Jason Schreier

“As someone who has been playing 'Final Fantasy' since before I could walk on two legs, I was particularly disgusted by 'Final Fantasy XIII-2's soundtrack.”

“Amalur's user interface is designed much like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, liberally sprinkling yellow exclamation points and markers all over your mini-map in order to show you where to quest next.”

“It can sometimes feel like the commercials for Activision's 'Call of Duty' series are always on. If the publisher has its way, the games will be, too.”

“I think there's that widespread sentiment that game developers need to be quiet unless they're talking on-message. I think that's changing a little bit; Twitter has helped, with developers sharing personal opinions on things.”

“When gamers look at games not as overall experiences but as chimeric potpourris of sight and sound, we take too mechanical a perspective and ignore what really makes them special.”

“If people are more civil about games, that'd make me super happy.”

“Among video game developers, it's called 'crunch': a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food.”

“One of the successes of Kickstarter is that it takes the guesswork out of greenlighting games. Publishers of larger games have to carefully choose which titles they publish, lest they lose a bunch of money on a quirky game that doesn't sell. Kickstarter is all reward, no risk, since nobody has to pay if the project isn't completely funded.”

“Unraveling the threads of a good game story is like solving a well-crafted puzzle. After a lengthy, sometimes difficult journey, the pieces click into place, and you're rewarded with the satisfying payoff of a job well done.”

“The puzzle of 'To the Moon' is both elegant and memorable. Take a few hours and try to solve it. The pieces fit together oh so nicely.”

“It's easy to think of a role-playing game as an amalgamation of two main components, narrative and gameplay, jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, they fit together nicely; other times, they're as awkward and frustrating as that one weirdly-shaped 'Tetris' block that always falls into the gap where you need an L.”

“Most game developers in the United States do not receive extra compensation for extra hours.”

“One of the best games to play with a significant other is Nintendo's 'Super Mario Maker,' for the Wii U, which lets you build and play your own Mario courses.”

“For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.”

“To avoid long-term deleterious effects, game developers must commit to stop facilitating a culture in which crunch is the norm. The occasional long night or weekend at the office can be useful and even exhilarating, but as a constant, it is damaging.”

“Chris Ferguson brought up a really interesting point that I agree with, and he said science is a human endeavor. The more someone tells me that they're absolutely objective, the less I believe they are. So people need to fact-check things. They need to understand that science is easily damaged by politics and personal opinion.”

“Game ideas on Kickstarter have found loads of success, even when they're not as unusual as 'BlindSide.'”

“Why would it matter to anybody if a game developer talks about a project that they worked on ten years ago that was canceled? It really bums me out to think about how many of those games have been lost to time.”

“One of the interesting things I've found is that crunch is the result of crunch culture rather than the result of managers coming and saying, 'Okay, we've gotta work overtime.'”

“While 'Final Fantasy XIII-2' does quite a bit to fix the mistakes of its predecessor, it does very little to stand out on its own merits.”