From the transcript, it seemed like he was also interested in exploring a game that would enable people to meaningfully follow a “gray” path — which is very interesting to me. I hope that wasn’t completely out of the realm of his talk.

In most RPGs with a moral slider, for example, if you follow a gray path you effectively limit yourself (i.e. the most powerful spells/forces are for “very good” or “very bad” people, and i.e. the NPCs in the world only react in interesting ways to “very good” or “very bad” people.)

2) I attended Hocking’s talk. (Clint is the best speaker evar!) Your comment misses the main point. It was less about the black/white vs shades of grey thing; than it was about how there are few if any games that present these choices to a player that make them question their OWN values. It’s not a good/bad choice vs a kinda-good-kinda-bad choice; it’s about whether it’s possible to present a choice to a player in a game that would cause them to say ‘what do *I* feel is the correct thing to do here?’.

3) The audio game experiments were the results of the latest indie game jam, so my guess is htat they’ll eventually end up on http://www.indiegamejam.com like past year’s have (2005 being an exception as it’s wrapped up in some Sims IP stuff I beleive).

There’s some cool stuff that we (Microsoft) could do with it, too, but I can’t share my thoughts on that in a public forum, unfortunately.