the player as much of the decision making as possible.
ThoughGettysburg!had a multi-player option, by and large your games have
been single-player only for a long time. What do you think of the emerging pop-
ularity of multi-player gaming?
I think down the road I would like to get more into multi-player, perhaps even a game
that is primarily multi-player. But I still enjoy essentially single-player games, so I’m
not sure exactly when or how that’s going to happen. Online multi-player gaming is
probably the only revolutionary development in our technology we’ve seen since I
started writing computer games. Everything else has been pretty much evolutionary.
Better graphics, better speed, more memory, et cetera. But the multi-player online
thing was a revolutionary change in the tools that we had to make games. I’m interested
in doing something along those lines, but I’m not sure what it would be right now.
In an oldNext Generationmagazine interview, you said, “Games are going to
take over the world. It’s going to take a while, but there’s something inher-
ently more engaging about computer games than any other form of
entertainment.” Board games have certainly been around a long time, but
have not yet taken over the world. I wondered what it is about computer
games that you find so compelling.
Yeah, I think I stand by that statement. I think that it’s the element of interactivity that
makes them unique. They interact personally with you as a player, as opposed to mov-
ies, television, or music, which don’t. There’s this phenomenon of watching television
and using the remote control to desperately try to make it an interactive experience,
going from one channel to another... [laughter] But the interactivity of computer games
is what differentiates it and makes it so very powerful. Now, we’re still learning how to
use that tool and in a lot of other ways we’re not as good as television, movies, et cetera.
But I think that as we learn to use the advantages that we have, they’re more powerful
advantages than the advantages of other entertainment media.
I think that board games are kind of interactive, but they require other players. The
computer brings a lot of power to the equation that board games don’t take advantage
of. If anything, the advent of the Internet and multi-player play, that combined with
interactivity seems to me like a really powerful combination. I think as we learn to use
that element of our technology too, games can be very, very compelling. The question
that pops up is do people want games that are that interesting to play? There was the
wholeDeer Hunterphenomenon, and there wasSlingoand things like that and I’m still
working to integrate that into my model of the world, and I haven’t totally succeeded in
doing that. But what that tells me is that there’s a broader range of potential gamers
than I am really familiar with. And part of our learning process is going to be to integrate
them into the way that we design games and the way that we create games. But I still
think we’re going to take over the world.
38 Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier