Marc Laidlaw Quotes

One of the things we joke about in the FPS development is it's so hard to get the player to actually bother to look at all the cool stuff you've been doing. You spend a lot of time making really cool things, and usually the player isn't looking where you want them to.

The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

I don't want to criticize any other designers, but I have to say that many of the people involved in this industry - directors and producers - are trying to make their games more like movies. They are longing to make movies rather than making videogames.

When I create a game, I try to focus more on the emotions that the player experiences during the game play.

I think you need to understand games to write them. There's a learning curve, just like there's a learning curve in anything. It's not precisely the same as film or television, but you're using the same muscles.

There's a misunderstanding that I've always tried to address straight on when this question comes up, which is that a 'Half-Life' story can somehow exist outside of a game. It can't. The story is created through the process of trying to figure out how to best use the features of the engine within the interesting set of constraints it poses.

You don't really want to talk about 'Duke' in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters… It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.

I'm a game designer, so I care about the whole experience.

We're growing into an entertainment medium as opposed to 'We make games. We make Mario jump.' We no longer have to focus so hard on the technical hurdles and can ask, as a player, why am I doing this? Why am I making these choices? Games that don't have that strong foundation stumble.

I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.

Before 'Final Fantasy VII,' I would have told you that I had zero interest in RPGs with turn-based combat. But that game was so well done, I didn't care what genre it was. Any genre can be done poorly or done well.

Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.

You can't just come up with an idea for a game and stick the drama on top. It all has to be one driving thrust.

Game design is a funny thing. There are people out there who are really good at it, but it's not clear that they can teach it. It's a very intuitive process. It's an art.

The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren't sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters.

I always try and come up with a clear theme when I'm making a videogame.

I would love to make video games.

Our approach to making games is to find the fun first and then use the technology to enhance the fun.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

The video game market is huge, and the ability to tell stories, and tell different kinds of stories in the gaming space is quickly evolving and changing for the better.

I still like to play games that have a beginning, an end and a story.

I was the lead designer on 'Portal,' and I really enjoyed making that type of game.

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

My earliest interest in game design came when I was in primary school, and my parents bought a Commodore 128 computer. I taught myself to write programs in BASIC, and then I made my own games.