Your game industry in your words, week of October 19

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Firaxis' Garth DeAngelis, Funcom's Craig Morrison, Ouya's Julie Uhrman, 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 on emergent storytelling, minimalist graphical design, the dangers of Windows 8's closed distribution, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "Now that we have incredibly advanced art, we're not necessarily relying on the players to fill in the blanks visually; instead, we should enable them to fill in the blanks elsewhere, perhaps emotionally." - Firaxis producer Garth DeAngelis (XCOM) "If you hear yourself saying, 'Our competitor uses this solution all the time, and they must have done user testing, so let's just do it that way' ... you're not innovating. Worse yet, you're not learning anything for yourself." - Arkadium's director of R&D Tom Rassweiler shares one of five signs you're not prototyping enough "It's quite remarkable how, with less control, less authority, from an IP holder or a license company, how much creativity and innovation you run into [from players]." - SuperData Research CEO Joost van Dreunen "The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is getting called 'lazy' in the occasional comments thread. ... It's easy to assume the abstract design is covering for a lack of skill." - Kairo developer Richard Perrin discusses reactions he's encountered taking a minimalist approach to graphical design "A lot of the hype is actually generated by the players. They want you to start huge, and if you don't sell a million copies it's suddenly, 'Oh, you're a failure. I don't care about that game anymore." - Funcom Montreal creative director Craig Morrison on the problem with player expectations and MMOs "For any developer keen on creating the breakthrough software of the future, it should be abundantly clear that the closed nature of Windows 8's new ecosystem will be catastrophic for the platform." - Programmer and industry veteran Casey Muratori "Part of any success with a new platform is making sure that we have great content on it. We definitely want to put money into game development." - Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman describes her company's efforts as a first-party publisher "There's a lot of countries that started like us. ... Like all those Eastern European companies -- they were small and they're now very recognized. We are definitely trying to build the means and the people in order to achieve that." - Kaxan Games (El Chavo) business manager Martin Melendez on building Mexico's game development community "[It] all boils down to consumer expectation. If the norm now is that a shooter -- a quality -- shooter delivers high quality single player and high quality multiplayer, then that's the standard, and that's what every studio has to build for." - Medal of Honor: Warfighter producer Luke Thai 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.