rules which were not laid down by me and everything looks so real, you damn right it’s just a next generation game.

But well, I guess today’s games industry has become too big too soon. It’s the biggest entertainment with the deepest pockets, but nevertheless there will be some genuine games with a burning core, that will be made off an on.....

....... and for the rest of the games.

I am happy paying $20 per year on Gamespot and *Watching* all of them.