社交游戏开发商LOLApps日前宣布，在AAA游戏行业的资深设计师约翰·罗梅洛（John Romero）和布伦达·巴瑞斯维特（Brenda Brathwaite）的帮助下，该公司的游戏《Ravenwood Fair》用户数量已达1000万。但罗梅洛已经离职自立门户，巴瑞斯维特如今也表示她将跳槽。

根据巴瑞斯维特的LinkedIn主页显示，这位游戏开发领域资历最深的女性，将兼任Loot Drop的首席运营官、联合创始人及游戏设计师三种角色，该工作室由罗梅洛与老同事Robert Sirotek和汤姆·霍尔（Tom Hall）于近日创办，这二人分别担任Loot Drop的首席执行官和奥斯丁工作室负责人。Loot Drop总部设于加州圣马特奥市。

Brenda Brathwaite

巴瑞斯维特表示，能够与一组充满激情的设计师兼老同事一起朝着新目标前进十分令人激动。许多老游戏开发商已经纷纷撤离AAA领域，转战社交游戏领域，比如最近刚加入Playdom的Raph Koster和Steve Meretzky。

她认为，对于一个新公司而言“我们全部转投社交游戏领域，这看起来就像一个疯狂而激动人心的时期。”在LOLApps工作的乐趣之一就是回归充满斗志的小团队氛围，在这种环境中这些资深设计师们建立起了持久的友谊和工作关系。她认为现在是她与“朋友及老熟人一起开公司的绝佳机会。”

尽管Facebook是各种新游戏设计的沃土，但这个平台一直备受争议。对于从AAA领域的人才转战社交游戏领域的这种现象，媒体和粉丝也总是抱有诸多疑问。

她强调，“奇怪的事情是，当人们说大量人才流进社交游戏领域时，没有人会说人才流进了第一人称射击游戏领域，也没有人会说所有的单机游戏都是第一人称射击游戏。”在她看来问题的关键是，人们的观念。“与其把Facebook看做无组织的‘关于社交游戏的东西，我更愿意把它当做一个平台。在这个平台上我可以接触大量不同的游戏，获得多种不同的体验。”

她在承认无关策略的农场、城市及时尚模拟等在Facebook上泛滥的游戏，目前看起来已形成“主流”趋势，但也认为“这些游戏形式还仅仅是冰山一角。”她并不认为元老们离开原来的游戏领域，仅仅是为了开发大众化的社交游戏，相反，她把这看做是新的试验战场，为大量用户提供新的游戏体验。

巴瑞斯维特指出，“5亿多游戏玩家，这代表一个巨大的市场，而决定在该平台上运行什么类型的游戏也是件很有风险的事。”

在她看来，未来几年内Facebook将出现更多传统类型的游戏，而那些已经存在的热门游戏也仍将继续发展。她表示自己相信更多设计者进入这个领域，将推动这种情况的发展。

她认为，回归小规模团队，与80年代就开始并肩作战的同事和老友共事，“是如此充满诱惑，我甚至无法用言语表达。”

开发Facebook游戏对巴瑞斯维特而言还有另一个特殊意义，“在我的职业生涯中，我第一次为自己的同类群体开发游戏，我是一个四十多岁的女性。”她表示，这是自从推出《Wizardry》系列以来，她告诉同龄女友们自己所做的工作时，第一次没有人首先想象游戏是关于“那些枪炮之类的东西”。也没有人像十年前那样问她，“游戏是不是很暴力很恐怖？”在当时，那些形式的游戏都比较不容易被人理解。

“为与我性别相同的同龄人开发游戏，同时又可以和老朋友们一起工作，这对我来说是个十分奇妙的感觉，。”她表示，这是离开LOLApps的绝佳时机，现在《Ravenwood Fair》运营顺利，而她和罗梅洛可以更多地扮演顾问角色。 虽然Loot Drop尚未准备公开最近的项目，但已宣布将获得社交游戏公司RockYou的资助和发行支持。

巴瑞斯维特解释道，她将在Loot Drop协助约翰运营他的新游戏，时机成熟她也会开发新的游戏，但目前主要把精力放在正在开发中的Facebook游戏上。

她兴奋地表示，“我们有两名毕生都在开发游戏的设计者，我们的志向不会变，并且真的没有其他我更愿意做的事情。游戏已经成为我们生命的一部分，我们对这种生活心怀感激。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Interview: Brathwaite Joins Loot Drop For Old Reunions, New Frontiers

With the help of AAA industry veteran designers John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite, LOLApps’ Ravenwood Fair reached 10 million users, as the company announced today. But Romero has moved on to found a new company, and Brathwaite now reveals she’s going, too.

As her LinkedIn page now reflects, Brathwaite — widely-known as the longest-serving woman in game development — will take the role of chief operating officer, co-founder and game designer at Loot Drop, the studio Romero recently launched with longtime colleagues Robert Sirotek and Tom Hall, who are Loot Drop’s CEO and Austin office studio head, respectively. Loot Drop is headquartered in San Mateo.

Brathwaite talked to Gamasutra about how exciting it was for a crew of passionate designers who’ve been such longtime colleagues to be launching in a new direction together. Many storied game developers have left the AAA space to explore the social gaming frontier, like Raph Koster and Steve Meretzky, who were just joined at Playdom by BioWare’s Gordon Walton.

“There’s this whole slew of us just entering the social space… this just seemed like such a crazy, exciting time” for a new company, Brathwaite tells us. One of the pleasures of working at LOLApps was the feeling of a return to the scrappy, small-team environment in which all of these longtime designers formed their lasting working relationships and friendships.

To Romero, Brathwaite, Sirotek and Hall, it was “the perfect opportunity to start a company with friends and with people we’ve known for years,” she says.

The Facebook space as breeding ground for new and meaningful game design forms, however, has been much debated, with plenty of questioning in the media and among fans about the gradual but notable migration of key talent from “AAA” development to social network games.

“The weird thing that happens when people say there’s this massive ‘brain drain’ into these social games — nobody would say there’s a massive ‘brain drain into first-person shooters’ nor would

anybody claim that all PC games are first-person shooters,” she suggests, highlighting the key problem in her view: perception.

“Instead of thinking of Facebook as this amorphous ‘social game thing’, I think of Facebook as a platform,” Brathwaite tells us, “on which I can have a huge variety of games and a huge variety of experience.”

So while she concedes that the strategy-lite, farm, city and fashion simulators that proliferate all over Facebook appear to be “predominant” for now, she also believes “that game style is literally the tip of an iceberg.” Instead of seeing a slew of veterans exiting the established games space to build generalized social titles, she sees new opportunities to investigate, and a massive addressable audience ready to receive new experiments in game design.

“500 million installed players… represents a huge market,” she points out. “And it is dangerous to determine the type of games that people are making by the platform they choose to work on.”

In Brathwaite’s view, the next couple of years will bring more traditional types of games onto the Facebook platform, even as those popular genres simultaneously continue to grow and exist in the spaces they always have. “And I believe that the game design talent that’s coming in… is what’s going to make that happen,” she says.

For now, being back on small teams with the some of the same friends and colleagues with whom she collaborated in the 1980s “is such an allure I can’t even tell you.”

And there’s another unique chance for Brathwaite in developing for Facebook: “I am, for the first time in my entire career, my own target demographic; I am a woman in my 40s,” she says. For the first time in her life, when she tells female friends in her age group what she’s always done for a living ever since the Wizardry series, people don’t picture “those shooter things”. Nobody asks her “aren’t games violent and horrible?” like they did decades ago when the form was less understood.

“That is wonderful for me, to be making games for my literal gender peers,” she says. “And at the same time I get to work with friends I’ve known forever.”

It was the right time to leave LOLApps, she says, now that Ravenwood Fair is well on its way and she and Romero are able to serve in more of a consulting role. And while Loot Drop isn’t ready to unveil its current project, it’s been announced that it’ll be funded and published by social gaming company RockYou.

“I’ll be going into Loot Drop to assist John in shipping his new game,” she explains. “At some point I’m going to start a new game, but at this point, our focus is on the Facebook game he’s working on.”

“You have two game designers who have done nothing in their lives but make games,” she enthuses. “It’s constant; there is truly nothing else i would rather do. We live, eat, breathe and sleep games, and we are truly grateful for that.”  （source：gamasutra）