Sputtering, coughing, sloooowly progressing, the MTV Multiplayer Mini-Game Interview Series somehow manages to reach the far reaches of Edmonton today, with a quick interview about card-playing.

Space-age card-playing in the BioWare-developed “Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic,” that is. Pazaak.

Who comes up with these things? And why? And how do they make sure the game doesn’t get dull? Sure this interview topic is a tad dated, but, hey, this is the one you readers asked for.

BioWare’s Preston Watamaniuk, assistant lead designer on “KOTOR” and lead designer of “Mass Effect” recently explained things to me over e-mail.

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Is “mini-game” a four letter word? It certainly is a pair of them. I’ve found that developers are cautious about the term.

I first learned this in August when the product manager on the soon-to-be-successful “Carnival Games,” uh, Wii mini-game collection, told me: “We don’t like to characterize these as mini-games.”

But if you think that’s a touchy term, then what about “mini-game collection”?

You know, the term we use to classify “Wii Sports,” “Wii Play,” “Mario Party 8,” “EA Playground,” “Carnival Games” and a bunch more? What’s the reputation of that phrase, now that it’s become synonymous with one of the biggest genres on the Wii?

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question to David Luntz, the guy behind “Ninja Reflex,” the six-mini-game martial arts Wii title he will be co-publishing with EA in March.

I was curious what he thought. Were publishers still really into mini-game collections? Did they think — did he think — there may be too many of them out there on the Wii already? Was he worried it would be hard to stand out?

One thing Luntz said stood out:

I think some games that just set out to be a mini-game game for that purpose… it’s sort of like somebody wanting to write a book because they think writing a book will look cool. “Oh, I’ll write a novel. That’ll be fun.” It’s sort of like the cart before the horse. It should be the idea that drives the design and the structure of the game should follow out of the idea.

Take that, Miyamoto! Oh, of course he wasn’t talking about Miyamoto. But perhaps you see games out there that deserve that comment?

I like “Ninja Reflex.” I had fun playing it and was surprised to hear the game getting trashed on the 1upyours podcast a couple of weeks back. The head of EA’s casual games division, Kathy Vrabeck, recently told Nex-Gen.biz that the hardcore gaming press doesn’t even really understand these games.

OK. Well, whoever I am, gaming press, mainstream press, whatever, I’m trying to understand. Read on to see what Luntz and I were able to figure out.

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How do those little games tucked inside big games get made?

I started publishing answers to that question earlier this month, when I ran my interview with “BioShock”’s Dorian Hart about that game’s hacking mini-game.

Next up is Jake Sones, the developer at Insomniac Games chiefly responsible for the hacking mini-game in the PlayStation 3’s “Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

The game is pretty simple. The player uses the Sixaxis motion control (or the controller’s analog sticks) to tilt a circuit board, trying to get a metal ball to bridge gaps in the circuit as a spark inexorably creeps from a starting point to its destination.

Sones volunteered to make the game after the designer of the series’ previous hacking mini-games left Insomniac Games. I wanted to know how Jake, who was given assistance by some of the programming, art and sound folks at Insomniac, came up with this game. Little did I know that we’d be talking about “Pipe Dream” again. But we did.

We also talked about early, scuttled concepts:

…one of the first concepts that we thought about was doing something like “Arkanoid” meets “Puzzle Bobble.” When we started to work out the exact mechanics of that it started to fall apart.

We even chatted, sort of, about the mini-game’s music:

Multiplayer: The music. How does the music get chosen for a “Ratchet and Clank” decryptor game?

Sones: That is an excellent question that I don’t have an answer to. It kind of just showed up one day.

Multiplayer: You didn’t put in any requests that this needs to be mellow or this needs to be frantic to freak the player out?

Sones: I talked to the audio guys and said, “Hey man we should really have some audio in here, that would be cool.” And then it showed up.

For an in-depth interview on one of the more easily overlooked aspects of game development, read on. Jake Sones was a fun guy to talk to.

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No one ever bought “BioShock” just to do plumbing.

No one bought “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” to play cards.

And as great as it was to make a big catch, did anyone really play “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” just to fish?

Let us stop and praise the mini-game, the little diversions tucked within the epic adventures we love to play. Who makes these things? The guy on the development team who isn’t trusted to contribute to the larger experience? How is it decided if and where the mini-game fits? Why are these things even necessary? Who makes sure they aren’t annoying (or fails to figure that out)?

This post is the first of a series of interviews with the people behind the mini-games that were tucked into some gaming greats.

First up: “BioShock” Hacking. I got the details about this one last week during a 15-minute phone interview with 2K Boston designer Dorian Hart, one of the designers on the current best-reviewed game of the year.

Hart and I discussed the inspiration for the game, the mixed fan response, what Hart and team would have done differently had they had the time and the new twist that employees of 2K Boston have put on the hacking game when they play it in the office.

An excerpt:

…we knew going in that some people would think it was great and want to do it over and over again — and that some people would enjoy it at first and gradually come to think of it as a chore — and some people would hate it right from the start.

Read on for the full interview.

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