Category Archives: Games/Inventions

An Interview with the Exploratorium’s Adam Tobin, Part 2

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The Exploratorium's Adam Tobin talks about what makes a great toy and shares ruminations from a Muppet colloquium.

AC_Tobin2-280Dan Brodnitz: I read that you also create mechanical art. What’s that work like?

Adam Tobin: After I sold the first toy company, I had a few larger-scale projects I’d always wanted to pursue. The first thing I wanted to make was a clock that told time with rolling marbles. I’d wanted to make it since I was a kid. And I started making it and ended up making a few other contraption-type pieces. It was just such a joy for me, after years of designing things to be mass produced to say, “I’m just going to make one, and I’m not as concerned about how you can make 10,000 of these.” In essence, they were very large one-of-a-kind toys.

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An Interview with the Exploratorium’s Adam Tobin, Part 1

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The Exploratorium's Adam Tobin talks about growing up as a child-inventor, the Exploratorium workflow, and the challenges of summoning an "ah-ha!" moment on a deadline.

Adam TobinDan Brodnitz: Do you remember your first invention?

Adam Tobin: I started as an electronics tinkerer. I made a burglar alarm to keep my sister out of my room. I took an old car radio that had been abandoned from one of the old family cars and got inside it and wired up quadraphonic sound in my bedroom. I began making wooden toys when I was young as well, like whirligig and rolling marble toys.

DB: Were you raised in a family of inventors, or was it something you got into on your own?

AT: I don’t know where it came from. My father can’t pick up a hammer…. For some reason, with me, I was just a tinkerer from the get-go.

DB: How did your parents respond?

AT: They encouraged it — it meant that things around the house might get fixed that otherwise wouldn’t. I remember I was seven or eight years old and somehow I was the only one in the house that could fix our stove.

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An Interview with Blizzard’s Chris Metzen, Part 2

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World of Warcraft's Chris Metzen talks about the ingredients of good interactive story-telling, the power of tribal creativity, and why Blizzard's game makers will never put rubber nipples on Batman's suit.

Welcome to the second part of this interview with Blizzard VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen. If you haven't already read Part One be sure to check it out to hear about the power of spinning ideas, and how Metzen got his big break on a bar napkin.

Chris MetzenWelcome to the second part of this interview with Blizzard VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen. If you haven’t already read Part One be sure to check it out to hear about the power of spinning ideas, and how Metzen got his big break on a bar napkin.

What do you think are the ingredients of good storytelling in computer games?

You definitely want “show — don’t tell.” And it’s difficult in interactive spaces because “showing” usually means it’s very keyed into specific art resources or the way your game engine works. Also, more often than not, you don’t want to stick the player with minutes worth of exposition. Ultimately, it’s a video game and people are conditioned to want push buttons or click their mouse. Whether they’re playing Pac-Man or Half Life 2 or World of Warcraft, they want to feel like they’re in the driver’s seat — that’s the difference between the interactive medium and film, for instance. In film you’re pretty much a captive audience. You’re going to sit there for two hours and experience what the writer and the director and the actors want you to experience. You have very little say in the matter other than how you process it after the fact, right?…. [So] even if we take control away from you for a couple of minutes to show a pre-rendered cinematic, or a cinematic sequence that shows the next story note unfolding, we want to get people back into the action as soon as possible. And that determines the way your story unfolds. You have to tell it in bite-sized chunks because you know that control must resume for the player pretty soon.

How do you typically kick ideas off?

CM: I just get geeked up walking into a room where we all sit down and jam. (I use the term “geeked up” a lot — like you’re just out of your mind for an idea.) I’ll throw out an outline of, “Here’s where I’d like to go” or “Here’s a rough painting.” And then we’ll all sit around and absolutely sculpt a grander vision. My ideas are usually kind of the initial spark, but I’m surrounded by a really good team. We’ve been doing this for a long time together. Instincts are honed and there’s a great chemistry, so these guys wind up taking ideas and just running all the way down the field with them.

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An Interview with Blizzard’s Chris Metzen, Part 1

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World of Warcraft's Chris Metzen talks about the power of spinning ideas, and how he got his big break on a bar napkin.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. Be sure to also check out Part Two to hear about the ingredients of good interactive story-telling, the power of tribal creativity, and why Blizzard’s game makers will never put rubber nipples on Batman’s suit.

Chris Metzen

How do you explain to non-gamers what you do for a living?

My core responsibility is coming up with the worlds our games take place in. And over time, the worlds are becoming the game, strangely enough.

When I started out in this racket about fourteen years ago, we were making war games. Essentially, you’re playing through a sequence of maps with this virtual army you build over time. It was my job not only to create the single-player component of the game — the storyline that you ultimately track through in these ongoing wars — but also to just kind of create the universe behind the game so that when you weren’t actually playing, you might still be chewing on these concepts or characters or places that you’d experienced.

What were some of your big influences growing up?

Well, figure that everyone in the industry just loved Star Wars. Star Wars created a monster. But I think what shaped the monster [for me] ultimately was a mix between Dungeons & Dragons and comic books. Those were my absolute loves, as most geeks around here will probably repeat. I’m more a comic geek than anything else, honestly. I still have about a thirty-dollar habit per week. It’s gotten bad; I need a twelve-step program. I even still buy Marvel. So I just grew up with serial storytelling. Every week you could go to the store and see somebody’s latest adventure. That template — the way comics unfold over time — had a really big impact on me.

I loved D&D — I loved the big worlds, the big spanning themes, the big epic quests, the unfolding settings with ancient civilizations and ancient secrets coming back to haunt the present. I loved all that. I love mythology. And somehow, as a little kid, comics was the conveyance system — the media that really captured my imagination…. There was continuity, high drama, threads from beyond space and time. There were threads from the past. There were gods walking the earth. Everything I wanted to have my head in was right there.

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