"So what happened when you removed collision detection?" "Players started looking for other ways to get more feedback. Helping each other yielded the most feedback so they began to do that instead. It was fascinating." A lovely interview - and great piece of writing fro Simon - with Jenova Chen. The parts on how players regress is particularly interesting, as is Chen's ambition to be _different_ rather than just 'artistic'. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote about collision detection, hence quoting it.

"[Was shooting The Artist very different to making a 'regular' movie?] No, it’s a regular picture. The only difference is, there is no boom mic. And the story is not being told by what comes out of your mouth. If you want to tell the story, the story being the narrative, not the plot—the plot’s fairly simple—but if you want to tell the narrative, then you have to be concise with your reaction, and let the reaction get into your body and your face in a way you don’t necessarily do when you have dialogue, because the dialogue takes care of that." James Cromwell interview by the AV Club. I enjoyed this line especially.

"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.

A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).

"I have this colleague of mine who is an avid rock climber, and I’m trying to get him to play GIRP. He says that what I’m saying is like, “I’ve come up with this new formula of crack that’s ultra-addictive; why don’t you try this new crack I’ve cooked up?”" Wait, Bennett GIRP/QWOP Foddy was in *Cut Copy*?! Awesome.

Gosh, what a lot of topics: fashion, fabrics, architecture, space, cybernetics, cities, all spinning out of the development of the spacesuit. Cracking interview, impossible to pick a quotation from.

"There was one guy on the steps of a building and proselytizing the end of the world. My guess is that he was doing it for jokes, but if you’re in the middle of it with your friends exploring a world covered in blood, then there’s something in our understanding of the Black Death in the Dark Ages and people announcing the coming of the end that plays into the social fear." Kill Screen interview on the Corrupted Blood outbreak in WoW.

"The CSM [player-run council] is a dirty election. It’s a third world election. Anything that’s allowed under the EULA in Eve is allowed in the election. You can buy votes, dead people can resubscribe and vote, you can scam people for votes, so it’s hardly an iconic democracy. So, this coming election, almost every major candidate you will see on the council will have been backed by a null sec plot. In advance, we’ve all met and spoken to one another to decide on the issues of the day. So I’m not going to be a voice in the wilderness. I’ll be speaking alongside people I’ve been fighting with or working with diplomatically for years."

This interview is full of some great moments - nice to see the "1% problem" acknowledged by a player, but gosh, you can see the appeal of that 1%. This line was particularly acute.

"It was May 1991. She was 89 years old. She often spoke of herself in the third person. She had a strapping male secretary named Horst." Jordan Mechner interviewed Leni Riefenstahl. Blimey.

Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here - to be returned to, I think.

In which Laura Parker looks at what "mainstream" games can learn from the type of success indie titles such as Limbo have had, with contributions from Nels Anderson, Manveer Heir, and - would you believe it - me. It's a really nice feature; I hope Laura can get more of this sort of stuff published on Gamespot, because it deserves a bigger audience than being buried on the staff blog.

"This is short film I worked on a while ago called "Avatar Days"... It follows 4 MMORPG players taking about their online persona's. As they tell their stories we see them go about their everyday lives against the mundane backdrop of city life...but as their Avatars." Lovely.

Lovely interview with Danny Trejo about many of his roles. If you like movies, totally worth a read. He's really quite a guy.

"I hugely prefer Windows ME to anything else.  The problem is that it’s difficult to run on most of the hardware I have and no other Windows edition cuts it for me. So, I’m down to using a Mac..."

"The premise was this: Division 9 would have put players (and their friends) in the middle of an ever-encroaching zombie menace. Co-op gameplay, scarce resources, base-building, and strategic rescues were a part of the conceptual blueprint." Big interview with Ken Levine - including some video footage - of Irrational's cancelled take on the zombie genre. In a nutshell: slower, more strategic, more long-term survival than L4D's short campaigns, and had it been released, would have come out around 2006/2007.

Dan interviewed Tale of Tales for Wired; this, published on his blog, is the full interview, and it's got lots of great stuff in it. I'm really not sold by them - indeed, I'm less sold by the firm than I am by their work - but it's interesting to hear something from the horse's mouth, as it were.

"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.

Great interview with Lantz, expanding on his "games aren't media" angle and some other interesting points on aesthetics; totally marred by Michaël Samyn's trolling of a comment thread (on his *own* company's blog). Still, read the top half!

"Kevin Nguyen talks to the minds behind Kind of Bloop, a chiptune cover album of cool jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue." A good interview with some of the Kind of Bloop gang; Shnabubula's "All Blues" is utterly marvellous, so it's nice to hear more from the artist.

Simon Parkin interviews Martin Hollis. As with much of what Martin says, it is gentle, readable, and dotted with nuggets of purest gold. And the word "teleportage". Martin's a lovely, lovely chap, and he really, really knows his stuff; reading this should convince you of that.

"This is my boot fetish Pong game". I first saw James at OpenTech demonstrating his prawn-sandwich powered BBC Micro clock. It is good to know he is still building brilliant things. And: more Ellie Gibson interviews in the world is never, ever a bad thing.

"Is this interview just going to be you hawking your wares for the next 20 minutes?" No, it's going to be better than that. A frank - and hilarious - interview with Mark Rein from Ellie Gibson. He really is like this, you know.

"During the Develop conference earlier this week, Edge Online editor Alex Wiltshire chaired a panel discussion on the close relationship between architecture and videogames, and here we have a recording of the full session for you to download." I still have to write it up, but it was really, really good. Worth a listen.

"I think in films, zombies are cyclical. They come around, they get reinvigorated. I think in games, they're a constant. In games, zombies just represent this thing around which you can construct a game. There's no morality to them. There's no worries about racism that games are having right now. If it's a zombie and it's a pure zombie, a stupid zombie like the ones we have, they're a game mechanic. They're fodder, they're whatever you want to put in a game, however you want to deal with it."

"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.

"Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome." Jack gets interviewed by Jennifer over on the Kicker blog. And: "Always have nice pens".

Lovely: Creature Comforts meets "Hey There Little Fella". Totally charming.

Lovely interview with Dylan Cuthbert, of Pixeljunk, about some of the design processes behind the Pixeljunk games.

"The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere. Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way." Peter Molyneux becomes a bit more self-aware, possibly a little too late.

Microsoft on their new MSN Music service, weighed-down by DRM. I don't normally link to stuff about DRM, but frankly, every single response in this is comedy gold.

"It is from the era when people were all 'we will not know if acid is dangerous until we test it on THE FOXIEST GIRLS IN ENGLAND.'" Too right.

"So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads." Fascinating interview with a smart guy, who at one point in his life, did some bad (if not entirely unethical) work.

"I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on." There is loads in this interview that is awesome; it was hard to choose a quotation. Rigopulos is super-smart.

"No consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo. Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets..." and, even if it's not exactly powerful and the business model still seems sketchy, this could be really, really interesting.

...and here's a tiny bit that got cut from the final interviewer, from Tom Chick's own site. Spielberg talks in more detail about balancing storytelling and gameplay, and expands a bit on the cutscene problem.

Tom Chick interviews Spielberg on games for Yahoo!. Spielberg is consumate and smart, as you'd expect, but also well-grounded; he really does _play games_. "Yes, I've played Half-Life, of course" - the "of course" is the important bit.

Jolly good interview with Stephen Cakebread and Craig Howard from Bizarre Creations about the evolution of the Geometry Wars series. In a nutshell: simple games, simply made, and then honed to perfection, or as near as you can get. It's the honing that's important

"Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks." That's interesting.

Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.

"Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation."

Julian answers the question. Some great stuff, that rings true: learning not by studying design, but by being in the design studio, making and making and making. Definitely worth watching.

"...when Anti Records sent us this interview Tom Waits did with himself, we had to pass it along." Beautiful, wonderful, funny. And a great Buckminster Full quotation in there to boot.

"I was lucky to have met good people, read good books, watched good movies and listened to good music. They made me who I am. Therefore, I hope that people will treasure the games I create and it will shape them in a beneficial way."

Gosh. Long, detailed, smart, wonderful interview with Jonathan Blow. I can't even begin to find a suitably quote for this box so: please, just *read* it.

"Like TED for Music" - tons of transcriptions and video interviews with all manner of performers. Looks superb.

Joel Johnson interviews a designer of some "classic" Space Lego, from c.1990. I had a least one of these sets - it was one of my favourite Leg sets to build; really well thought through.

"I’ve tried hard to use [sequencers] but it’s blocks in different colours and I'm only used to just seeing the waves. I don’t need to listen much to the drums because I know they look nice, like a fishbone, rigged up to be kind of skitty, sharp."

Mike Krahulik finally puts up a transcription of an interview with his grandfather about his time in the Navy during the Second World War. it's interesting, notably when Krahulik asks him how he feels about WWII videogames. Also, it's just a great story.

Fantastic conclusion to the TF2 interview. Lots of lovely stuff in here about design processes, being honest to users, and seeking out hard problems. A must-read for anyone who makes things, really.

"...HG Wells, had [this] huge, leisurely 'here and [now]' from which to contemplate what might happen. Wells knew exactly where he was and knew he was at the centre of things.' Wonderful William Gibson quotation.

Erk. I'm on video. Hopefully, not being too much of an asshat.

In the interview, Johnson explains how the Long Zoom holds together his recent work, and how this perspective emerged from his graduate-school training in literary theory and the Victorian period.

Nicolas Nova presents his take on the interview.

First half of the interview at WWMNA.

Surprisingly good (for .net) interview with Caterina Fake. “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.”

The internet is changing, very disruptive technology and there are new inventions coming along every month. One has to stay awake and race to stay up with it, or if you get enough brilliant people around maybe you can get ahead of it.

[Murukami] wrote the initial chapters in English, before translating them into Japanese. "I didn't know how to write fiction, so I tried writing in English because my vocabulary was limited. I knew too many words in Japanese. It was too heavy." Good inter

Lovely, in-depth interview full of cracking quotations. Definitely worth a read.

Awesome awesome shop. Must read this later

Tracey Emin is interviewed by the guardian. She asks a reviewer what they think of her new film. Reviewer was bored. Amusing transcript ensues