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Brian Reynolds 发表评论(0) 编辑词条

据游戏资讯网站Polygon报道,Zynga首席游戏设计师Brian Reynolds日前宣布离职。观察者称Reynolds的出走对Zynga来说是个不小的打击,因为该公司在去年已经遭遇大批人才流失现象。

brian reynolds(from glbimg.com)

brian reynolds(from glbimg.com)

Reynolds于2009年加入Zynga并担任创意总监,他对Zynga公司的发展功不可没。在此之前他曾是Big Huge Games首席执行官,主要代表作包括《半人马座阿尔法星》以及《Rise of Nations》,帮助Zynga推出《FarmVille》等休闲游戏热作。他在主持Zynga East工作室事务期间,曾推出《FrontierVille》以及《CityVille 2》等游戏。

Zynga将于2月6日公布财报,Wedbush Securities分析师Michael Pachter认为该公司在2012年第四季度(截止12月31日)收益将达2.75亿美元。在他看来,Zynga最近任命Mark Vranesh担任公司首席财务官,并提拔David Ko、Barry Cottle以及Chiang等举措,或许有助于重振投资者信心。

目录

Brian Reynolds谈职业生涯和游戏行业变革编辑本段回目录

Brian Reynolds从1981年开始便成为职业游戏制作者,当时他只有13岁,但是他一开始就在MicroProse担任职业程序员,同Sid Meier合作制作于1994年发布的《Colonization》(游戏邦注:此游戏类似于《文明》,但是并未成为流行游戏)。

brian-reynolds-frontierville(from blog.games.com)

brian-reynolds-frontierville(from blog.games.com)

在他与Meier联合创办的公司Firaxis中,Reynolds设计了许多畅销游戏,包括Sid Meier的作品《半人马座阿尔法星》。2000年,Reynolds离开Firaxis,成为Big Huge Games的首席执行官,在那里他制作了《国家的崛起》等游戏。

2009年,Reynolds成为Zynga的首席游戏设计师,成立Zynga East,设计了《FrontierVille》。他在最近采访中谈到了自己在行业中数十年的职业生涯、游戏的未来和他的设计想法。

你在游戏行业中的首个项目是什么?

我首款可以算作“发布”的游戏面世时间为1981年,当时我才13岁。我出售的游戏登上1981年8月《Softside》杂志封面,这是款小型的角色扮演游戏。我靠出售这款游戏赚得200美元,用这笔钱给我的个人电脑增加了32K的内存。作为正式行业从业者,我主导编程的首款游戏是《Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender》。

我记得这个名字,它不是那种会让人轻易忘掉的游戏名。

至少它是个很容易记住的名字,至于好不好我也不确定。

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender(from gamesindustry)

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender(from gamesindustry)

负责制作这款游戏的团队有多大?

和所有的游戏团队一样,团队刚开始很小,随后逐渐变大,但是我想人数最多不超过15到16人。

你还能否记得这款游戏的预算?

你知道,我在团队中只是首席程序员,不负责商业事务。但是,据我猜测,我们制作这款游戏预计投入了10万到20万美元。

这种时刻真令人怀念。

这确实是段值得怀念的美好时光。要点在于,不仅我们的团队很小,而且所有人在开发期间未被支付任何酬劳。这是我们在怀念过往时光时往往忽略的方面。

现在,游戏制作预算和团队大小呈指数般迅速膨胀。

现在,如果你想要制作AAA级游戏,可能需要3000万到1亿美元的预算,MMO的预算甚至比这个更高。数年之前,甚至连制作MMO框架都需要5000万美元。这显得极为不可思议。我记得在自己的AAA游戏开发职业生涯中,尤其是到项目开发末期,会出现游戏设计方面停滞一整个月的情况,因为你需要等待技术、美术和3D内容的完成。

对我来说,能够重返更注重游戏玩法而不是技术、美术作品和3D内容的开发世界,感觉很不错。同时,我们在这片领域中飞速发展,比较08和09年以及现在的社交游戏产品就可以看出这一点。

近些年,游戏行业的变革似乎不断加快。与之前大为不同的是,在开发主机游戏时,你专注于将其开发完成,游戏发布后就相当于整个项目完成。

从盒装商品模型到游戏服务模式,这确实是个巨大的转变。花数年时间开发游戏并将其包装完成后,你就无法再对它做出修改,所以你必须将其做得尽可能完美无暇。你无法根据玩家的反馈来改变游戏,或许最多做个小补丁,随后你就转向下个项目。

我的职业生涯中多数时间都待在独立工作室,作为独立游戏工作室,项目完成后就会马上担心团队无所事事,所以你必须马上寻找下份合同。如果你有60名员工,而现在你开始制作的新项目根本不需要这么多人,那要怎么办呢?这就是为何AAA行业发明出扩展包和可下载内容的原因,这样可让部份成员在制作下款游戏时,剩余的团队人员不至于无所事事。

现在,在社交游戏行业,我们将游戏制作完成并发布,但是这只是项目的开端而已。你必须持续更新游戏,而为了保证游戏能够持续获得更新,你就必须不断创造改变游戏的内容。你从玩家处获得大量快速循环反馈,你观察他们在游戏中所做的事情,你将他们的意见整合到游戏中,使之变得更好。对于游戏设计师来说,反馈循环很重要,这样我们才能够更快地弄清楚哪些是玩家感兴趣的内容。

这是个有趣的游戏设计角度,游戏设计变得更像是由信息驱动。

设计师可以学习如何有技巧地将所获得的信息整合到游戏中。比如,你可以获得玩家点击内容的数据,你可以看到红色按钮的点击次数要多于蓝色按钮。处理此等数据的非技巧性方法是,将所有的按钮变成红色。你不能片面地看待所获得的数据。你需要发掘数据,弄清楚如何使用数据才能做出综合性的英明决定。

我不希望任何人产生游戏设计已从艺术变为科学的想法。它只是利用新颖和科学化的工具,实现游戏设计师以往想要实现的目标。它让我们可以不断改善游戏的各个部分。最明显的就是,你可以根据用户反馈来改善用户界面。数据还能让我们明白更多有趣的内容,我们可以看到哪个故事玩家比较喜欢。

你觉得这种改变让游戏设计变得更难、更容易还是仅仅有所不同而已?

从某种程度上来说,这种改变可能会使游戏设计变成一项更为复杂的任务。截至6月份,《FarmVille》已连续运营3年时间。发布如此长的时间后,每天仍然有数百万人前来玩你的游戏,而且感到很高兴。

从某种程度上来说,这也是种与之前不同的游戏设计技能。游戏行业或许会出现另一种分裂。我觉得,我们在将来会看到游戏服务模式逐渐成为游戏行业的主流做法。原因很简单,如果你制作的是盒装商品,你会面临盗版问题。但是,如果你提供的是游戏服务,你就不会面临此等问题。看看现代AAA游戏,已经开始有越来越多的游戏支持连网。

在过去的20年间,你看到游戏行业发生过各种变化,这些变化令你欣喜还是令你沮丧?

这些变化总是令我感到欣喜。你永远无法预测接下来将发生什么疯狂的事情。我经历的首个巨大的技术变革是,我们从使用软盘转向使用CD-ROM。我们之前使用的是成本为1美元的3.5英寸软盘,将其放在包装盒中。如果你需要使用10张软盘,那么该游戏的盒装商品成本就是10美元,你可能需要以40或50美元的价格出售。随后,我们转向使用CD-ROM,于是盒装商品的成本就只需要1美元,因为同样的游戏只需要1张CD-ROM便可以容纳得下。对于用户来说,游戏的售价并没有显著的改变,但是我们的盈利大幅增长。

下个大变革是游戏进驻Windows,当时我正处在该转变的绝妙位置上,我正在开发游戏《文明2》。人们都记得《文明2》,因为他们喜欢玩这款游戏。但是这款游戏有个潜在的优势,它能够同Windows 95以及所有随Windows 95发行的新系统兼容,我们的游戏有大量潜在用户。

文明2(from gamesindustry)

文明2(from gamesindustry)

随后,游戏行业又出现转变。这次转变对我来说很难过,盒装商品PC模式开始消亡并被主机游戏所取代,但是当时我喜欢制作的游戏类型是战略游戏。21世纪早期数年,我们仍然还在制作PC游戏,但是随后所有人都转向制作主机游戏。如果你的游戏题材无法在主机上运转良好,那么你就会陷入困境,所以在这段时间我陷入困境!但是,当Facebook游戏出现时,我又找到了新的目标,所以现在我进入了社交游戏行业。事实上,我拥有的许多技能都适用于社交游戏。目前已能够肯定这也是游戏行业的重大转变,而我正处在有利的一面。

关于游戏行业的下个大转变,我觉得手机将开始逐渐占领整个世界的游戏市场。现在智能手机的渗透率还不到90%,但是很可能将在未来数年内实现。这可能会促使游戏包含手机成分,在行业内引领创新风潮。我认为,这是下个飞速成长的领域。

可预测的5年主机模式似乎正在走向尽头,但其商业模式依然保持不变,开发者只需要了解有关新主机的内容。

80年代的时候出现过一次大型的商业模式垮台,当时我们弃置了雅达利产品。80年代末90年代初,行业发展又得以重返轨道。在接下来将近10年的时间里,商业模式从本质上维持不变。随后,自然也出现了新的商业模式变革,但是它们都并没有让老商业模式完全消亡。现在,仍然有主机游戏不断面世,盈利逾10亿美元的产品依然存在,这仍然是个可以获得盈利的领域。

你是否觉得下一代主机将拥有更强大的社交成分?

无论从玩家还是从社交游戏设计师的角度来看,我都很希望看到它们融入社交成分。但是,具体结果还有待观察。我记得在自己担任主机游戏设计师的时候,我与许多设计和制造主机的人密切合作,他们总是很反对在主机上添加键盘。键盘会让主机变得像是电脑,就不再是娱乐系统。社交媒体可以让人们相互交流和上传照片。既然可以上传照片,也就可以发表评论。如果我不能发表评论,我们可以点击“赞”按钮,但是对我来说,这并非完善的社交性。我相信,他们不会在短时间内突然决定在主机中加入键盘。或许他们会选择添加触摸屏或采用其他方法。我的这种想象是完全有可能出现的,因为智能手机和iPad是很棒的社交设备,但是要如何将其融入主机,这依然是个难题。

平板控制器是Wii U的优势之一,他们或许会在上面设置虚拟键盘,让玩家用来输入文字信息。

确实,我相信他们正考虑这么做。他们必须找到能够让我们愉快地同他人交流的方法。

对于接下来10年的情况,你有何预测?

可能会出现变革性的创新。在web领域以及随后在游戏领域,Facebook就属于变革性创新。没有人会知道接下来将发生什么事情,我也不知道接下来10年内将有何趋势。我将同所有游戏行业从业者保持一致。

智能手机和平板电脑也属于变革性创新。

Brian Reynolds:是的,它们也属于变革性创新。我承认,当我听到iPad的相关消息后,我的想法是:“这是我听说过的最愚蠢的想法。”这也正是我为何无法成为技术创造者的缘故,我是个游戏设计师,这两个职业所需的技能并不相同。

你是否觉得,现在游戏行业正处在历史上最动荡的时代?

与过去数年相比,现在游戏行业的波动确实较大。NPD报告称,自去年起主机游戏的销售量已经下滑了20%。在1年的时间里有如此变化幅度,确实算很大。2009年,当我来到Zynga的时候,并不像我待在AAA游戏领域那样兴奋。这只是种选择,是要继续待在原本的船上,还是要转向做新事物的新船?要么选择学习全新的技能,要么选择坚持老商业模式,面对这些新的竞争力量。能够与目前游戏行业波动相比较的或许只有80年代的那场大变革,当时整个第一代主机市场崩溃,这是比现在更大的动荡。

那已经不能用动荡来形容,是场世界灾难。

从本质上来说,现在游戏行业整体依然在不断成长,所以这是种良性的动荡。

你还有其他想要分享的有关行业本质或设计的想法吗?

我觉得就游戏设计本身而言,如何制作游戏以及如何让内容有趣等核心行为大部分保持不变。我在选择游戏设计岗位求职者时所用的方法与过去相同。有趣的是,尽管技术在21世纪发生了巨大的改变,然而Sid Meier在90年代早期教授给我的如何制作游戏以及如何让其变得更加有趣的技术现在依然适用。

现在你仍然亲自设计游戏,还是只负责监督?

我自己也参与到游戏设计和开发中。就《FrontierVille》而言,我亲自参与到代码编写中。在我目前开发的游戏中,我不再从事代码编写工作,但是我参与到设计循环中。我的职位是首席游戏设计师,这并不意味着我只需要告诉其他设计师要做什么,我与其他设计师是平等的。我能够让Zynga改善游戏设计方法的最有效办法就是制作出很棒的游戏。然后所有人就会问:“我要怎样才能做出这种产品?”于是,我就会将技巧告诉他们,他们才会接受。我觉得,这是激发创新的最有效方法。

如果进入管理层的人无法再抽身从事真正的开发工作,这有时会令人感到沮丧。

我同意这种说法,如果我面临这种情况,我也会感到沮丧。我已经努力工作了20年,避免染指任何管理事务。即时当我在Big Huge担任首席执行官时,我也有个行业合作伙伴,帮我打理多数商业方面的事务。我带领整个团队,但并不会完全抽身离开开发岗位,我的侧重点总是在真正的游戏制作过程中。

这确实很不错,我觉得游戏设计已经是种相当稀有的技能,我们不应当再失去任何游戏设计师。

我同意你的说法!(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,作者:Steve Peterson)

Game Industry Legends: Brian Reynolds

Steve Peterson

Brian Reynolds has been creating games professionally since 1981 when he was only 13, but it was MicroProse where he first worked as a professional programmer, and began working with Sid Meier, which led to Sid Meier’s Colonization in 1994 (similar to Civilization, but never became popular).

Reynolds designed a number of best-selling games at the company he co-founded with Meier, Firaxis, including Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuari. Reynolds left Firaxis in 2000 to become CEO of Big Huge Games, where he made Rise of Nations among other games.

Reynolds became Chief Game Designer at Zynga in 2009, forming Zynga East, where he designed FrontierVille. GamesIndustry International spoke with Reynolds about his decades in the game industry, the future of games, and his thoughts on design.

Q: What was your first project for the game industry?

Brian Reynolds: Ironically, my first sort of “published” game was in 1981, when I was 13 years old. I sold a game that was the cover feature of the August 1981 Softside magazine, it was a little roleplaying game. I think I made $200 from that, and plowed it into 32K more memory for my personal computer. The first thing I did as an official industry person, I was the lead programmer for a game called (laughs), and this is gonna be a doozy, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender.

Q: I remember that name; it’s not one you forget.

Brian Reynolds: At least it had a memorable name, I’m not sure it had a good name.

Q: How big was the team on that first game?

Brian Reynolds: As all these teams do, it started smaller and got bigger, but I think it might have topped out at around 15 or 16 of us.

Q: Do you remember what the budget was for that game so long ago?

Brian Reynolds: I imagine that, you know I was just the lead programmer not the businessy guy, but if I was just guessing I would say we might have spent between $100,000 and $200,000 dollars making that game.

Q: Ah, the good old days.

Brian Reynolds: It was the good old days, yeah, definitely. The thing is, not only did we not have many people but they weren’t paying us anything either. Those are the parts we forget about the good old days.

Nowadays, the budgets and team sizes are orders of magnitude bigger.

Certainly if you want to make a triple-A game these days it’s probably $30 million to $100 million just to get in the door, and that’s not even MMO. Even a few years ago just looking at the bare-bones entry to doing an MMO was $50 million. It is pretty crazy. I can remember times in my triple-A career, especially towards the end of it, where you could go a whole month without doing any game design, because you were just waiting on technology, and art, and 3D stuff.

It’s great for me to get back into a world where it really is more about the gameplay and not quite as much about the technology and artwork and 3D whatever. At the same time, we are on an accelerated ramp in this space, if you look at what social games looked like way back in ’08 and ’09 (laughs) and then you look at what’s coming out now.

Q: The evolution seems to be much faster these days. One of the big differences is before, with console games, you were focused on getting it out the door and it’s done.

Brian Reynolds: The transition from the packaged good model to a games-as-a-service model is definitely a big transition. Before you spent several years and you packed it all up and you’re not going to get a chance to do anything new to it once you’re done so you’ve got to get it perfect. You don’t get to iterate on feedback from your players very much; if you’re lucky you might get to do one minor patch… and then you’re just on to the next project.

If you’re an independent studio, which is where I spent most of my time, then you’re almost immediately worried about being out of work or out of business and you’ve got to have the next contract lined up. If you have a staff of 60 people, now you’re trying to start some new thing, and do you need all 60 people right away? That’s why the triple-A industry frankly invented expansion packs and downloadable content, because that’s what gives half the team something to do while the rest of the team is making the next game.

Now in social games we’re making these games and we put ‘em up and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. On the one hand you have to keep updating it, but on the other hand you get to keep updating it, so in a sense you’re continuing to evolve your game as you go. You get a lot of very fast-cycle feedback from your players, and you see what they’re actually doing in the game, and you’re able to incorporate that into making your game better. For a game designer that’s really tightened up the feedback loop and made it so that we can figure out the fun kind of content faster.

Q: That’s an interesting angle, because game design becomes more information-driven.

Brian Reynolds: It can, and learning how to incorporate that information skillfully… for example, you’ve got all this data on which things your players click on, you can see that the red button got clicked on more times than the blue button. The unskillful way to deal with all that data is to say ‘Well, let’s make all your buttons red!’ You don’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction to data. You really need to digest it and figure out how to use the information to make a sophisticated smart decision.

I don’t want to give anybody the idea that game design has suddenly gone from being an art to being a science. It’s just got a new, much more scientific tool that does in fact satisfy some of the things we always wished for in the old days as game designers. It lets us make a lot of different parts of the game better. The obvious stuff is making the user interface better because you get really quick feedback. It also even points us toward more interesting content – we can see which stories players like better.

Q: Do you think it makes game design more difficult, or less difficult, or just different?

Brian Reynolds: It probably makes it a more complicated task in some ways. FarmVille’s been running continuously for… in June it’ll be three years. That’s a long time after launch to still be having millions of people a day come and play your game and keep ‘em happy.

In some ways that’s a different game design skill. There might actually be another kind of schism in the profession, as it were, like two species separating. I think we’re going to see games as a service really take over as the dominant part of the game industry if it hasn’t already, for the simple reason that if you’re doing packaged goods you have this problem of piracy, and if you’re doing games as a service then you really don’t have that issue. Even when you look at AAA games today they’re becoming more and more sort of online-ified.

Q: You’ve seen many changes over the past 20 years, have they surprised you or disappointed you?

Brian Reynolds: Well, they always surprise me. It’s an industry full of what they call black swan events. You just never can predict what the next crazy thing that’s gonna take off is. The first big technological change I went through was when we went from floppy discs to CD-ROM. We used to pay a dollar a disc for 3.5″ floppies to put in the box, and you’d be putting ten of them in, so that was like $10 of packaged goods costs for a game you might be selling for $40 or $50. Then we went to CD-ROMs, and the next year we were just paying $1 of packaged goods, because you put one CD-ROM in with the same game on it. There was no noticeable price change to the customer, but the margin… we were actually no longer going out of business like we were the year before. Suddenly the business was profitable again.

The next big one was when games went over to Windows, and I ended up in a pretty good place on that transition, because I was working on a game called Civ 2. People remember Civ 2 because they loved playing the game, but one of the hidden stories is it was actually a very accessible piece of software to a much larger audience because it was Windows and it went along with Windows 95, and every new system that was coming out was being sold with Windows 95, and our game was easy to run.

Then there was another transition, and this was a harder one for me, when the packaged good PC model started to die and was overcome by the console games, but the type of games I liked to make in those days were strategy games. Back in the early 2000s we were still making PC games, but then it was just all console all the time. If your genre didn’t run well on consoles, you were in trouble – so I was in trouble! But that positioned me perfectly to be looking for something new to do when the next amazing thing came along which is Facebook games, and so there I was. Actually a lot of the skills I had were perfect for doing social games. That has certainly been the next big transition, and I was on the lucky end of that one.

The next big thing… I think mobile is starting to make its move to take over the world. The fact is that smartphone penetration is still not up in the high 90% range, but it’s gonna be getting there over the next few years. That’s probably going to make games that involve a mobile component the next big area in terms of a huge wave of innovation and capability and dominance within the industry. I think that’s the next big growth area.

Q: It seems like we’re moving away from the predictable 5-year console model, where the business model was the same and all we had to learn was a new console.

Brian Reynolds: There had been a giant meltdown of the business model in the ’80s when they were burying Atari cartridges in landfills. Then in the late ’80s and the early ’90s the industry got back on track again. We had 10 years there where the business model was substantially the same. The paradigm shifts lately have certainly been bigger ones, although they haven’t crushed the life out of the old business models. There’s still console games that come out and make a billion dollars on the first day; it’s certainly still a profitable business.

Q: Do you think the next generation of consoles is going to have to have a stronger social component?

Brian Reynolds: I would certainly like to see them have one, both as a player and as a social game designer. It might remain to be seen what they can do that would be good. I remember in my time as a console game designer, I worked pretty closely with the various guys who design and make consoles, and they were always very against having a keyboard on a console. A keyboard, that makes it geeky and like a computer, and then it’s not this cool entertainment system. Social media is about talking to each other and uploading pictures… well, it’s about uploading pictures but it’s also about commenting on them. If I can’t leave a comment we’d just be down to the Like button, but that would be a little bit thin as social coverage for me. I’m sure they’re not going to suddenly decide that they should suddenly put keyboards on consoles. Maybe they’ll put touchscreens or something; I can totally imagine that, because smartphones and iPads make fantastic social devices, but how do you work that into a console?

Q: One of the advantages of the Wii U with their tablet controller could be that they could put a virtual keyboard on that and you could type text messages.

Brian Reynolds: Exactly. I’m sure they’re thinking about this. They’re going to have to find some way for us to actually communicate without making it look geeky.

Q: Do you have any predictions for the next 10 years?

Brian Reynolds: It’s going to be disruptive innovation. Facebook was an extremely disruptive innovation both in the web space and following on in the games space. The whole point was that nobody saw it coming. I don’t know what’s coming in ten years. I’ll be along for the ride with everybody else.

Q: Smartphones and tablets have been another one of those disruptive innovations.

Brian Reynolds: Yes, that was another one. I admit to hearing about the iPad and thinking, ‘Well, that’s just the dumbest idea I ever heard.’ That’s why I’m not a tech inventor, I’m a game designer; it’s a very different set of skills.

Q: Do you think now is a time of greater change and upheaval in the game industry than other times that you’ve seen?

Brian Reynolds: It is one of the more upheavious ones, yes, in the last few years. When you see the NPD reports that console games sales have dropped 20% since the previous year, that’s a big drop for a business to take during a year. In 2009 when I came to Zynga, it wasn’t like there I was really excited about staying in the triple-A space. It felt like, do I really want to go down with the ship, or do I want to go get on the really cool new ship that’s doing the new thing? That’s the kind of thing that is going on. You’re either learning completely new skills or trying to shore up the old business model against new disruptive forms of competition. The only other upheaval that maybe compares is the bigger one in the ’80s when the whole first-generation console market just crashed. That was a bigger upheaval.

Q: That wasn’t just an upheaval, it was an apocalypse.

Brian Reynolds: The game industry as a whole now is still substantially growing, so this is the good kind of upheaval.

Q: Any other thoughts about the nature of the industry or design to share?

Brian Reynolds: I feel like in terms of game design itself, the core activity of how you make a game, how you make things fun, have remained largely the same. The kinds of candidates I look for in game design jobs are the same as I used to look for in previous decades. It’s interesting in 21 years of radical technological change, the same techniques that Sid Meier taught me in the early ’90s are still highly relevant today to how you take a game and make it more fun.

Q: Do you still get your hands dirty on design, or are you just overseeing things?

Brian Reynolds: I do. As recently as FrontierVille, I actually got my hands dirty on writing code, believe it or not. I’m not writing any code so far on my current game, but I’m definitely in the design loop. My title is Chief Game Designer; it doesn’t mean I’m telling other designers what to do, it’s more of a first among equals kind of thing. Usually the way that I can effect the most change within Zynga on improving game design practices is to make a really cool game. Then everybody says, “Wow, how do I get me some of that?” And then I tell them, and then they do. I’ve found that to be the most effective way to drive innovation.

Q: Sometimes it’s sad when people end up managing processes and don’t get involved with them at all anymore.

Brian Reynolds: I agree, I would be sad if that was what I was doing. I’ve worked very hard for 20 years to avoid any kind of primarily management position. Even when I was CEO of Big Huge I had a business partner who did most of the things you would formally call business. I lead teams, it’s not like I’m completely free of having to have any leadership ability, but the point is my emphasis has always been on actually making the games.

Q: That’s good, because I think game design is a rare enough skill that we shouldn’t be losing any game designers.

Brian Reynolds: I agree! (Source: Games Industry International)

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