Feature: 'A Man For All Seasons: gameLab’s Eric Zimmerman Talks Design, Trends, and the Big Apple'

In today's main feature article, Gamasutra sits down with gameLab CEO Eric Zimmerman, long-time industry notable and creator of innovative web-based or casual titles including Diner Dash and Blix, to talk about making games, trends in the industry, and the New York video game development scene. In an extract from the full interview, when asked about 'gaming trends that are exciting or bothersome' by interviewer Matthew Hawkins, Zimmerman comments: "Well, I could talk about the increasing homogenization of the field of commercial games. That's sort of an old song, but I still think it's true. If you go to E3 where Sony and Nintendo have their booths and stand everywhere, you can see hundreds of screens at once, and they almost all look exactly the same in the sense that they're all 3D spaces with a horizontal plane in the middle and an object in the lower center of the screen. It might be the barrel of a gun, a vehicle, a person running. And it's amazing, considering how with today's technology we can really put almost anything on-screen, that there's such a structural homogeneity, both terms on aesthetics and in terms of content, but especially in the structure of the gameplay... it's shocking. But it's also hard to innovate. And as I said, that's both a business dilemma and a creative or design dilemma." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).