Stay hungry, stay foolish

I randomly stumped upon this youTube video. It's the Stanford commencement speak by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says. I am very touched by his speak and cherish that I have already found what I love and am doing things that I won't regret if I die tomorrow.

Design Game for Entertainment

This is the slides I used on GDC 2007 Game Innovation Panel. My speech's topic is about how video game started as a niche software product, now evolves into a major entertainment medium.

However, entertainment is the emotional food for human beings. When you are sad, you need some thing to make you feel better. When you are too stressed, you want to see some thing to calm you down. It is all about the feelings its audience experienced rather than a product which is very much about features and functions. When people comment about main stream entertainment like movies and literatures, they talk about how it feels. When people talk about products and software, they talk about the technical features. It's also very interesting to see people describe certain product as an entertainment and experience. For example, ipod and bmw.

As a main stream medium, video games are often treated like products and designed around features such as "40 hours gameplay, MMORPG, FPS, WWII" I think it is time, we, the game enthusiasts, to review and design games as an entertainment medium rather than software products, to care more about how our audience feel rather than how long they can play.