[jwiley]

I've been a fan of Chris Crawford for a long time. I find his framing of games in terms of "verbs" (the things you can do in the game) and "nouns" (the things you can do them to) to be incredibly eye-opening. It feels like games are constantly getting more nouns (NPCs, cars, buildings, other players), but remain incredibly verb poor.

I think a lot of the bubbling frustration with newer AAA games may actually be an unconscious reaction to enormous, beautiful landscapes where you can't really do much beyond shoot nice looking mannequins, open doors and follow the strict roller-coaster rails down the dialog tree.

Heres to hoping he and other clever people crack the code and give us some better tools and methodologies for building interactivity.