Do advances in technology liberate game design or confine it?
Advances in technology liberate game design, as long as you’re not too scared to embrace them. We’re seeing at the moment, over the next generation of consoles, this huge boom in realistic games – the style to mimic the real world. There’s certainly a place for that and certainly satisfaction in playing a game like that, but if that’s all that is done with that technology, then we’re missing a trick. I think things like the Wii are showing that there are different ways of approaching game play and it doesn’t have to look realistic. Gaming is not about making it look as good as a Hollywood blockbuster; it’s about finding new ways of playing games. The Wii controller is a paradigm shifter. Any sort of game designer worth their salt would be leaping at the opportunity to get their hands on it and try out new things. Technology advances just gives us new toys to play with in gaming, as long as we’re not too shy to use them.
