We know that violent video games have an impact on children. Just rece — Video game

"We level designers — you would come and explain what it is that the goal would be. This level should look like Piranesi, the famous architect. We’d go and look at books and try to come up with a level that looked like Piranesi. You’d come by and shake your head and we’d go back to look at books again. I used to wonder, why is Amy mad? And it wasn’t until I became a creative director myself that I understood the curse of being a creative director, which is this: you have the vision for the game. You know what it is you want to be making. You explain it to someone. If they get it instantly, you’ll never see that person again on the project, because you don’t need to communicate. The brilliant people on the project who are — realistically you’ll see them three times in the course of the game. If you have a masterful UI designer and you can explain the vision, you’re done. You spend your time almost exclusively with the people who don’t understand what you’re trying to do. That’s the load you bear. And so we just didn’t get it."

"There have been four decades of research on the effect of media violence on our kids and it all points to the same conclusion -- media violence leads to more aggression, anti-social behavior, and it desensitizes kids to violence. The American Academy of Pediatrics summed up this point in a report entitled Media Exposure Feeding Childrens Violent Acts. "Playing violent video games is to an adolescents violent behavior what smoking tobacco is to lung cancer," it said. This isnt about offending our sensibilities -- it is about protecting our children."

"It was intended to be ironic, to illustrate what I perceived at the time to be an elitist attitude among a certain kind of PC gamer. People who invest in expensive gaming PCs and continually spend money to make sure the tech in their brightly-lit tower cases is up to date. Who actually prefer games that are temperamental to get running and that have complicated keyboard interfaces, just because it discourages new or casual players who will in some way taint the entire community with their presence. I meant it as a dig."

"Research has demonstrated that some game design choices improve the way people focus and increase feelings of well-being. Other design choices can trigger addictive behavior. While research is ongoing, experimental studies have shown that some military FPS games can cause players to become measurably more militarist in outlook. In a “realistic” military FPS game, the presence or absence of rules of engagement, for example, will dramatically change how the player approaches a mission. When the military itself consults on the design of such a game, this leads to a number of uncomfortable questions about why those choices were made."

"Unlike print, radio, television, or movies, video games are an interactive format that allows them to affect people differently than more traditional forms of broadcast media. Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has argued that the interactive nature of video games makes them an inherently persuasive medium—a system of “procedural rhetoric” that encourages players to create abstract mental models for how systems work and to form judgments about those systems through the act of playing. The design of a game’s models and systems of interactions are intentional choices by the designers, and they set the terms for how a person encounters the game. One video game designer called this effort to induce a certain type of player reaction “emotion engineering” in the design process."

"Few good computer games have been written so far. Of the good ones, some are computer adaptations of games like Chess and Othello which existed first in another form. These games are good if they add a dimension to the play of the game that is not present in its original form, (such as the possibility of solo play), and do so in an aesthetically pleasing form. My personal opinion is that such computer adaptations will play a trivial role in the future of computer games and the best ones will be those which take unique advantage of the computer capabilities."