The Blog of Glen Moyes

I've been a long-time fan of the Unreal series by Epic Games since its debut in 1998. I can recall countless LAN parties where we played the original Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. I can even attribute the Audigy2 ZS that's in my computer right now from playing UT2004 competitively. Let's just say that I'm a fan. When I first saw the screenshots for Unreal Tournament 3 back in August 2005 I was really excited, not to mention worried that I wouldn't have a computer beefy enough to play it when the time came. Over the years I actually lost interest in UT3 and Epic Games because of their new direction to gaming that became vividly apparent at E3 2006. In the meantime Nintendo and Valve caught my interest, and I had all but forgotten about UT3 until the demo was announced a few months ago. UT3 is out now, and as a UT fan I hate to say that I actually feel let down by the game. There's a few reasons for this. First, the game has...

This came out on November 29, and it's one of the best lectures on game design I've listened to. It's called "Design Reboot" and it was given by Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Game Summit 2007. If you go to the page on his blog about the lecture , there's a link to the Zip file that contains the MP3 and the PowerPoint presentation. He talks about what games really are, what they can teach you, why game designers lack discernment, and architecting vs. exploring in game design. I highly recommend this talk because it's a surprisingly truthful analysis of game design. Jonathan said everything that I've been wanting to tell the industry over the past 6 months, was in a position to do so, and told me some things that I didn't know. I'll do a summary of his talk and interject a few things of my own towards the end of this very long post, but first I should start this out with some of research I've been gathering on the subject prior ...