> I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or thro

> I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks who can conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming experience, will come out on top. Like there are auteurs like Kevin Williamson and Aaron Sorkin in Hollywood, so there are true renaissance men and women in game creation. Zach Gage. "Gage is an indie game designer — the Bon Iver to Rovio’s Katy Perry, the artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga’s factory farm. He works out of his apartment and has long hair and a perpetually in-progress beard. He works on games mostly by himself, collaborating occasionally with friends, and sometimes he drops into immersive research sessions that can last for weeks. One recent session was intended to figure out why people like playing word games, a genre Gage has always hated. (He thinks it’s cheating to build a game on top of a system that already exists, like words or numbers.) So he spent two weeks playing Bookworm, Words With Friends and Wurdle, during which he decided that the genre suffered from a serious lack of strategy — aside from Scrabble, he says, most of those games are just dressed-up word searches. The result of this was SpellTower, Gage’s newest and most successful game, which allows users to create towers by building words from letters in adjacent boxes. In its first two months, he says, it earned him enough money to live off for two years." [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html?pagewanted=4&_r=3&hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv...