Interview: Rod Humble

By: Derek Yu

On: April 5th, 2007

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

Posted in Games and Art?, Interviews

rinkuhero

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.
Jason Rohrer (the interviewer)

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 :)