English professor Matt Barton grew up loving computer role-playing games like Pool of Radiance and Baldur’s Gate, and was discouraged when that style of thoughtful, analytical gameplay almost disappeared.

“For a long time the very words ‘turn-based’ were enough to make everybody laugh at you,” Barton says in Episode 363 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was like, ‘Who wants that? It’s boring. We want action, action, action!'”

Barton did his best to draw attention to the classics of the genre, publishing Dungeons & Desktops: A History of Computer Role-Playing Games. He also started interviewing game designers on his YouTube channel, with a special emphasis on role-playing games of the 1980s and ’90s.

“Once I started doing this I had people contacting me saying, ‘Here’s who I am. I worked on this series. I saw your interview with Jeff McCord and I’ve got some stuff I’d like to talk about as well,'” Barton says. “So it was just one after another, boom boom boom. There were a lot of untold stories.”

In one interview he asked Brian Fargo what a sequel to Wasteland might look like, and Fargo spitballed a few ideas. A year later those ideas had grown into a Kickstarter pitch for Wasteland 2, which ultimately produced a successful game. “He has acknowledged that it kind of comes back to the moment in that interview where I asked him that question, and he started thinking about it, and got more and more excited about it,” Barton says. “So I like to think I really played a role in that.”

In recent years crowdfunding has led to a flourishing of games with old-school sensibilities, including Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, and Torment: Tides of Numenara. Barton is thrilled by all the new and exciting games, but he also encourages players to embrace older designers as well.

“I tell people all the time, if you’re playing some old game, it’s really not that hard to figure out who made it and send them a shoutout on Twitter or something,” he says. “You really do make their day with stuff like that.”

Listen to the complete interview with Matt Barton in Episode 363 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Matt Barton on education:

“It’s not so much that you learn valuable content from playing these games, but you do learn habits of thinking. So really it comes down to the scientific method, learning about statistical reasoning. If you really are good at these games and you play them enough, you’ll start to pick up on things like, ‘I should use this weapon rather than that weapon’ or ‘Here’s a different kind of creature, they have these resistances.’ It’s those kinds of observations, and then you try something, you measure the results, you modify your tactics along the way. And even though these are fights with rats or skeletons or zombies—or whatever the case may be—you’re training your mind to approach problems in a certain way that’s really just straight out of a science textbook.”

Matt Barton on game design:

“As things start to scale upwards, it becomes more of a game made by committee. Like a big Hollywood production, if you can imagine that, except even the producer doesn’t have much power. So you get these watered-down projects that are trying to please everybody, without a lot of creative vision. There’s not a unified vision that you get in those early projects like Shard of Spring, or look at all the early Ultima games, where it was mostly Lord British. I think you really see a huge difference when you go from something like Ultima III or Ultima IV, and then compare that to Ultima IX or Ultima Online, something with a much bigger scale. I think you really lose something when you move from the small teams.”

Matt Barton on worldbuilding:

“[Designers] want to show how creative they are, and how original they are. ‘Here’s a new twist.’ Like with Dragon Age. ‘The elves will be totally different in this game, and the dwarves won’t have beards.’ But that’s just annoying to so many of the players. Now, the players that have really been hardcore about it, they’re hungry for something different, some alternative. But for the masses out there, they’re not really demanding that alternative because they haven’t gotten their fill of the main fare. And I think that’s really where computer role-playing games are. There haven’t been enough of these—compared to the tabletop role-playing games—so there’s plenty of room just for standard fantasy, sword and sorcery, dwarves with beards and Scottish accents, the works.”

Matt Barton on GOG.com:

“I really want to shine a light on a website called GOG.com—Good Old Games dot com—because they actually make a lot of these old, old games available. So all you have to do is click the link, install the game, and boom, you’re good to go. You don’t have to worry about emulators and things. Because that was one of the problems I had with the first edition [of Dungeons & Desktops]. It was just so hard getting these games to work on a modern computer. And that’s basically trivial nowadays. So rather than just looking at a book like this as a bunch of obsolete games, you might actually see some games that look interesting, and you can go back and play those very easily now.”

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