PHILIP TAN: My name is Philip Tan.
I'm a research scientist here at the MIT Game Lab,
and I've been teaching various game courses here
at MIT for about 10 years.
Every night I play StarCraft for a couple of games,
just to help me calm down and get to sleep.
So that's kind of my regular ritual.
Otherwise, lately, I've picked up
this game called Desert Golfing, which is just
kind of endless golfing on the iPhone,
which is strangely soothing, yet maddening at the same time.
Right now I'm actually working with Blizzard Entertainment
to try to create different ways for players-- for people who
are interested in StarCraft-- to spectate a game being played
by professionals.
So we're about fixing.
I'm really looking forward to what the students end up
making.
They usually impress me with some sort
of far-out-of-left-field approach to the problems that
we put forward to them.
And this year we are ramping up the design challenge,
so I'm interested to see where they go with that.
Outside of this class, I'm pretty much focused
mostly on my four-year-old kid and relearning
what fun is, actually, through her eyes.
I'd like to just see a lot more different kinds of games
about a whole bunch of different things.
Right now I feel we're right at the cusp off
like a Cambrian explosion of different ideas.
Tools are out there.
The knowledge is getting out there-- with this idea
that anyone can make a game.
But I feel that there are still a lot
of social and systemic barriers to prevent people from getting
every idea into distribution.
So we're still constrained to a small set
of genres-- familiar genres.
We see a lot of those games.
I'd like to get a greater variety out there.