Warren Spector on Gaming
Warren Spector is my gaming hero. He gets it: games aren’t about the best graphics, or the most gore, or the best level design. Games are about another reality, “a ritual space where people go and explore elements of their culture and come out changed.”
Said another way: it’s not about the list of features, silly, it’s about the experience.
This is what makes games like the first Jedi Knight, Half-Life, and System Shock 1 & 2 so smashing — and what makes shooters and eye-candy like Serious Sam and Jedi Knight 2 such trash.
I’ve known this since 1982 when I first played Zork as a teenager. No graphics, no sound, just text scrolling up on my screen. An interface which had my immersion into this textual world as its sole goal. Lucky for us Spector knows it too. Read all about him at A Spector Haunts Gaming (GameSlice).