Your game industry in your words: Week of January 13

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Irrational Games' Ken Levine, Ngmoco Sweden's Ben Cousins, Falcom's Toshihiro Kondo, and many others.] In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts with Gamasutra about the challenges of HTML5 games, the cancelled 1990s Choplifter reboot, relying on interesting game systems instead of wild character designs. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "People saying stuff is the last resort in a video game, especially if it's going to constrain the player from acting. You know, I want the player to be active. Active, active, active. So you just really learn, you sort of sharpen your toolset each time out. I try to get across the same amount of ideas, but I try to use less text to get that idea across." -- Irrational Games creative director and BioShock writer Ken Levine "We love Skylanders because the game explained what we can do with installing tags in items. We are the next step. ... Gamers are between ages 5 and 77 -- and Skylanders only targets ages 5-8." -- ePawn's general manager Valentin Lefevre on his company's Arena board game/figurine tech "They were game players, but they knew what game players know. They weren't visionaries." -- Dan Gorlin explaining his problems with the managers that cancelled his 1990s Choplifter reboot "It's sad to me to think that we're the entertainment industry, and we're the most technologically advanced of all the entertainment industries, and yet we seem to be lacking in a social progressivism that matches our technological progressivism. I want to turn that around." -- Dance Central project director Matt Boch "Our expectation is that we can place your game in front of 100 million people right away [by the end of 2012], and we're way ahead of schedule to get there. So I have no fear of achieving that goal." -- David Perry, CEO on cloud gaming service Gaikai "I don't know how to explain that to a customer. That's a big, big problem." -- EA creative director Richard Hilleman on the difficulties in predicting how HTML5 apps will run on a given hardware specification "I think Valve and Naughty Dog try to keep their teams controllably small, very senior staff, little overarching management and much more broad, self-directed people. [My hope is to] become the Naughty Dog or Valve of mobile." -- Ngmoco general manager and DICE/EA veteran Ben Cousins "We ended up with a wide range of review scores because some people saw the flaws and it fundamentally ruined it for them, but other people... forgave us in favor of appreciating our ambition." -- Prototype 2 design director Matt Armstrong on the superhero series' original game "When we create a game design, the gameplay system has to be interesting, and if the gameplay system is not interesting, the designers get in trouble. There are people within the company who would say, 'Okay, let's use the character to attract the audience.' Those kinds of game designs would get canned. They would get in trouble." -- Falcom president and Ys Seven director Toshihiro Kondo "When core gamers say 'there are no real games on Facebook,' I think what they're striving for is, 'I want a game with a win condition; when I play somebody I want to play that person, I don't want to play an abstraction of the person, or the statistics of the person." -- Electronic Arts' Spencer Brooks, producer and designer on newly launched social game RISK: Factions The complete versions of these in-depth articles, as well as other insightful pieces, are all available in Gamasutra's pages for Exclusive items and Features.