I did an inteview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun a short while back.
It’s funny, because tidbits from the interview have been picked up as news stories by various sources. And they all led with a different take on it! Over at GamesIndustry.biz, it was how the industry needs new inspiration. But over at Virtual Worlds News, it’s all about “players will touch Metaplace soon!” About which more shortly.
One of the things is that our influences in the game industry are fairly narrow. Bioshock is one of the big hits of the year, and everyone is impressed by its core narrative influences. It’s a critique of Ayn Rand and Objectivism and all of that stuff. But if you think about it, Objectivism is common currency for game developers, it’s a nerd kind of thing. So we’re not referencing anything too far afield there, a little further afield, but not a lot. A lot of the common cultural currency is not all that diverse, and that was really hammered home for me by watching the Xbox Live trailers for the new year. I sat with my wife and she said that if she hadn’t been told that they were all different games, she would not have been able to tell them apart. They were all so similar.
