Costikyan: Death to the Game Industry (Long Live Games)

I couldn't have said this better myself. Here is the view of Greg Costikyan on the state of the industry. I enjoy it when a game designer curses violently out of passion for his choosen profession. :-)

Much of the work on Lostgarden is there to provide practical tools for accomplishing many of the goals that are outlined in Greg's PowerPoint. "Death to the Game Industry (Long Live Games)" describes a movement made up of dozens of individuals who are active with blogs, talks and more. We need to spread this philosophy beyond the core group such that it infects hundreds of top designers. The ultimate goal is to influence the creation, marketing and distribution of future generations of games.

Some pertinent topics that I've been covering on this site:

• How do we create alternative business models that increase the power of the game authors and reduce the destructive influences of the distributors, retailers and publishers?
• What alternative distribution systems need to be created to ensure success?
• How do we reduce production costs?
• How do we empower smaller developers?
• What are market factors (such as genre addiction, genre lifecycles, etc) that affect the success of games? How can we build games that succeed in the market and still maintain creativity?

In this light, Space Crack is more than just a game design. It is intended to be an illustrated example of many of these ideals in action. My intent is not to preach theory, but to demonstrate a series of simple, revolutionary tools in a practical, concrete fashion.

take care
Danc.