sandbox, I suppose. “There’s the toy, let’s dig holes and build castles,” players would think. Creating an atmosphere where that will bring satisfaction was the goal." To support this design pattern, he claims to have deliberately spent time adding small atmospheric touches such as rainbows, hidden areas only reachable through exploration, auroras, flowers, and other "spontaneous events" that would draw the player into the game world. Ishii describes these as being quite important despite his perception of others viewing them as "pointless events." In a Famitsu interview, he was quite vocal about using game mechanics to attempt to sculpt player behavior toward cooperation and teamwork. Ishii claims credit (alongside Hiroshi Takai, credited as an assistant director of Final Fantasy XIV) for FFXI's skillchain system, by which players cooperate to time weapon skill abilities in concert to achieve bonus damage to an enemy monster. He explains that he created the system because he "thought it was important to create a sense of teamwork even while playing with strangers, and to that end [he] created the skillchain system." Two other areas he designed with teamwork in mind were the game economy and an EXP penalty upon death. The game economy was designed to make the player feel "insignificant" by emphasizing "production, consumption, and distribution," with the end goal of "understanding the importance of community." In a similar fashion, Ishii enforced an EXP penalty upon character death in FFXI because the player would "feel empathy for [his or her] teammates when they got knocked out." Grezzo He formed the new developer Grezzo in April 2007. Koichi developed the game Line Attack Heroes for Wii. Style and reception IGN called Ishii one of the top 100 best game creators ever. Ishii is noted for his use of an active real time battle system, a pioneering move at the time. Some critics felt that the constant switching between a battle screen and the world map made the games feel faster paced and "deeper". He was also praised for his use of cutting-edge technologies such as Mode 7 graphics to create a 3D feel. Games References External links 1964 births Final Fantasy designers Mana (series) Living people Square Enix people