You know, for 30 years I've just been trying to recreate the feeling I had in 1978 when
I played D&D for the first time.
It's all about that feeling of telling a story with other players.
And no game, no electronic game has ever made me feel that way.
It's still, I do three to eight points of damage with a piece of art that looks like
a fireball and you do three to eight points of damage with something that looks like a
spear or I can heal people and you can pick locks and I can wear armor and you can't.
And I mean, that's not multiplayer storytelling, you know?
So I think there's a breakthrough to be made.
I've certainly got people at my office who are taking me to task now because I'm just
so frustrated.
Damn it.
I am frustrated that so many people in this business focus on recreating the die rolls
of Dungeons & Dragons or recreating the conversation systems we were using in 1989 for Crying Out
Loud or focusing on prettier pictures and no one's focusing on that, you know, non-combat
AI situation and collaborative storytelling that I think will really just take us to whole
new levels.
No one's doing it.
The mouse faced many challenges and choices, but in the end he saved wasteland from total
destruction with the help of a new friend, Oswald, the lucky rabbit.
And so I've been going very publicly talking about how, okay, John Carmack and Tim Sweeney,
spend as much time on this as you do on rendering and change the world for real, you know?
And all my programmers are like saying, hey, you know, we talk about this all the time and
we want to do it.
And I said, I know we talk about it all the time and we're going to do it, but I've got
to get everybody doing it because we can't just have us and, you know, Journey in Dark
Souls trying something cool and different, right?
I want, you know, a thousand points of light.
Let's go, guys.
Get mad at me if you want.
Call me a jerk if you want.
Prove me wrong.
Show me how to do real collaborative storytelling.
Do that, then I'm the idiot here, okay, go.
And finally, with Disney Epic Mickey, the character I said, we've got to try, we've
got to start.
We've got to, you know, fail gloriously is what I hope is chiseled into my tombstone
someday, you know?
So maybe this is the part where we start failing gloriously and figuring it out.
