[ At the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, and Entertain) Summit in Las Vegas, the gaming industry's leaders meet up for a few days to discuss the business of creating games. This year, we're putting some of the world's best game developers in the hot seat for the D.I.C.E. Poll. Our five questions are designed to gain some insight into what makes them tick. ]

For this D.I.C.E. Poll, we spoke with Emil Pagliarulo, Lead Designer at Bethesda Softworks, who has just wrapped up Fallout 3. Previous games he has worked on include Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Morrowind as well as the Thief series. He worked at Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm Austin before joining Bethesda.



GameSpy: How has the current economic climate affected your company?
Emil Pagliarulo, Lead Designer: We're lucky... We have a successful game at a time when a lot of companies don't. So, it's not affecting us at this point like it's affecting a lot of people. Our company's doing well, y'know, we can still hire when we need to hire and we're not laying people off. It's a luxury that we're all very cognizant of. We realize we have it good and we're very thankful for that. The other thing about Bethesda, though... I've worked for other companies that just burn money like it grows on trees, but our company has never done that. We have a history of making smart decisions and I think that's helping us now, definitely.

GameSpy: These days, everyone is making distinctions between "casual" and "hardcore." Do you feel these approaches to game development are inherently mutually exclusive? Describe a "hardcore" and "casual" gamer.
Emil Pagliarulo: I think they're mutually stupid. Gamers love games. Gamers know good games. Once you start trying to find a success model based on polls and market data or different groupings of gamers (are they hardcore or are they casual?), I think you're setting yourself up to fail. One thing that this generation has shown and I've learned in the last five or six years is that, if you look at a game like GTA or Fallout 3, in a sense they are hardcore gamer games, so I think the industry has proven that they may be geared toward the hardcore, but there are millions of hardcore gamers out there. So, if you make a game that's fun and appealing and accessible enough for that group of gamers, they're gonna be into it. The casual game thing is like... I'm a hardcore guy, always have been, that's what I'm into, but I know there are millions of others like me.
GameSpy: What kinds of games do you hope to be making in ten years?
Emil Pagliarulo: The same type of game that I'm making now. I really love the massively single-player thing that we do and I'd like to continue pursuing that. I love the first-person perspective, I like my share of third-person perspective games as well, y'know, I love my Dead Space and Uncharted, but first-person is definitely where my heart is and I love telling stories in that medium. So, if I'm doing the same thing in ten years that I'm doing now, I'll be perfectly happy.