David Braben: Taking Kinect to Disneyland

We're in a rich industry with an unbelievable amount of blank space for us to fill as games. When wonderful games that go in new directions come out, we should do our absolute best to support them. Limbo was lovely. I loved it. But it just felt different. What they did with sound was so nice.

My heart does sink a little bit when there's yet another game that's really hard to tell apart. They're great – and that's not criticising the games. But if they put that effort into something different, I would go out and buy it at the drop of a hat. I'm probably going to buy them anyway. That's the depressing thing.

We probably can have both. But if you look at the amount of money we spend as an industry, most of it is being spent on a narrow section, very inefficiently. I can be very boring and go all the way back to Elite, publishers didn't want it because it was too different. Then, we were told, all the games needed a coin drop, ten minute playtime, and were all based on arcade games, even though we didn't need to. There are so many games we could be doing today that are different.

There is a lot of scope for doing fresh things, and that's what matters most. People may criticise Kinect. They also criticise the iPad. But some of the things you can do on it are amazing. The new sort of games it enables is what makes it exciting.

There are pieces of tech that will just get more and more applicable as things change. Our industry has never stood still. If you look at each generation, or even each year, you can place a game by looking at it, which just echoes how quickly we're changing.

I'm very excited by what they may bring, but bizarrely we're essentially having new generations all the time. In a sense, what is enabled by some of the online services these days, what is enabled by things like Kinect, what is enabled by things like iPad just give us so many more opportunities that the next-generation we will just embrace it when it comes.

Horsepower is a difference, but it's just one dimension, one part of it.

I do. I play games less often than I would love. I'm embarrassed to say I still haven't finished Portal 2. I keep thinking I've nearly finished it. It's a lovely game. I'm behind on my games because I've obviously been playing Disneyland a lot and there are some other things we're working on as well that I've spent a lot of time with.

But yes, I've always loved gaming. The ideas in Portal 2 are just lovely. That's my game at the moment.

I've probably got to play more games since I've had platforms like the iPad, because that's happening in time where I wouldn't of otherwise been playing games. On the train, on an aeroplane. That's the change, really.

I still play as much as I can at home on the big TV. But that time is still quite constrained. Whereas the bite-sized time, the ten minutes while you're waiting in an airport, you're on a train and you've done all your email, then it's quite fun to have a quick game of something.

It's supplemental and a different experience. It's something that's been talked about a lot but it's only really arrived in the last few years, the ability to properly play games on the move. Previously, the phone games – and we've done some – were more shallow experiences. We're now starting to see some of the mainstream game ideas appearing on mobile platforms.