I've been thining about Cloral

[Beldaran]

I've been thinking about you Cloral. You and your "Kushy" job.

Do you work for Kush games? Hopefully, otherwise my pun is retarded.

I bought MLB 2K5 today. It is very fun. I happen to really enjoy sports games, as I own a number of them. I really enjoy this. It's reall well made and the graphics are great. There are lots of neat features. I own another game made by Kush. It's a college basketball game.

I read something about how Kush Games won't make any games with violence, so they focus on sports. I think this is interesting.

If I'm correct in assuming that you work for Kush, I was wondering/hoping you could share with us a bit about your job and the company. What do you think of their mission statement of non-violence? What do you do at your job? ("programming" is a bit vague) What parts of a sports title do you work on? The graphics? AI? Engine subsystems? Tools? Do you like your job?

I'd be interested to hear anything you might have to say about working for such a company, and working on games in general.

[Cloral]

Yes you are correct, I work at Kush. I'm glad to hear you are enjoying some of our games. I wasn't around for College Hoops, but did a fair bit of work on MLB 2K5. I did some work on the frontend - putting some screens together - but the main areas I worked on were replays and cameras. So when you turn a double play and you see a replay of the second baseman making a jumping turn, that's my work (I noticed in watching the ad for 2K6 that this particular replay is highlighted in the ad, which was really exciting for me). I have since worked on additional areas, including the homerun derby and memory card access. And I suspect I'll work on many more before I'm done. As one gains seniority one works on more complex and challenging areas - for instance, most of our senior guys work on AI. From speaking with them and looking at some of the AI code, I can see that AI work is incredibly complex. But I know that if I keep working at it, one day I'll be able to handle a complex system like that.

Not making violent games is good, with all the debate of late about violent games. Having that right in our mission statement means that we're pretty much automatically excluded from having to deal with that debate. Though it is a bit ironic that our publisher now is Take2 of GTA fame. (When I started, Sega was our publisher. Had you told my younger self playing Sonic on the Genesis that one day I'd be working for Sega I would've been pretty happy.) Now none of this means I don't enjoy violent games myself. I still play Halo 2 a fair bit. But games don't have to be violent to be fun (or as I said in my interview, games don't have to be violent to be happy), and I think designers will often use violence and sex as hooks to bring in buyers. When used properly though, as in RE4 to create the ambience, it works and is even necessary - so banning or censoring violence really makes no sense.