Sid Meier’s GDC2010 keynote, entitled “Psychology of Game Design: Everything You know is Wrong” was a great combination of his own successes with the Civilization series and some interesting, albeit comical, errors he made along the way.
Meier then went on to talk about his previous mistakes in video game development which he entitled “My Bad.” He mentions mistakes such as making the first Civ a real-time game and also mentioning a Dinosaur themed game that he attempted a while back which never took off for reasons he still cannot figure out. Of the mistakes he mentioned, the most hilarious was his story about development of the upcoming Civilization Network in which he added the ability for players to give gold to other players for various reasons. It turns out that no one decided to give any of their gold to anyone else!
CGSociety has a great writeup of his entire keynote, and GameSpot has the entire video online to view. I’ve embedded it below.
