Jonathan Blow Quotes

The way I think about puzzles is a real puzzle, is something you may not ever figure out.

I can complain about games for my whole life.

Finally, Braid was the thing where I felt that writing could enter into it. But the game design also is a different kind of writing. It's a different kind of idea communication. One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. But the problem is that writing isn't a good venue for that. Because as I said, you can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you're clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next – the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you're writing down is total bullshit. But, you cannot do that in a game – or at least it's much harder – because in a game, you have to create a simulated universe that works according to some rules. Especially the way Braid is constructed. It has to be intact as a place that has laws, and consistency. And because of that, there has to be a kernel of truth in Braid. I can't write down any old bullshit that I want. I can't make any puzzle that I want that has any arbitrary answer, because it won't work in the context of the rest of the game.

I think a lot of game designers are irresponsible. When we can make something that affects so many people's lives—a AAA game these days, a hit one, is 10 million copies or more, probably. When you are making something that affects that many people, and you're not thinking about exactly what way you're affecting them—like seriously, not just like "oh, I'm giving them something fun" but like really introspecting—I feel like there's something wrong. If you think really hard about it and then you come to the conclusion "oh, what I'm doing is great, this is totally good", that's fine. But I feel like there's a lack of serious thought in the industry. People go and they spend three or four years of their life making a game, working very hard—it's very hard to make games, even when you have a hundred people helping. Because it's that much of your life, you would think it's very important to understand it and spend that time well but I think often the opposite happens psychologically—it's like "oh, I'm spending—I'm putting so much of myself into this". The thought that "it could be a bad thing when I thought that it was a good thing" is almost unbearable. "So I'm just not gonna look at that." I'm not saying that all game designers are like that. I've encountered what I perceive to be that attitude. Whereas other game designers, who make games where you just run around killing a hundred dudes or whatever, I've had totally reasonable discussions with them and they're just like "no, I've really thought about it and here's what I think". And so, it's complicated.

You know, in college, I never got either degree, but I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor's degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about.

Video games are in a weird spot now. I feel like we’ve been living through this time of anti-intellectualism across the culture—for the past few decades at least, but in video games especially. I mean crazy anti-intellectual. Part of that is because so much of the intellectualism we’ve had in video games is actually really pretentious and dumb. I feel like we’ve seen a lot of people just trying to be the person who says smart things about games, instead of doing the work to understand gaming well and discover things and then explore what those discoveries entail. And I think people have rightly reacted negatively to that sort of behavior. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people doing that work and genuinely figuring out what games can be and pushing them forward. I just hope that eventually we can get to a stage where that work’s more broadly celebrated as part of the medium, say in the way that film does.

There's another interesting thing, that I think that's interesting about game design is that game design is kind of a game by itself. I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and I've found that looking at a situation and saying "how do I make an interesting puzzle out of this?" is itself a really interesting puzzle. So there's this huge irony going on, that the companies that are making these social games [like FarmVille] that basically have no gameplay value in them are actually themselves playing a much more interesting game than the game that they're making for you to play. The game they're playing is this huge multi-dimensional optimization problem where you're trying to gather data and make the best decision and all that and the game they're making for you to play is like clicking on a cow a bunch of times and you get some gold. So that's very strangely humorous. And as I visualize that happening, somebody at one of these companies, they're doing their A/B testing, they're kind of tweaking something for Europe and tweaking something for America and tweaking something for Canada and then going over here and like "oh this A/B test is done, let's look at the graphs of the results and let's write a report on that" and stuff. It's a little bit like planting trees and rearranging a garden and minding livestock and all that. So you could say that the people making FarmVille are not only playing a game, but they're playing some kind of like ur-FarmVille that is way more interesting. And so the sad fact of what this all comes to is you've got these people—you know, FarmVille has a wide demographic, it's not just computer nerds who play it apparently, anymore—so you've got all these people who think that they're playing this cool game where they mine their cows and pigs and feeling like the boss and getting all this gold and getting richer and their farm is looking nicer. There's all these ways that they feel like they're progressing. But what's actually happening is that someone is farming them. So you know there's all these imaginary farms out there where you gain imaginary money but then there's a real farm with real money that pulls money from you over the internet and you don't ever see it because it's all behind your head while you're typing on the computer.

A long time ago, I used to write fiction, short stories mainly. And I reached a point where I had honed my style so that it wasn't totally atrocious, and I kind of knew what I was doing when writing, and then the question was just, "What do I write about now?" And I couldn't really find anything that I felt was important enough to write about. So I just kind of gave up on writing.

If what you're objecting to is the flavor and attitude and the nature with which Casey was expressing his criticism, then there's a little bit more of a point there, however, again, you eliminate that at your peril. It is well-known that many of the greatest contributors to society—not just in software, but in all science and technology and the arts everywhere—many of those people have been hard to work with for one reason or another. And partially it's because they care tremendously about what they are doing. They care tremendously about the form in which they are working. You might say "oh but that guy doesn't need to be crotchety and mean about that thing", but you can't take away that part of the personality and have everything else, because that part of the personality is quite likely an integral part of what made the rest of the artist or the scientist as good as they are. You can't just decide "Albert Einstein should have had a different personality but he should've still done all the cool relativity stuff and figured all that out and then I'm going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos and I'll criticize Einstein for not being a good person in some certain way that a hundred years later I decide is the right way to be, but I will take all the stuff that he contributed because it helps me eat Cheetos and that's great". That is so—it is important for us to see that kind of lazy, bloated, fat, social criticism of others as being as toxic as it actually is, and as being as unproductive and decay-inducing as it actually is. That's way more toxic than a programmer saying angry things—that kind of criticism, because that kind of criticism that's in vogue in places like Twitter right now at a large scale will destroy human society, whereas the crotchety programmer thing on a large scale built a large part of the human society that we have right now. So be very careful with that stuff, and on my part, I feel that one of the better contributions I can make is to not tolerate that kind of criticism. I just won't put up with it. If you come to this channel with that kind of thing I'll just ban you because it's stupid and I don't have time for it. There's too much of it. It's cheap, all it is is posturing so that the person making the criticism can feel better, can show other people that they are a good person, and it's gross, it's really gross. And it's destructive. We don't need it.

[In games], a lot of the problems that we need to solve [are] global state manipulation problems. And so pretending that it's not, by saying "look I have a functional language and I'm going through seven layers of things so that I can avert my eyes sufficiently from the fact that I'm actually just manipulating globals at the end of the day" - that's just an obfuscation, it doesn't actually solve any problems.

I'm not really in the indie scene, that's the thing. I'm off by myself. I don't hang out with game developers, either indie or AAA, except for—there's a small number of people who I consider my pure circle and most of them don't live near me so I have to go fly to visit them. And if I add up the number of people total, it's certainly under ten people that I know of that I can talk to seriously about game design, it's probably about six people in the world. So those are the people I talk to about game design, and the rest of the industry is just doing its thing. And that includes the indie thing. I don't know.

I feel like we don’t yet understand what games are capable of as a medium. And there’s not enough genuine interest throughout the game industry in dealing with that, because people have figured out how to make money. And that’s great, at least people have figured out how to make money for now by employing old gameplay discoveries in a continuously refined way, and-or borrowing things from other media.

Here's a thing I like to point out to people—I'm not really anti-piracy, I'm not really pro-piracy. I pirated stuff when I was a kid because I didn't feel like I had a choice. My mom wouldn't really buy video games for me. I actually—one time in like a Waldenbooks or something I stole a physical copy of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? from the store. And it wasn't even a good game! I was a little—I did some bad stuff when I was a kid.

Well, it's very personal to me, because I have that kind of personality. The same sort of thing that drives somebody to study physics for 30 years, so they can discover a new particle. Just so they can know something more about the world. I have that same personality, but I didn't end up in physics. I ended up in game design. What does that mean? What is my outlet for that? I have gone on record as talking about game design as a practice, like a scientific study, or like a spiritual practice, like yoga or tai chi. And that's part of what I'm doing when I design a game, is that I'm exploring the universe in a certain way. I'm trying to understand true things about it, or to uncover things about it, in ways again that are less bullshitty than just writing words on a paper. Because somehow, and I could be totally fooling myself about this, but I believe that somehow, there is something more meaningful about creating a system. Because the universe is a system, of some kind. And writing is not a system.

So what are the ideas? Are they anything? Not really. What they are is an exploration of the things that can happen when you’re in a simpler version of the world we live in. So you have light and shadow, and you have colors and shapes occluding other shapes, and there’s an exploration of ‘Let’s make this as simple as we can and look at it with the greatest degree of focus that we can and see what we can see, and what is that like?’ Not even necessarily in a high-minded philosophical way, but let’s experientially look with fresh eyes upon this activity of walking around in a world from day to day, before you even add in other people that send you off into a weird mental place and all that. And then some of the panels are even more primitive. The first ones are more abstract, they’re pre-spatial. So here’s the black and white spots, and you need to figure out that you need to draw a line separating them. That’s an attempt at engaging whether there’s some kind of Platonic idea of category or space that precedes what you get when you have a full 3D world-like space that you can walk around. This is a rambling answer, but the point is that those things all work together on a few levels. On one level it’s just, ‘Hey we’re getting the player into the mindset of looking with fresh eyes upon a world.’ Even if they don’t understand what’s happening, that’s fine, that’s just what we’re doing. But then also it’s metaphorical. There’s a metaphor for being a person in the real world just trying to understand ‘What is the truth about where we are? Are there investigations we can undergo in games that get us closer to the truth about the world we live in?’