Richard Garriott on the state of the games industry: 'The bells and whistles are no longer what's important'

Ultima creator Richard Garriott was one of several developers on a recent panel hosted by the Georgia Game Developers Association, and Lord British was in fine form. Calling himself the "great-grandpa" of the group, he began by summarizing the current problems faced by the videogame industry.

"It's not just one thing," Garriott began. "I think if it was one thing it would be a lot easier to diagnose and come back from, but it's a lot of folks who don't understand videogames trying to make money off of videogames, it's a political climate, it's a billion things. All the threads have woven together into this horrible knot that we're seeing now."

He went on to describe a cycle he's seen play out multiple times over his years in the industry, where a technological advance comes along and everyone races to make a simple game that highlights that advance—whether it's the CD-ROM or a 3D-rendering pipeline or the internet—and only in …