Interview: Rod Humble

Posted by Derek Yu Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:38:00 GMT

Humble

Caption: “Marriage ain’t easy.”—>

You guys ever take a philosophy course in college, and there’s always that one student that liked to spend 10 minutes of explanation and name-dropping before asking the professor a really, really simple question? Just to show how many books he’s read?

This interview kind of reminds of that, but it’s actually quite interesting. Whether The Marriage succeeds as a game is questionable, but there’s no doubt (in my mind, at least) that it is a fairly important piece of indie gaming. I hope Rod continues his experiments.

Also see: The Divorce

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Comments

  1. rinkuhero said about 11 hours later:

    The only name he dropped that I saw was Wittgenstein, though I don’t think that was only just to show how much he read because a big part of W’s philosophy was on the definition of words, and he used “game” as an example, so the name is pretty relevant. Not all intellectuals are pseudo-intellectuals.

    Though I agree with the people who say that he shouldn’t have included an explanation with the game. It’d be okay on his website or something, but to include it with a game is like a novelist writing a novel and then including cliff notes as an appendix.

  2. Jason Rohrer (the interviewer) said 4 days later:

    Um… I think he was pointing the finger at *me* as the interviewer, not at Rod as the respondent. Some of my questions are pretty long and wordy, but asked a rather simple question in the end. When the question is longer than the response…

    And I certainly did drop names of people and items from my reading list (like Koster, or the Realtime Art Manifesto).

    However, I honestly wasn’t doing that to make myself look smart or well-read. I was trying to set a context for the question. If we simply ask “what is an art game?”, the answers can be all over the board. Talking about Koster, or the RTAM, narrows the scope a bit—“oh, so that’s what you mean by an art game.”

    Anyway, I’ll try to write more concise questions in the future.

    And if you haven’t read Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design, you really should :)

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