ABSTRACT
Technology, At Last The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It may seem strange, in a book that is ostensibly meant to instruct about the design of videogames, to wait until so near the end to talk about technology. But there is a reason. Technology looms large in the lives of game designers. And just as it is hard to study the stars when the sun is out, it is hard to study game design when technology is in the room. Technology is ever novel and ever surprising and ever presents new puzzles to solve. Of the four elements in the tetrad (technology, story, aesthetics, and mechanics), technology is the most dynamic, most volatile, and most unpredictable. It’s like having a drunken billionaire show up at your partyall eyes are on him because no one knows what he might do. Well, at long last, it is time for us to plunge into the sun, to introduce ourselves to this drunken billionaire.
