via Speaking of Faith

Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, says that pleasurable, purposeless activity prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life’s complication.  Play games – they’re good for you!

Listen to the radio program here.

This is a presentation I gave at the GamesBeat09 conference hosted by VentureBeat. The topic is about the future of video games. Unfortunately, my presentation was interrupted. Therefore I recorded a version afterward to satisfy the people who are interested to hear the ending.

However, this is the first time I tried to add my narration to my slides. There were so many technical issues happened during the making of this video. So if you hear sound glitches (some are pretty long), please bear with me. In addition, this was suppose to be a 8 minutes talk. However, I spent 20 minutes trying to elaborate each slides to more details which made the talk too long to watch : {

It was a great honor and pleasant experience chatting with host of CBC Radio show Spark, Nora Young about Flower and the game design philosophy behind thatgamecompany.

The crew at Spark managed to edit our 30 minutes conversation into be a very condensed information feast. You probably won’t be able to tell that I had bad coughs that day. Applause for the effort went into the show!

I had a great conversation with my friend Anna Knos today on IM. She’s not in the video game industry but somehow is doing researches about games. And by sharing my thoughts on video games and art with her I learned a lot myself.

In short, video game can be Art if you make it.

And here are my lazy IM notes…

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The development team Tale of Tales is somewhat of a sister studio to ours. They develop games that explore richer emotional themes and content not traditionally found in the current video game market landscape. Most recently, they were finalists in the Independent Games Festival with their game “The Path,” a dark and haunting game that toys with the player’s sense of direct goals and achievements while the story of the game plays with the themes of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

They’ve been gathering quite an interesting interview series, the last of which, we are honored to say, is an interview with our Creative Director, Jenova Chen.
The same TGC concepts you are probably familiar with are explored, but Jenova goes into much more depth about his background and beginnings as a game developer, and I think the dialogue becomes more interesting in lieu of the nature of ToT’s games.

Click here for the interview.