Last week was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so we hosted a special episode of Ars Technica Live about the future of game design. Ars Reviews Editor Samuel Axon joined me to ask Tracy Fullerton about where games are headed in the future. An award-winning game developer, Tracy heads the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. She gave us her perspective as a creator and as a teacher of the next generation of game creators.
We began by talking about two of Tracy’s best-known games, Walden and The Night Journey, both of which push the definition of what counts as a game. In Walden, the player takes on the identity of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during the mid-19th century when he built a tiny cabin in the woods and tried to live off the land. That experience became his famous book On Walden Pond, and Tracy recreated it in her game by allowing players to build a cabin, wander a set of paths around the pond based on actual maps from the period, and watch thousands of different trees transform with the seasons.
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