Designer Notes #17: Ananda Gupta

In this episode, Soren interviews game designer Ananda Gupta, best known as the co-designer of Twilight Struggle and the lead designer of XCOM: Enemy Within. They discuss why DC has no fort in For the People, whether Labyrinth‘s neocon design is intentional, and should Twilight Struggle use dice to resolve conflicts. They also assume quite incorrectly that Command & Conquer: Generals was released before 9/11. Who knew?!?

Games Discussed: Lode Runner, Ancient Art of War, Diplomacy, Risk series, Paths of Glory, Twilight Struggle, History of the World, Labyrinth, A Distant Plain, Sept. 12th, Civ 3: Conquests, A Force More Powerful, X-COM, XCOM

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/ananda-gupta

2 thoughts on “Designer Notes #17: Ananda Gupta

  1. You also assume incorrectly that in Counter-Strike you always see the other team as the terrorists. That is not the case. In the standard competitive mode, bomb defusal, there is a terrorist team whose objective is to plant the bomb, and a counter-terrorist team that wants to stop them.

    You might be thinking about America’s Army, which was a F2P game made with the express purpose of getting people interested in joining the army. That had exactly the feature mentioned, were you always see yourself as a US soldier and the enemy as generic arab “terrorists”.

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