The saddest talk at this year’s GDC

One of my favorite talks at GDC this year was from Stone Librande, the lead designer of the latest Sim City. Lebrande shared with the audience the one-page design documents he created to express Sim City’s gameplay to the development team. These pages — they’re diagrams, really — stress elegance and simplicity. They look great. They’re drawn with a degree of charm that you can see in the game’s graphics. And the ideas they express should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Sim City enough to know how thoroughly, miserably, heart-breakingly broken the game is.

Listening to Lebrande talk reminded me that I really want to play the game he designed. I hope one day Electronic Arts finishes making it.