I’m not so certain that younger players enjoy old NES games. Perhaps those games are simply more familiar. It may be that those games are much more similar to the games younger players know and enjoy (“Mario Kart” hasn’t changed significantly in over 15 years) and so not as far from their preferences and expectations as is IF.

Thanks for writing this—this post in particular, as well as the blog.

Regarding the so-called rant: I was referring specifically to Meretzky’s digression into why cutscenes are “the worst way to put story development into a game.” I didn’t mean that as a criticism of what his point — I agree, for the most part — but it certainly was, ah, made with the most conviction. :) In a talk where most of his criticisms were light-hearted and generalized, that one stood out to me — he singled out an example of how games do storytelling poorly. I almost expected him to name specific titles, but I guess he wanted us to fill in the blanks.

That said, I don’t disagree with you — his answers were useful and illuminating, and I always enjoy hearing about writing from the perspective of the writer.

We’ve got a Usenet discussion going on this, too — link to Google’s feed here (http://tinyurl.com/6nuka4).

As I recall, Dan is right and Meretzky was focused on very recent examples — I think the context of the discussion at that point was recent games — and the impression I got was that he simply hadn’t been thinking about it that way: that in effect being asked to give his official opinion on Which Games Were Well-Written kinda threw him for a loop. A lot of times, writers aren’t comfortable being put in the role of critic.

Also, as the person who asked about his goals and strategies as a game designer, Meretzky’s reply, which you call a ‘micro-rant’ — I’m not sure what you’re getting at exactly — was very useful to me.

Conrad.

Still, even if we take the most restrictive of those possibilities, it’s sad that there aren’t more readily rememberable game stories from the past few years.

I would even venture to say that learning how to play text adventures (a self-contained activity with its own set of challenges/rewards) was great fun for many of us during the Infocom heyday, and Meretzky clearly embedded fun ways of scolding or rewarding the player for trying to do things the game wouldn’t let you do.

Interesting that he couldn’t name a game story he admired besides Portal. Hmm.

Many thanks again, Dan, for being our eyes and ears at this event.