Quotes from Jason Schreier

There are so many canceled games that people don't know about and so many stories people can't tell because they're restricted by this ridiculous culture of secrecy.

Most strikingly, 'World of Warcraft' allows you to live a veritable second life. Girls can pretend to be boys; boys can pretend to be girls; human accountants can pretend to be elven mages.

As a massively multiplayer online RPG, 'The Old Republic' has no single-player components; you cooperate with and compete against other people in a virtual, persistently online recreation of the 'Star Wars' universe.

Between 'The Godfather,' 'The Sopranos,' 'Goodfellas,' and the countless other mob stories that have been both critically and commercially acclaimed over the years, it's not hard to see why a game like 'Mafia Wars' works.

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.

Scrabble has always been immensely popular, so it's easy to see why online Scrabble is just as lauded.

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.

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

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.

After the mediocre 'Final Fantasy XIII' and the sheer disaster that was 'Final Fantasy XIV,' many fans have lost faith in the RPG titan.

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.

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.

Gamers have this tendency to turn games into mathematical equations, breaking them into lists of components like 'presentation' and 'mechanics' and judging each one on its own merits.

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.

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.

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.

Though many of Obsidian's games have featured wry, sardonic humor, the developer has stuck to more serious fantasy and sci-fi themes.

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

Like any good RPG, 'Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning' is adept at digging its claws into that part of your brain that just loves accomplishing things.

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.

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.

Kickstarter can get customers invested, both literally and figuratively, in a game before it is released. With nothing but an idea, a bit of video and a few screenshots, a developer can start building a loyal fan base.

Sure, when you think 'World of Warcraft,' you might picture the nerdier set - those who may have sacrificed hygiene and sleep to reach one more experience level. But the truth is that 'WoW' is populated with players of all sorts of backgrounds, from rural housewives to NFL punters.

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.