Beauty and Risk: Inspiration from Richard Lemarchand

Last week we hosted a great talk by Richard Lemarchand, lead designer on Uncharted 3 and a passionate advocate of indie games, innovation, and being deeply engaged with creative process. If you missed it, we have a video of it you can check out here: http://vimeo.com/32751622

His talk was a bit tough to summarize because it ranged freely across several topics, meditiating on the importance of free play, the beauty of systems both human-created and derived from nature, and what Richard called "design with a capital 'D'". I encourage you to watch the talk.

What I took away from it were: that design, and perhaps especially design in interactive systems, is a marvelous challenge for the practitioner; and the designer is well-served by exploring diverse disciplines and gleaning lessons from conceptual art, philosophy, physics, literature, psychology -- it's a daunting prospect in some ways, but also so exciting because game design is one way to think about the coherence and consilience of these fields of study.

Richard ended his talk with advice for future game designers and a poingnant reminder of our place in the world. It was the kind of talk that makes you want to run out and design a game!