Brock Pierce Quotes

If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it.

In video you are starting with nothing but a black screen. There's no game there. With pinball you at least start with that basic concept, but not with video. The challenge of going from no game to something today is only different because you have to create something so damn fun people will pay $1.00 every two minutes to play it.

If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.

Keep it simple, stupid. Good game design shouldn't keep you looking at the manual but should have enough depth where you feel like you bring something new to the game every time you play.

Personally speaking, when everything is boiled down to the marrow, I think the reason Reddit tolerates the creepy forums has to do with money more than anything else.

Video games are a special kind of play, but at root, they're about the same things as other games: embracing particular rules and restrictions in order to develop skills and experience rewards. When a game is well-designed, it's the balance between these factors that engages people on a fundamental level.

To people who traditionally charge $10,000 for a 3D animating app, we say you should be free-to-play and generate a revenue stream. Think of a 3D modeling package almost like an RPG.

When we go to see comedians or funny movies, they don't address the wall behind them; they face us. This is why a game's first job is to entertain through gameplay and secondarily through humor, drama, or other traditional entertainment devices. The humor has to be a gentleman. I mean, it needs to be squeezed in around the game.

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.

We're pushing the limits of what a game is, and they think I'm beyond this limit. There will always be purists, but we've never got that push-back from businesses or consumers. Game dynamics are too powerful to leave bottled up in games.

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.

The studios will go wherever they smell money. It's like sharks to the blood.

In 'Alpha Protocol,' right from the outset, the parameters of the game explain to you that the mission needs to get done. How you approach that is your decision. The rewards and penalties for either path, those are going to balance out into different consequences.

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

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 don't just write a script, and then someone takes it away and builds a game. I am continually getting input in order to create a big suspension field to hold the gameplay together so that the gamers aren't doing arbitrary tasks, so that they are doing things that seem meaningful.

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

When I play a game, I want to play, not necessarily laugh. If you try to make me laugh at the expense of interactivity, then you've just created another funny game that isn't very fun. The videogame medium itself is a terrible place for complicated humor, drama, and character development.

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.

Why are online games so addictive? It's mostly the narcotic appeal of 'leveling.'

Players today are concerned about the money, but the large dollars only go to those players who are the best.

Stories in which the player doesn't inhabit the main character are difficult for games to handle.

Players like to know that they've discovered things that even the designers didn't know were in the game.

People are pretty simple: they do what they are rewarded for doing. If they get multimillion-dollar bonuses by taking huge risks with other people's money - as they still do - then they will continue to take those huge risks, and not give it another thought.