Chris Crawford on Game Design

Mooser-Gooser

Necessity is the mother of invention. We seldom apply this handy-dandy aphorism to our work, because necessity is seldom a concept we apply to entertainment. However, when my good friend Laura Mixon found herself working a three-month contract in San Francisco, with her family remaining in Albuquerque, her sadness at being isolated from her husband and her little girls quickly became a matter of deep concern. She phoned home every night, but conversation just wasn't enough. She wanted something more, some way to spend time with them. One evening we spoke just after she had conversed with her family, and she was feeling particularly homesick. I tried to empathize, but never having had children, I was doing a bad job of it. “Can't ...