Who do you wish did, who doesn't? (Pt 2)

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Finishing what I started below, here's the rest of my list of people I wish would take a side-step into game development.

Colin St John Wilson

He's not a man I know much about, but he designed a building I know very well: the British Library at St Pancras, in London. A lot of people loathe it - it's a bit too square and a bit too red, but as this book cover shows, the inside is a very different proposition. Wilson designed the interior with a lot of thought for the people who would use it - people who would come to the building every day, perhaps for years, and always with heads full of abstract information. Consequently, there are no obvious routes through its sun-bright atrium. Rather than forcing its visitors into a daily, identical trudge, Wilson wanted them to wander, to find short-cuts and distractions. And it works. Even when I was going there every day, I would find that my feet downright refused to settle into a pattern. Which meant that a man who I'd never met was using 400,000 tons worth of brick and glass to control my movements. Games are only just beginning to understand how they can use their architecture to tell their stories and manipulate their players, but I suspect it will take the input of people like Wilson to fully exploit it. Other things to like about the British Library include the five-story, inside-out, library-within-a-library, the thing that looks a bit like a sniper tower, and the fact that it's as useful for impressing your mother as it is for meeting girls.

Cornelius

This one's a bit of a cheat, because the musician known as Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) already makes games – or at least the sountracks for them, as anyone who's had the chance to chime hypnotically with Coloris can testify. But what makes it less of a cheat is that he's probably the only person on this list who'd stand a chance of actually making something you could play. His credentials, other than Coloris, are impeccable, in that his son is actually called Mario, and his (brilliant) videos make it pretty clear that he could give Minter, Mizuguchi and Iwai a run for their money. Especially since he doesn't have a weakness for yaks, The Black-Eyed Peas or improbably impratical musical instruments, and would be be guaranteed to involve monkeys somewhere along the line. He might need a bit of help on the character design front, though.

Men Of Science

This is definitely a cheat, but right now it's the one I'm most excited about. I would like (take note, any passing VC-samaritans looking to sink millions into a vanity project with a prospective market of one) these guys to make me a shmup. Look at that stuff! It's astonishing, and ten times as extraordinary as anything I've seen in a game all year. I want to streak over the surface of two m-plane sapphire substrates at 200 miles an hour, never mind 200x magnification. I want to bury quad-rocket charges into the spaghetti-genitalia of a Copepod lophoura - surely standing by to take the 'most phallic enemy since Xenon 2's foreskin plants' prize - and blast it to mush. I want to slice through the sky as cleanly as a microchannel for flow-stretching DNA. Who's with me? All we need is Treasure, a million dollars, and the phone-number for the guy who's got the Fantastic Voyage licence.