I don’t want this place to become a Firaxis fanboy zone, but there is an interesting interview with Sid Meier on Gamespy. He went to GenCon to check out the games there and had some interesting things to say about the game industry in general.

Meier confirms that Firaxis is going to start designing more games for the console. Though the Pirates! transition seems to have been relatively smooth, Meier recognizes that most console games require the player to be able to just jump in and do stuff. Pirates! is that kind of game, and, I think, so is Civ. There is, in fact, no reason that a TBS like Civ couldn’t be done for a console.

Meier’s statement that board games and video games are competing for the same audience seems a little out of date. When video gaming was a niche hobby, there was probably a lot of overlap in the audiences; both have this geek aura that also explains the dominance of comic book/sci-fi nerds in both camps. I was never really heavy into serious board gaming, mostly because of my birthplace and roots – neither of which supported the kind of frivolity that 60 dollar board games represented.

The video game audience has changed to the point where people need to have hexes explained to them, and to the point where Settlers of Catan is not common knowledge. It is nice to hear that his son (who is as good as his father at Civ IV) is being raised with proper geek cred, including an interest in RPGs, but I think that he is a rarer case than he would have been five or ten years ago.

The whole thing does make me want to check out GenCon next year.