According to Reynolds, the reason console manufacturers - including Microsoft for the original Xbox - were reluctant to have keyboard support for their machines was that it was too much ”like a computer” and ”geeky”.
With the rise of social networking gaming as a mainstream activity, that may change.
“I remember in my time as a console game designer, I worked pretty closely with the various guys who design and make consoles, and they were always very against having a keyboard on a console,” Reynolds reminisced. ”A keyboard, makes it geeky and like a computer, and then it’s not this cool entertainment system.”
Social networking changed all that. ”Social media is about talking to each other and uploading pictures… also about commenting on them.”
Reynolds, however, doesn’t see manufacturers suddenly adding keyboards to consoles. Rather, there will be something that makes it seem “cool”. ”Maybe they’ll put touchscreens or something,” mused Reynolds, ”I can totally imagine that, because smartphones and iPads make fantastic social devices.” He then expressed a theory that Nintendo at one point considered a virtual keyboard for the Wii U.
In the end, games have to be games, and game design is timeless, as Reynolds stated, “The core activity of how you make a game, how you make things fun, have remained largely the same. The kinds of candidates I look for in game design jobs are the same as I used to look for in previous decades”, then added, “It’s interesting in 21 years of radical technological change, the same techniques that Sid Meier taught me in the early ’90s are still highly relevant today to how you take a game and make it more fun.”
Brian Reynolds is best known for co-founding Firaxis alongside industry legend Sid Meier, then striking out in 2000 to found Big Huge Games. Reynolds went to Zynga as the chief game designer in 2009 and developed Frontiersville.
