BnB: You have a remark­ably refresh­ing approach to dis­cus­sions about gam­ing and RPGs in your blog. Instead of thread­ing a care­ful, diplo­matic line, you express your thoughts clearly and with lit­tle cen­sor­ship, stat­ing exactly what you like, don’t like, and want more of in mod­ern RPGs. Though I can imag­ine this helps you with the core audi­ence, do you ever find it get­ting you in trou­ble with a more main­stream mar­ket or industry?

JB: Espe­cially when said devel­oper I might be talk­ing about comes to visit! Talk about awkward!

Hon­estly, I really don’t know how much trou­ble it gets me into. I have a lot of friends who are still in the main­stream games biz, and I don’t think my views are always too far out-of-line with their own. A lot of main­stream devel­op­ers and design­ers get frus­trated work­ing on Sequel #7 of Best-Selling Fran­chise or its clone, and have a lot of ideas of what games ought to be like that are noth­ing like their assigned project. But you are being paid to make a par­tic­u­larly prod­uct, not your own game.

Ken Rol­ston recently spoke of the equiv­a­lent of a “closet drama” for games… things he would love to take the time to design just for the joy of doing so, but which he har­bors no hope what­so­ever of get­ting funded or pro­duced. That’s the joy of being indie — you can work on those “closet dra­mas.” Sure, they may be com­pletely non­vi­able as a multi-million dol­lar project. And they may not even be com­mer­cially viable as a low-budget indie game. But as an indie, your small size can work to your advan­tage cre­atively. Maybe some­thing doesn’t have an audi­ence of a mil­lion cus­tomers. But it doesn’t need to.

I’m more con­cerned with honk­ing off my own audi­ence when I com­plain about some­thing one week, and then turn­ing around and do it myself a week later, sim­ply because it’s eas­ier. So some­times I’m the tar­get of my own rants!
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