Tue 26 Aug 2008
At this year’s Develop conference I was able to spend some time with Braid’s thoughtful and interesting designer, Jonathan Blow.
We were speaking just seven days before the game came out (Jonathan had just heard his game had been awarded a nine in Edge and was joking about doing a Minter-style internet freakout over the fact it wasn’t a ten) so it was interesting to see about a designer’s hopes and fears for his baby so close to its public debut.
After a while the conversation turned to other areas of gaming. Specifically I asked him about his thoughts on World of Warcraft and MMOs in general, a topic which Blow has some controversial views on (he has in the past called WoW “unethical”).
It’s something I’m fasicnated by. On the one hand MMOs build communities, get strangers working together in amazing ways and often tell us a lot about our own societies and the way they work and can work better in reality.
On the other hand, this.
So yeah, here’s what Jonathan had to say on the subject both in terms of what he sees wrong with the genre as well as the ways in which he thinks it might be ‘fixed’.
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[The interview was for Gamasutra who have put a few bits of it up on their site as news items in recent weeks. When they've finished the run I'll put the audio of the whole interview up here]
August 26th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
[...] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt“World of Warcraft is Unethical”: Jonathan Blow on Fixing the MMO chewing videogames At this year’s Develop conference I was able to spend some time with Braid’s thoughtful and interesting designer, Jonathan Blow. We were speaking just seven days before the game came out (Jonathan had just heard his game had been awarded a nine in Edge and was joking about doing a Minter-style internet freakout over the fact it wasn’t a ten) so it was interesting to see about a designer’s hopes and fears [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
[...] the rest of this great post here Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
September 4th, 2008 at 10:05 am
[...] WoW is Unethical – Discussion moves to Jonathan’s comments on how WoW is unethical. Jonathan tries to argue that MMO designers design in way to exploit players, and not benefit them. [...]