ANDREW GRANT: My name's Andrew Grant.
I'm the technical director for the MIT Game
Lab and sometime lecturer.
I've been playing games pretty much all my life.
That's what my family does when they get together.
And then when computers started doing it too,
that's what I do with computers.
I went to the games industry in 1994
working for Looking Glass Technologies
and then I moved out to California
to work for Dreamworks Interactive.
And actually, all told, that didn't last terribly long.
I burned out after about five or six years
in the games industry.
And then I went to be a solo programmer,
doing random contracts and work-for-hire,
kind of like a gunslinger from the Wild West for awhile.
But no matter what I do, I keep getting dragged back
into the games industry.
I like making games.
It's what I want to do.
Right now I'm playing a lot of things
I'm playing a lot of the cooperative LEGO games
with my son.
He's four and we're playing through LEGO Batman,
that sort of thing.
And we recently started LEGO Lord
of the Rings, which has been a bit of a challenge for him.
It's a much darker LEGO game, oddly enough.
And so he'll say things like is Boromir a bad guy?
And I'm like, well, that's hard.
Let me explain to you, you're four.
He's confused.
Is Gollum a bad guy?
No, he's definitely a bad guy, yeah.
But why is he going with the hobbits?
Right, he's kind of a good guy, too.
I don't know.
Anyway, it's a complicated story for a four-year old.
And it's kind of fun.
I'm working on a number things right now.
I'm working on a side project with the astronomy department
on some software for them.
I'm working on an IOS port of a game called Yomi.
And I'm also working on a fractal tangram
independent game.
And with Rick, also, at the lab, I'm
working on a massively cooperative strategy game.
This semester we're trying a couple new game engines.
We always try a couple of new game engines.
But I always like to let the students sink their teeth
into a couple of them and then come back and tell us
what they found out.
There's a degree to which I can do that myself,
but it really is more useful, I think,
to get some people with fresh eyes
to come in and try them out.
Usually they come back and tell us
the old standbys are the ones they want to go with.
We usually end up going with Unity and Flixel
as our reliable ones.
But this year we're trying out a new language hacks, which also
has a Flixel implementation.
And we're also trying a game called
Phaser, which is used by the Education Arcade.
So we really want to get our teeth into that
and see how we like it.
I've always been interested in artificial intelligence.
When I have a chance to sit down and play with stuff,
I want to my computer figure out how do things
that it couldn't do before.
That's a lot of fun.
We are in a really interesting place,
I think, in games right now.
It used to be the case that when I first started playing,
that there would be two or three interesting games a year.
And you could play them, and then you
waited very impatiently for the next ones to come out.
And now we're in a place where you cannot play all
the interesting games.
In fact, I can't even play all the really interesting games.
There's just too many of them.
But in spite of that, I still kind of want more.
One of the neat things about games
is that there's a whole bunch of different games you can make.
I feel like, a lot of times, we get stuck on a couple types.
We don't necessarily need another first-person shooter
that's super realistic modern combat.
There are some good games there.
Don't get me wrong, but we don't need five of them a year.
But what I'm really looking forward
is seeing all the weird stuff, the stuff that no one expects.
The new, crazy things, and the more games get made,
the more crazy stuff gets made.
And I love that stuff.