Games Gregor has designed
Frenzy, Best Friends, 3:16
Games Gregor will be representing @ the Design Matters booth
What inspires you
I get inspired by the world around me. Something I see, or something someone will say, write or do. It makes me think, and I can see disparate threads coming together. Like in Best Friends, say, the words that the game was based on were “girlfriend” and “hatred” but the inspiration came from thinking about my sister and her girlfriends in that context, and how much of a bond they had to each other, but how they had these little petty hatreds too. Then I scribbled a stick-girl and that was the game, everything just fired off of that. Back in the day Frenzy was the same. The people that worked on that game saw John Woo’s The Killer for the first time and we thought: “Wow, we’ve got to have a game that can do that!”
What do you look for in a game as a player? As a designer?
As a player I want a game that’s not complicated and that I can just play. I work at work, you know? So when I play a game I don’t want to have to work hard at it, even for (great) reward. I just want to play and have fun. Can’t I get my reward for play?
As a designer I want to make my games so that they are fun, elegant and easy to get to. I really was enamoured with Emily Care Boss’ Breaking The Ice because it was a complete game, was simple and I could read it several times on my plane journey home from GenCon. I thought to myself that I really need to make games like this.
I’ve been “into” game mechanics for a long time and I washed complicated systems out of my blood long ago. So, I like elegant systems that are intuitive, robust and easy to play with.
Finally, I want my books to look great, so they are well designed in look and in system. I really think the world has enough overly complicated and ugly things in it, so we don’t need to be adding to that list with our games.
If you could play a game with anyone (living or dead) who would it be, what game, and why?
I would play Breaking The Ice with Marilyn Monroe. The reason would be that she’d play a pretty cookie version of me, which would be very entertaining I think. And I would get to maybe find out a bit about the real Marilyn when we were creating our characters. I think it would be a funny screwball comedy we’d end up with in play, and I least I could say I got three dates with Monroe at the end of it.
