"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.

"in the meantime, I decided to do an absolutely crucial bit of game science. Something that I am entirely sure is mulled over constantly, but never properly investigated. The question is but stated thusly: how long would it take the Little Prince to roll up an entire room based on a random path algorithm?" Julian is having fun.

"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"

"For all the talk of immersion and realism it seems gamers still want games that provide for them, that make them the centre of the action, the pivotal agent in the events of the world, the nexus around which everything is focused." And this is one of the big conflicts within games: you have to make the player feel wanted whilst they're playing the game, make them feel the centre of attention, because without them the game is nothing. But at the same time: can you still tell stories that aren't about them? I expand a little in the comment on the blogpost proper.

"Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations… Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable." Could be useful.