Your game industry in your words: Week of May 11, 2012

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Epic Games' Mark Rein, Loot Drop's Brenda Brathwaite, Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe, 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 the danger of open platforms, old-school episodic content, and making games like storybooks. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "A lot of games these days feel to me like 500 page novels" - The Unfinished Swan's creative director Ian Dallas on making games more like storybooks "The only way to learn game design is not beating the hell out of a game in test, the only way to learn game design is to make a lot of bad games yourself." - Loot Drop's Brenda Brathwaite "Simplicity does not exclude depth, as a strong combination of simple rules can make for incredibly deep gameplay." - Vlambeer's Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman (Gun Godz, Super Crate Box) "That's information we're not addressing at this time." - Playdom's Chris Hinton echoing many other developers who've declined to comment on the performance of their Google+ games "Making sure your intellectual property ('IP') paperwork is complete will help prevent needless ownership challenges" - Attorney Jovan Johnson emphasizing the importance of owning the work in your game "We kind of invented episodic content, although we put it in separate boxes." - Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe "If you look at the most open platform today -- that's Android -- Android is anarchy. ... We do not want open as in Android -- that would be a disaster for the business."" - Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney "For me, that's a lot of the appeal of especially the classic text adventures: the process of realizing you live in a world with a tremendous and unbounded number of verbs" - Linden Lab creative director and interactive fiction maven Emily Short 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.