Your Game Industry In Your Words: Week Of December 30

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Spicy Horse's American McGee, Bungie's Hao Chen, Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi, and many others.] In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts with Gamasutra about topics like playtesting MMOs for kids, solving graphics problems, and employee extortion at a social game studio. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "For us, arrogantly speaking, it is our Star Wars. It is the game we believe could become a really successful high quality franchise. The war we're fighting is, is it possible to do that starting small, or do you need to have $25 million dollars?" -- Kim Haar Jorgensen, game director at Interstellar Marines developer Zero Point Software "We bring in cub scouts, and we bring in hardcore gamers, and we brought in parents, and we brought in girl scouts, and they just play the game. And we get the greatest feedback right away -- if something's not fun, they're going to tell us." -- Gazillion GM/VP Jason Robar on playtesting free-to-play MMO Marvel Super Hero Squad Online "In terms of what we think is important, we will even lower some of the quality in order for us to have a more dynamic world. ... Everything we do to sell that this world is moving and dynamic is important to us." -- Bungie senior graphics engineer Hao Chen sharing the big graphics problems his team wants to solve "It's not likely we'll go back to big-budget AAA development. Ultimately, it's not why we're in China. We started the studio here in order to be close to the fastest growing online market in the world and tap into an incredible amount of technical and artistic talent. " -- Spicy Horse head and Alice designer American McGee "We were basically being told that if we did not take this money, we weren't going to see a penny later on. This is extortion, and their actions trample our rights. We ought to be fired properly and paid what we are owed by law." -- Former MetroGames employee accusing the social game developer of avoiding having to pay severance by allegedly pressuring workers to resign "The idea is that a system that deals with player failure within the game's boundaries will always be superior to one that does so outside those boundaries." -- Game designer Dan Andrei Carp examining how games streamline players' deaths "When I first joined Tecmo, I didn't want to be a part of Team Ninja." -- Team Ninja head Yosuke Hayashi "It's very simple: non-interactive text should be interruptible, just as movies should be." -- Game Designer Ernest Adams on uninterruptible text and other bad design decisions The complete versions of these in-depth articles, as well as other insightful pieces, are all available in Gamasutra's pages for Exclusive items and Features.