The Sandbox

My name is Harry Teasley, and I've been making games professionally for around sixteen years now. My coworkers call me "Old Man Teasley" to my face, and "Harry" when they think I can't hear them. For this, they will pay.

I started in games as an artist, which I still am, but I've also done game design, production, user interface design, a number of different things that make me talk about games as if I know something.

The highlight games I've worked on are Civilization, Doom PSX, Half-Life, and most recently, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. The lowlights would be... hmmm, probably Double Dragon V, and Dr Floyd's Desktop Toys. Although Dr Floyd shipped with Kye, which was great, it also had an early precursor of Clippy, only the good doctor was even more annoying and less useful. Hence, it can never be forgiven.

The industry has changed a lot over the past sixteen years, yet, for all the advances, it is surprising how little computer and video games have changed on a fundamental level. I intend to gripe about that fairly frequently. There is almost nothing that I won't gripe about.

This article at CNN points out something that most gamers have known for a long time, that games can be great ways to connect with other people, that they can foster good social relationships, instead of being the tools of isolation that they're accused of being.

Not living in a battleground state, and not watching any network television, I don't see a lot of Election 2008!! commercials, but gamepolitics.com informs me that I've missed out on a truly excellent Mitt Romney commercial. Titled Ocean, Mitt comes out against liking things that are bad.

No, he was mildly more specific than that, belaboring a "society is an ocean in which we swim" metaphor, and video games get mentioned non-specifically for their pernicious influence. Yeah.

I would encourage Mitt to read The Sandbox, specifically this or this or this. Get with the program, Mitt.