That’s a complicated question for any creative person, perhaps even more complicated in games where so many different things have to come together to make a game. Then you have the problem that whatever your intent and purpose with your work, people will ignore it and do what they want anyway. Plus they’ll always interpret and project things onto your work that you never even intended.
It might sound like a cop-out answer, but the goal is different with every piece of work. Sometimes something might be artsy or indie-oriented, another time conventional and old school. I have no huge or particular loyalty to any single way of doing things. I like diversity – in the proper meaning of the world – and try to design games synergistically so that setting and rules work together to support each other. If there’s a theme, I suppose it’s that. The right tool for the right job.
I’m interested in ideas, politics, freedom and every game is almost like a mini-experiment to see how people react and what they do with it.
I can’t point to any single, common thread but if there are any they include that synergistic, adaptive approach, working on several levels beyond the surface analysis, a casual writing style and a love of controversial topics and pushing buttons. Those things are interesting to me. Even ideas, beliefs and so on that I do not personally hold.
I also like to make fun of things, prick egos and to satirise pomposity – wherever it appears.
I’ve worked on conventional and indie games, horror, SF, fantasy, for big and small companies, on existing games and designing my own systems.
I suppose, most of all, overriding everything else, I just want games to be fun, but ‘fun’ can have many different definitions – even just for me.
Postmortem Studios 