Objectively, what I do is strange, in the sense that if you looked at it and wrote a description of it — the themes and the setting and the time period — it would come across as rather strange. But probably no stranger than a lot of games. Assassin’s Creed is really strange in its own way. Games generally are strange, let alone all the indie games, which are really strange.
Games are strange because we don’t know what the form is yet. We’re just figuring that out as we go along. So we have only strangeness, to some degree. I’ve been spending a lot of time this week trying to talk to some very mainstream press about the game, like Studio 360. The host was so game and so enthusiastic, and really was there and engaged. To some degree, though, because of his level of experience with games, it had to be strange for him, in the same way that it would be strange for me talking about wine or something. Because I don’t drink a lot of wine.
I was showing the game to my mom the other day, and there are parts of it that she deeply appreciates. But keeping it in her head that it was a first-person view, that she was Booker, was a very complicated, weird bit of math for her to do. Not because she’s dumb — she’s incredibly smart — but because she just didn’t grow up with that game literacy.