This blog, and indeed me, lives at a strange intersection between two crowds - the “social” posse, which I emerged from and worked with for years, and the game design and interaction design people, whom I have spent the past few years getting to know and getting to admire.
It is with considerable sadness, that I have gotten word that Jeff Freeman has passed away. I might as well add, that Jeff took his own life for reasons only privy to him and not up to us to speculate upon. Jeff was one of the most prolific and readable writers on the subjects of game design and game interaction. In a world in which (sorry, Robert), Robert Scoble serves as a model of an expert for game design, Jeff brought sanity to my days. Reading him, I knew he’d been there, he’d done that, and he knew better than anyone else what it meant to eat the burger and buy the shirt.
A while ago, Jeff pulled some of the great game design posts from his weblog. Aside from being slightly disappointed to no longer have something to point people to, I wasn’t concerned. I’d lost most contact with him a long while ago (when we used to fight over sideline design and how to implement freedom without jerk empowerment) and just followed him on his blog. I knew he’d been about to leave Spacetime, and I’d heard from someone else who knew someone else, that there was a new job in the works, but that was about it. I loved his UO work, he moved on to new things, and for some reason I just stopped debating with him after that.
I never met him in person. Those who did, tell me he had a dry sense of humor and seemed to be quiet and sulky at first. The “Dundee”, I’d been talking to, was different. He’d shown insane patience with me, with the game designer wannabe, that I was. He’d be working on his UO shards, I’d be struggling getting code and interactions right in LPmud and our implementation thereof. During which he - sometimes wittily, sometimes drily, and often slightly annoyedly - answered most of my apprentice questions.
Jeff, you’ll be missed. Here’s hoping you find the solace you sought.
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