The Critical Path Project (stylized CRITICAL///PATH) is a video archive of interviews with

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...

designers and developers.Critical Path /// insights from the greatest minds in videogames
/ref> Launched on July 23, 2012, Critical Path contains over 1,000 videos of interviews with over 100 developers, conducted between 2010 and the present. According to director David Grabias, the project's goals include: *To provide a documentary-based venue for critical discussion about the art of making video games. *To provide developers with a place where they can come for inspiration. *To provide players with insight into their game experience. *To make gamers aware of the great minds behind the great games. *To document the current state of game development for future generations. Topics covered in the interviews include violence in games, methods of storytelling, game mechanics,Cifaldo, Fran
"Have game designers failed when players are cheating?"
Gamasutra.com. July 23, 2012. player interaction, psychology behind playing games, commercialism in the industry, and the future of video games, among others. All clips on the site are available for free viewing online, and there are plans to release a full-length documentary in the future.

Interview Subjects

The site currently features video clips with interviews from the following notable developers, among others: * Ernest Adams *

Brian Allgeier Brian Allgeier (born March 10, 1971) is an American video game designer who is best known for being the original designer and creative director of the ''Ratchet & Clank'' series developed by Insomniac Games for the PS2, PS3, PS4 and PS5. He ...

* Stig Asmussen *

Chris Avellone Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before working as a freelancer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as '' Planescape: Tormen ...

* Daniel Benmergui *

Cliff Bleszinski Cliff Bleszinski (; born February 12, 1975), popularly known as CliffyB, is an American video game designer, known for his work in the development of the '' Unreal'' and ''Gears of War'' series. After working at Epic Games from 1992 to 2012, he ...

Ian Bogost Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game '' Cow Clicker''. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences an ...

Nolan Bushnell Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. He has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consum ...

David Cage David De Gruttola (born June 9, 1969), known by his pseudonym David Cage, is a French video game designer, writer and musician. He is the founder of the game development studio Quantic Dream. Cage both wrote and directed the video games '' Heav ...

John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related discip ...

Jenova Chen Xinghan Chen (; born October 8, 1981), known professionally as Jenova Chen, is a Chinese video game designer. He is the designer of the award-winning games ''Cloud'', '' Flow'', ''Flower'', and '' Journey'', and is co-founder of Thatgamecompany. ...

and

Kellee Santiago Kellee Santiago is a Venezuelan American video game designer and producer. She is the co-founder and former president of thatgamecompany. Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and raised in Richmond, Virginia, where Santiago played video g ...

Brendon Chung Blendo Games is an American independent video game development company based in Culver City, California. It was founded by Brendon Chung in 2010 and is primarily a one-person effort. Blendo Games gained more widespread exposure with the short for ...

* Michael Condrey *

N'Gai Croal N'Gai Croal is a video game critic and consultant, previously employed by Newsweek, currently involved in his own consultancy company. Croal started out as consumer technology writer at Newsweek, later writing the Newsweek-associated Level Up blo ...

Don Daglow Don Daglow (born circa 1953) is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game ''Utopia'' for Intellivision in 1 ...

* Patrice Désilets * Denis Dyack *

Noah Falstein Noah Falstein (born June 1957) is a game designer and producer who has been in the video game industry since 1980, winning "Game of the Year" titles for multiple games such as ''Battlehawks 1942'' and '' Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis''. ...

Josef Fares Josef Fares (born 19 September 1977) is a Swedish-Lebanese film director and video game designer of Assyrian descent. His brother is the actor Fares Fares, who has appeared in many of his films. He is the founder of Hazelight Studios. Biograp ...

Tracy Fullerton Tracy Fullerton (born June 21, 1965) is an American game designer, educator and writer. She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC. In 2014 ...

* Toby Gard *

Richard Garriott Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux ('' né'' Garriott; born July 4, 1961) is an American video game developer, entrepreneur and private astronaut. Although both his parents were American, he maintains dual British and American citizenship by birth ...

*Steve Gaynor *

Ron Gilbert Ron Gilbert (born January 1, 1964) is an American video-game designer, programmer, and producer. His games are generally focused on interactive story-telling, and he is arguably best known for his work on several LucasArts adventure games, inclu ...

* Auriea Harvey *

Trip Hawkins William Murray "Trip" Hawkins III (born December 28, 1953) is an American entrepreneur and founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and Digital Chocolate. Career A fan of the Strat-O-Matic Football pen and paper games, Hawkins started his ...

* Chris Hecker *

David Helgason Unity Software Inc. ( doing business as Unity Technologies) is a video game software development company based in San Francisco. It was founded in Denmark in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment (OTEE) and changed its name in 2007. Unity Technol ...

Richard Hilleman Richard Hilleman is an American computer game and video game producer best known for his work creating the original Madden Football game for video game consoles for Electronic Arts. Apart from ''Madden'', Hilleman was a key figure in building the ...

Clint Hocking Clint Hocking (born 18 September 1972) is a Canadian video game designer and director. He has primarily worked at the Canadian divisions of Ubisoft, where he developed three titles, and briefly worked at LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon Game Stud ...

* Todd Howard * Rod Humble *

Robin Hunicke Robin Hunicke (; born March 15, 1973) is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena. Hunicke began her career at Electronic Arts where she worked on multiple ...

* Kenji Inafune *

Toru Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer who spent much of his career working for Namco. He is best known as the creator of the arcade game ''Pac-Man'' (1980). Early life Iwatani was born in the Meguro ward of Tokyo, Japan on January 25, 1955. Whil ...

* Marcin Iwinski * Daniel James * David Jones *

Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer, director, producer and writer. He is regarded as an auteur of video games. He developed a strong passion for action/adventure cinema and literature during his childhood and adolescence. In 1986, he was hired ...

* Raph Koster * Frank Lantz * Ken Levine *

Laralyn McWilliams Laralyn McWilliams (born 25 February 1965 in Vicenza, Italy) is an American game designer and video game producer. She was creative director for Free Realms, a massively multiplayer virtual world for teens and 'tweens. In 2010, she was recog ...

Jordan Mechner Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, author, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He is best known for designing and programming the Broderbund Apple II games '' Karateka'' and ''Prince of Persia'' in the 1980s, the l ...

Sid Meier Sidney K. Meier ( ; born February 24, 1954) is a Canadian-American programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the ''Civilization'' series. Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bi ...

Peter Molyneux Peter Douglas Molyneux (; born 5 May 1959) is an English video game designer and programmer. He created the god games '' Populous'', '' Dungeon Keeper'', and ''Black & White'', as well as ''Theme Park'', the ''Fable'' series, '' Curiosity: ...

Ray Muzyka Raymond Alexander Muzyka is a Canadian investor, entrepreneur and physician. Originally trained as a medical doctor and practicing as an emergency department and family physician after graduation, he is the co-founder of video game developer Bio ...

and

Greg Zeschuk Gregory Zeschuk is a Canadian businessman who was a VP at Electronic Arts and General Manager at BioWare Austin until 2012. He co-founded video game developer BioWare in Edmonton in 1995 with Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip, after all three earned ...

Frank O'Connor Frank O'Connor (born Michael Francis O'Donovan; 17 September 1903 – 10 March 1966) was an Irish author and translator. He wrote poetry (original and translations from Irish), dramatic works, memoirs, journalistic columns and features on a ...

* Yoshinori Ono * Rob Pardo *

Randy Pitchford Randy Pitchford is an American businessman. He co-founded the video game development studio Gearbox Software in 1999 and was president and CEO for the company until 2021, upon which he became CEO and president of Gearbox's parent company, The G ...

* Rhianna Pratchett *

Zoë Quinn Zoë Tiberius Quinn (born 1987) is an American video game developer, programmer, and writer. Quinn developed the interactive fiction game ''Depression Quest'', which was released in 2013. In 2014, a defamatory blog post by their ex-boyfriend s ...

* Amir Rao *

Siobhan Reddy Siobhan Reddy is the studio director of Media Molecule, a video game development studio based in Guildford in the United Kingdom, most famous for their debut title ''LittleBigPlanet''. Biography Reddy was born in South Africa, but grew up in Cam ...

Warren Robinett Joseph Warren Robinett Jr. (born December 25, 1951) In the A. Miller interview, Robinett says he was 26 in November 1977. is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, notable as the developer of the Atari 2600's ''Adventure'' — ...

Jason Rohrer Jason Rohrer (born November 14, 1977) is an American computer programmer, writer, musician, and game designer. He publishes most of his software into the public domain (Public domain software) and charges for commercial platform distributed ve ...

Tim Schafer Timothy John Schafer (born July 26, 1967) is an American video game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games '' ...

Jesse Schell Jesse N. Schell (born June 13, 1970) is an American video game designer, author, CEO of Schell Games, and a distinguished professor of the practice of entertainment technology at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a joint master's ...

* Glen Schofield * Harvey Smith *

Warren Spector Warren Evan Spector (born October 2, 1955) is an American role-playing and video game designer, director, writer, producer and production designer. He is known for creating immersive sim games, which give players a wide variety of choices in ho ...

Joseph Staten Joseph Staten is an American writer best known for his work at video game studio Bungie. At Bungie, Staten served as director of cinematics for the studio's games, including the ''Halo'' series; he would write mission scripts and movie dialogue ...

*Davey Wreden * Will Wright *

Brianna Wu Brianna Wu (born July 6, 1977) is an American video game developer and computer programmer. She co-founded Giant Spacekat, an independent video game development studio, with Amanda Warner in Boston, Massachusetts. She is also a blogger and pod ...

Vince Zampella Respawn Entertainment, LLC is an American video game development studio founded by Jason West and Vince Zampella. West and Zampella previously co-founded Infinity Ward and created the ''Call of Duty'' franchise, where they were responsible for i ...

Eric Zimmerman Eric Zimmerman (born 1969) is an American game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game ''Diner Dash''. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Cha ...

Discussion

A few quotes from the site have raised discussions between critics and fans alike. For example,

Metal Gear Solid is a series of techno-thriller stealth games created by Hideo Kojima. Developed and published by Konami, the first game, '' Metal Gear'', was released in 1987 for MSX home computers. The player often takes control of a special forces oper ...

Director

(famous for his cinematic narrative scenes) mentions that he's "not trying to tell a story."

says he's "failed as a designer" when players use cheats, causing some stir with gamers when they discovered an all-powerful

character in the latest

Firaxis Firaxis Games, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Sparks, Maryland. The company was founded in May 1996 by Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds following their departure from MicroProse, Meier's earlier venture. They were a ...

release, X-COM: Enemy Unknown. The archive presents a variety of differing opinions from developers. For example,

speaks about creating empowerment fantasies for players, while

condemns the practice.

says that "micromanagement is not fun"Meier, Si
"Is it Work or Fun?"
CRITICAL///PATH Project. and other developers, like Fable's

, Ultima's

, and others attempt to create games that give the player as much freedom and decision-making as possible.

References

External links

* {{Authority control History of video games