Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire

Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire: "The first person to cry playing Passage was Rohrer himself, as he was programming it. All that summer, he watched one of his neighbors die of cancer. She was a nice old woman with a beautiful garden. 'Her whole life, she had said if she ever got cancer, she wouldn't want to go through chemotherapy,' Rohrer says. 'But once it happened to her, she changed her mind....We watched her go through chemotherapy, and she essentially just rotted away. And she died in six months anyway.' It wasn't only sad. It was irrational. So Rohrer, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, made a game about the inevitability of death. 'Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible,' he wrote in a twelve-hundred-word creator's statement, 'but in the end, death is still coming for you.'"