Jennifer deWinter
- Dean, Lewis College of Science and Letters
“The core experience of Mario is playgrounds,” says Jennifer deWinter, dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters and author of “Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda.” “It’s climbing and jumping and sliding and exploration. Look at that original movie, the core experience is the conflict. (The game has) never been about the conflict, it’s about the experience. How do you translate this experience?”
“There’s no such thing as a perfect game,” said Jennifer deWinter, dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters. “But if I had to ponder the brilliance of Tetris — and I think that is a fun thing to ponder — Tetris provides a pattern-based abstraction that allows people to go into a flow state, readily.”
“What ‘The Last of Us’ did for U.S. games is it showed that we could handle tremendous complexity in a narrative structure about social issues,” says Dean of Lewis College Jennifer deWinter, a game scholar and author. “And in an action game, a game historically made for the ‘hardcore player,’ ‘The Last of Us’ starts helping us rethink what we can do in AAA games.”