Two years ago, Warren Spector spoke at the GDC about the relationship between game licenses and creativity as a game designer. What are your feelings on working with a license and how that's affected your creative process?

I agree in a lot of ways with what Warren said at that lecture. Working on a license certainly isn't all bad. In fact, it's not even mostly bad. It allowed us to really focus. We didn't waste a lot of time futzing around with thousands of weird ideas. The concept was very, very easy to scope. If I was given the task to simply "make a game", I'd never get off the ground. Ideas are cheap and easy to come by and sorting through them is a long and difficult, and fairly non-creative task. A brand, a license, a sequel, any of these things can make the work of sifting through a mountain of garbage to find a nugget of gold much, much easier, and free you to get on with the important creative work of actually building something.

Are you interested in doing an original title?

Interested? Sure. Am I in a hurry? No. As long as I'm learning from what I'm doing, I'm happy. Like I say, there is a terrible chore that comes with trying to bring something from nothing, and the hunt for constraint—a way to "pre-sort" the millions of ideas you might have—is not that fun. If I get to do it eventually, I'll be happy to, but I'm not running around in a panic worried that I'll never get to do it and I'm certainly not going to complain about getting to work on the amazing brands I'm working on now.

At this year's "Burning Down the House" session at GDC, the general tone was very negative, especially in terms of games becoming too generic and the inability for designers to be truly creative in today's market-driven industry. Would you agree with that as an overall assessment?

No. While entertaining, the "rant" was terribly inaccurate. Here's a rant for you: I wish my parent's generation would stop whining about how horrible the world is because of evil capitalist corporations and war-mongering, and how the only way to fix anything is to burn something—whether it be "the house" or "a draftcard", and then get everyone in a huff about the injustices of the world before going for a double latte. It's very depressing to me that this panel of experts thinks that my work, or the work of my peers—thousands of us working in this industry—is not truly creative, and that we're driven by the market and enslaved to share-holders and quarterly financials. Guess what, we're not making Space Wars in a basement by ourselves. Those may have been the good old days, but I'd put the emphasis as much on "old" as on "good". I work for a large corporation that's responsible for returning profit on the investment of shareholders. Do I sit here at my desk and look at a design problem and call up the Ubisoft Stock page on Le Bourse and try to design a way to make the market value of the company go up? No. I do creative work for a company that believes that the best way to be profitable is to develop quality products. I work as creatively as I can, and I work with others who do the same. I also work to protect that creativity and emphasize the value of creativity and originality when confronted with the success of derivative design. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I fail. I agree that there is a lot of derivative design out there, and probably the only thing that is indicative of is that we fail more often than we succeed. I think it's irresponsible of these industry legends to chastise us for our failures instead of celebrating and rewarding our successes… of which there are many. You'd think they'd have learned something about how to use reward mechanisms in their study of game design.

You've been an advocate for greater quality of life for those working in the videogame industry. What do you think is the largest issue regarding quality of life and what solution would you like to see implemented?

That's another really hard question. The largest issue actually seems to be our ignorance of where to even begin working on the problem. I was shocked by Steve McConnell's "Business Case for Improved Production Practices" that was offered at GDC this year and presented again in a video to the Montreal IGDA Chapter. The fact that I'm a professional software developer who has never even heard of things like CMM software development practices is insane. But it's not the lack of formalized development processes itself that's the problem, it's the fact that we're so isolated that we didn't know such methods existed. What else is out there that we should have learned from that we don't know about? So the biggest issue is simply lack of awareness of methods that already exist to deal with the issue.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks for the awesome questions.

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