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.
