Ron Gilbert Speaks

Idle Thumbs have posted the first part of an interview with the Grumpy Gamer, Ron Glbert. Well part of it is him seeming to interview them, but Ron, as always has some ideas about games that he's spent time thinking about (that is, I don't know if he is right or wrong, but you can tell that he's not just spouting off, I agree broadly with what he says and very much miss the style of game he is advocating).

I think the main thing that really bothers me is that the games business is in this dangerous cycle, where a lot of people are spending a lot of time satisfying this very small group of very vocal people, and every time they do that, they really knock out this fringe group of people who would really like to be playing games. I'm not talking about this, you know, "mass market," of moms out there who would supposedly "love to be playing Doom 3 if it just eren't so violent." I'm just talking about people who go into stores, they look for stuff, and they just don't find anything. Or maybe they buy one game, they're disappointed with it, six or nine months later they'll try something new.

"I think for those people, we could really be doing a lot more to bring them into the games industry, a lot more creative things with the games. I wish the publishers were a little more adventurous in terms of things they'd like to do, and not completely obsessed with "everything has to be so driven," you know? I guess it's a little bit frustrating to me that we're really not actively trying to branch out a little bit more.

I'm not sure if he quite gets away with comparing Monkey Island to Citizen Kane, though.

Idle Thumbs, by the way, is rapidly becoming about the only on-line games site worth visiting. Sure, it doesn't do reviews with any kind of timelyness, but that's not the point. They care about games, and write insightfully about them. They manage to do this with quite the fanboy glee in what they're doing but without devolving into the immature gibber that most games site do.

Though if you do need immature gibber, there is always UK Resistance and for timely reviews there's metacritic.