>>319095
I've found an old interview with Sophie Revillar (she talks about the GDC 2002 with the French magazine Joystick, ref: June 2002, #138, page 70)
>So making simpler games would urge more people to play?
>It's a big question that always comes back. Last year, Cliff Blezinski explained that for most people, the equasion is simple: videos games are toys; toys are for kids; adults playing with toys are geeks. Therefore, his theory is that people don't play video games so they are not viewed as geeks. It's also the same idea that Ernest Adams talked about this year. For him, we're half-way between technology and toys. Games aren't serious, they have a negative reputation, they are not recognized as art.
>So what's the solution?
>The best answer I've heard was coming from Chris Hecker in his "Experimental Gameplay Workshop". According to Chris Hecker, we won't reach mass market by creating games that everybody will enjoy, but instead by catering to specific targets. I'd venture further: there are always people who won't play video games. For those people who own a computer or console in their home, we have to craft products that use the same technology as those used in video games, but that won't be video games.
She also likes to repeat stuff like "video games need to become more mature, to grow up". Which is funny, because Revillar worked with Cryo. If you don't remember that company, they were known for publishing mostly boring adventure games in pre-rendered scenes (almost the equivalent of today's walking simulators). People knew them for the quality of the visuals (the emergence of CD-Rom drives in the early nineties allowed fore more storage memory than what any home computer had at the time, so devs started to pack their supports with tons of stuff, like high fidelity music, full motion video, etc. – this type of content was impressive at the time because impossible before CD-Roms), but nobody really played their games and the company went bankrupt.
When I read that interview, it looks like they want to "save the video game industry" (fourteen years later, the industry's still there) by "having a larger audience", therefore "creating technological products that aren't video games, catering to a specific audience" is the way to go. It's always been a hispter nest. While the different conventions looked interesting, the underlying goal makes no sense.