1 00:00:04,969 --> 00:00:06,510 ANDREW GRANT: My name's Andrew Grant. 2 00:00:06,510 --> 00:00:08,301 I'm the technical director for the MIT Game 3 00:00:08,301 --> 00:00:10,310 Lab and sometime lecturer. 4 00:00:10,310 --> 00:00:12,607 I've been playing games pretty much all my life. 5 00:00:12,607 --> 00:00:14,690 That's what my family does when they get together. 6 00:00:14,690 --> 00:00:16,564 And then when computers started doing it too, 7 00:00:16,564 --> 00:00:19,100 that's what I do with computers. 8 00:00:19,100 --> 00:00:20,957 I went to the games industry in 1994 9 00:00:20,957 --> 00:00:22,540 working for Looking Glass Technologies 10 00:00:22,540 --> 00:00:24,190 and then I moved out to California 11 00:00:24,190 --> 00:00:25,799 to work for Dreamworks Interactive. 12 00:00:25,799 --> 00:00:28,090 And actually, all told, that didn't last terribly long. 13 00:00:28,090 --> 00:00:29,840 I burned out after about five or six years 14 00:00:29,840 --> 00:00:31,164 in the games industry. 15 00:00:31,164 --> 00:00:32,830 And then I went to be a solo programmer, 16 00:00:32,830 --> 00:00:34,640 doing random contracts and work-for-hire, 17 00:00:34,640 --> 00:00:37,380 kind of like a gunslinger from the Wild West for awhile. 18 00:00:37,380 --> 00:00:40,020 But no matter what I do, I keep getting dragged back 19 00:00:40,020 --> 00:00:41,020 into the games industry. 20 00:00:41,020 --> 00:00:41,930 I like making games. 21 00:00:41,930 --> 00:00:42,888 It's what I want to do. 22 00:00:47,100 --> 00:00:49,470 Right now I'm playing a lot of things 23 00:00:49,470 --> 00:00:53,360 I'm playing a lot of the cooperative LEGO games 24 00:00:53,360 --> 00:00:54,270 with my son. 25 00:00:54,270 --> 00:00:56,290 He's four and we're playing through LEGO Batman, 26 00:00:56,290 --> 00:00:56,940 that sort of thing. 27 00:00:56,940 --> 00:00:57,875 And we recently started LEGO Lord 28 00:00:57,875 --> 00:01:00,520 of the Rings, which has been a bit of a challenge for him. 29 00:01:00,520 --> 00:01:03,480 It's a much darker LEGO game, oddly enough. 30 00:01:03,480 --> 00:01:05,630 And so he'll say things like is Boromir a bad guy? 31 00:01:05,630 --> 00:01:08,125 And I'm like, well, that's hard. 32 00:01:08,125 --> 00:01:10,440 Let me explain to you, you're four. 33 00:01:10,440 --> 00:01:12,520 He's confused. 34 00:01:12,520 --> 00:01:13,390 Is Gollum a bad guy? 35 00:01:13,390 --> 00:01:15,300 No, he's definitely a bad guy, yeah. 36 00:01:15,300 --> 00:01:16,861 But why is he going with the hobbits? 37 00:01:16,861 --> 00:01:18,360 Right, he's kind of a good guy, too. 38 00:01:18,360 --> 00:01:19,550 I don't know. 39 00:01:19,550 --> 00:01:21,915 Anyway, it's a complicated story for a four-year old. 40 00:01:21,915 --> 00:01:22,790 And it's kind of fun. 41 00:01:26,560 --> 00:01:28,970 I'm working on a number things right now. 42 00:01:28,970 --> 00:01:32,110 I'm working on a side project with the astronomy department 43 00:01:32,110 --> 00:01:33,620 on some software for them. 44 00:01:33,620 --> 00:01:36,670 I'm working on an IOS port of a game called Yomi. 45 00:01:36,670 --> 00:01:39,700 And I'm also working on a fractal tangram 46 00:01:39,700 --> 00:01:40,620 independent game. 47 00:01:40,620 --> 00:01:42,910 And with Rick, also, at the lab, I'm 48 00:01:42,910 --> 00:01:45,560 working on a massively cooperative strategy game. 49 00:01:49,750 --> 00:01:52,230 This semester we're trying a couple new game engines. 50 00:01:52,230 --> 00:01:54,021 We always try a couple of new game engines. 51 00:01:54,021 --> 00:01:56,271 But I always like to let the students sink their teeth 52 00:01:56,271 --> 00:01:58,437 into a couple of them and then come back and tell us 53 00:01:58,437 --> 00:01:59,370 what they found out. 54 00:01:59,370 --> 00:02:01,420 There's a degree to which I can do that myself, 55 00:02:01,420 --> 00:02:03,700 but it really is more useful, I think, 56 00:02:03,700 --> 00:02:05,520 to get some people with fresh eyes 57 00:02:05,520 --> 00:02:07,970 to come in and try them out. 58 00:02:07,970 --> 00:02:09,400 Usually they come back and tell us 59 00:02:09,400 --> 00:02:11,070 the old standbys are the ones they want to go with. 60 00:02:11,070 --> 00:02:13,020 We usually end up going with Unity and Flixel 61 00:02:13,020 --> 00:02:14,360 as our reliable ones. 62 00:02:14,360 --> 00:02:17,020 But this year we're trying out a new language hacks, which also 63 00:02:17,020 --> 00:02:18,292 has a Flixel implementation. 64 00:02:18,292 --> 00:02:19,750 And we're also trying a game called 65 00:02:19,750 --> 00:02:21,540 Phaser, which is used by the Education Arcade. 66 00:02:21,540 --> 00:02:22,950 So we really want to get our teeth into that 67 00:02:22,950 --> 00:02:24,110 and see how we like it. 68 00:02:27,289 --> 00:02:29,580 I've always been interested in artificial intelligence. 69 00:02:29,580 --> 00:02:31,680 When I have a chance to sit down and play with stuff, 70 00:02:31,680 --> 00:02:33,596 I want to my computer figure out how do things 71 00:02:33,596 --> 00:02:35,327 that it couldn't do before. 72 00:02:35,327 --> 00:02:36,160 That's a lot of fun. 73 00:02:39,839 --> 00:02:41,380 We are in a really interesting place, 74 00:02:41,380 --> 00:02:42,945 I think, in games right now. 75 00:02:42,945 --> 00:02:45,320 It used to be the case that when I first started playing, 76 00:02:45,320 --> 00:02:47,737 that there would be two or three interesting games a year. 77 00:02:47,737 --> 00:02:49,278 And you could play them, and then you 78 00:02:49,278 --> 00:02:51,590 waited very impatiently for the next ones to come out. 79 00:02:51,590 --> 00:02:54,514 And now we're in a place where you cannot play all 80 00:02:54,514 --> 00:02:55,430 the interesting games. 81 00:02:55,430 --> 00:02:58,080 In fact, I can't even play all the really interesting games. 82 00:02:58,080 --> 00:02:59,490 There's just too many of them. 83 00:02:59,490 --> 00:03:03,270 But in spite of that, I still kind of want more. 84 00:03:03,270 --> 00:03:04,855 One of the neat things about games 85 00:03:04,855 --> 00:03:06,680 is that there's a whole bunch of different games you can make. 86 00:03:06,680 --> 00:03:09,600 I feel like, a lot of times, we get stuck on a couple types. 87 00:03:09,600 --> 00:03:12,740 We don't necessarily need another first-person shooter 88 00:03:12,740 --> 00:03:15,497 that's super realistic modern combat. 89 00:03:15,497 --> 00:03:16,830 There are some good games there. 90 00:03:16,830 --> 00:03:19,640 Don't get me wrong, but we don't need five of them a year. 91 00:03:19,640 --> 00:03:21,098 But what I'm really looking forward 92 00:03:21,098 --> 00:03:23,970 is seeing all the weird stuff, the stuff that no one expects. 93 00:03:23,970 --> 00:03:26,699 The new, crazy things, and the more games get made, 94 00:03:26,699 --> 00:03:27,990 the more crazy stuff gets made. 95 00:03:27,990 --> 00:03:30,250 And I love that stuff.