As expected, the response to Adam Maxwell’s opinion piece that I mentioned previously has been swift and zealous. The article continued to elicit powerful responses on GameSetWatch, including an impressively long entry from Era, with this excerpt:
“Interactivity does not have to suffer from linearity. Interactivity does not equate to choice. Very common misconceptions plaguing both designers and people on the outside looking in. Our medium can be used for more than point/goal based competitions. We don’t have to have everything fit into the standard control schemes for platformers, action games, racers or shooters. We can restrict control just as the director restricts a camera to a specific scene. We can restrict the camera on top of control too, but don’t remove any of that for the sake of narration.”
The piece was also reprinted over on Gamasutra, where, naturally, it triggered a shitstorm of response. I [More...]
Better Than Free (or Pirated?)
I read a couple of interesting blogs recently, and began to wonder how they might be related to the indie game scene.
The original piece was written by Kevin Kelly who, among many other notable things, helped co-found Wired magazine. On his “semi-blog” The Technium, where he posts thoughts on his next book, he authored a piece called “Better Than Free” back on January 31st — and it triggered an avalanche of discussion, all of which I naturally missed since I have no sense of these things.
In the piece, he discusses how to approach the creation of product value in a digital world, where free copies proliferate in the “super-distribution system” of the internet:
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