Brian Moriarty

Recently, I’ve visited the website of Jonathan Blow, an indie game designer who was mentioned by one of my heroes, Eric Zimmerman. Jonathan mentioned the presentations of Brian Moriarty.

Brian is the game designer of many games. For example, he did Loom, which I like very much. Anyway, here are the presentations:

The Secret of Psalm 46
This seems to be the most recent one. Quite nice although it is hard to understand because of the music in the background. Although highly entertaining, I find the point he tries to makes rather weak (in short “games should be awesome”). It seems like he tries to persuade his audience with razzle dazzle then to convince it with solid arguments.

Who Buried Paul?
This one is very nice. I couldn’t find an audio version except maybe this torrent which I couldn’t test yet. It is something I also realized and which fits well to Daniel Renkel’s recent post.

“If you want your artificial characters to exhibit a wide spectrum of intelligent-looking behaviors, don’t try to program them all yourself, one case statement at a time. [...] Instead [...] Throw in some useless particulars.”

The Point is
I mention this one only because it is funny. It is from 1996 and it sure feel like it. Totally new-age, hippy stuff mixed with the strong belief that the internet is god. But kinda interesting to compare it what really happened.

Oh yeah and here is some other stuff from him.

Krystian Majewski

Krystian Majewski was born in Warsaw and studied design at Köln International School of Design. Before, he was working on a mid-size console project for NEON Studios in Frankfurt. He helped establish a Master course in Game Design and Research at the Cologne Game Lab. Today he teaches Game Design at various institutions and develops independent games.

2 responses to “Brian Moriarty”

  1. Daniel 'sirleto' Renkel

    i only want to add one thing: moriarty? wasn’t that the opponent / bad guy in the sherlock holmes stories? moriarty? moriaty? cool name :-)

  2. Krystian Majewski

    Yeah, he also was the sentient Hologram in the Star Trek: TNG Series. :-)

About

The Game Design Scrapbook is a second blog of group of three game designers from Germany. On our first blog, Game Design Reviews we describe some games we played and point out various interesting details. Unfortunately, we found out that we also need some place to collect quick and dirty ideas that pop into our minds. Hence, welcome to Game Design Scrapbook. You will encounter wild, random rantings. Many of then incoherent. Some of them maybe even in German. If you don't like it, you might enjoy Game Design Reviews more.

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