One of my favorite things at GDC is watching people try to set that stuff down. Clint Hocking at Ubisoft had a talk this year about immersion, and it wasn't so much about the concept of immersion, it was more about codifying what we mean when we say that. Instead of having all of these unwritten things that everyone kind of understands on principle, let's say, "This is what I mean when I say this." And it's a process that's only very much at the beginning.

CB: And no one's even started. We did the same thing on our game, like having a discussion about puzzles, and how do you get the language around that; where you're talking about how a puzzle needs to be "intuitive", so the end state needs to communicate to you. The line-of-sight needs to communicate; how much of the puzzle space is the cognitive parsing of what's happening, like, "What do I do?" and then how much is the execution of the cognitive answer, right?

In Ratchet & Clank, you walk in, you go, "I know what to do!" and then you spend all your time doing it. In Myst, the game, you have no idea what to do, forever. And then once you figure it out, it's done, right? So those are the two extreme examples. So what's that language? How do you discuss those phases of the puzzle, and what you're trying to be?

What is the actual "puzzle" that is just a random set of trial and error, that you're like, "If I try this, did it work? If I try this, did it work?" Is that a puzzle? Versus, like, Portal, which is brilliantly intuitive. You're thinking of the space, and going, "Oh! I have to do A, and then B, and then C," and you intuit what you need to do to get to the end-state, which is in the space.

Where is that kind of language? Who is doing it? Is that being taught in a college somewhere? Is there a book you can read? And so having that language -- like, if it was film, they would have a language for that; everyone would talk in this lingo that is all about puzzle lingo. It doesn't even feel like that is standardized yet, across the industry. You happen across people who've done it, and have experience, and talent, and talk about it, and then you have people that don't, so...

It leaves this weird thing, where you've got the developers who are known for, "Well, those guys, I guess, figured it out!" But sometimes it feels like it's still so insular.

CB: It's a brand; it's almost a personal brand. Like, whoever was doing the Portal thing, that's just how they thought of games. "This is what we're gonna do." In our game, we're horror, so we needed somebody who thought in terms of horror, like a horror setup; the first thing they do when they walk into a room is they think of, "How is this going to be a horror setup?"

And then you get somebody who's a gameplay guy, and he walks into a room and says, "OK, I'm gonna put four guys there, that spawn in one way, but then I'm gonna do this, and then it would be really cool if this guy with the ranged attack...!" Someone thinking in terms of all these combinations, right?

So we're finding that game design talent is extremely broad, where you've got all these different brands of it; it's not just a game designer, it's all these things.

Like, in effects, you've got somebody who does water, and somebody who does light, and somebody who does air, you know what I mean? They specialize. So that's what we're getting to now, it feels like. And it's weird to say it now, because games have been around for so long, but it just feels like, as the spaces get bigger, and the games get more mature, and people are thinking about them in more detail, it's becoming more clear, how to get that stuff built.

That's reassuring.

CB: (laughs) Yeah, it's funny how long it takes, but the thing is, it takes longer because production value becomes so dominant that it's a big deal. It's just like with movies, right? "Is the writing any good?" "I dunno, but you've got a hot chick in it, and it's got a lot of explosions, so that'll sell!"

It becomes difficult, in that every pixel is so much work on the screen. To get those nuances and those ideas in there while you're busy fighting with a gigantic department that's, like, a lighter and a rigger and an animator and a modeler and a character modeler and a texture modeler. There's this huge string of people that are trying to make one thing happen, and the subtlety can get lost. You're trying to get it to go.

So I think, once we get a process down that in the beginning gets all the cleverness in, and then the production values can take off... Hopefully we won't suffer Hollywood's fate and make beautiful things no one wants to watch.