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" "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.
Jonathan Blow (1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016).
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Right now, if you're coming out of school—is the generalization of the age of people who happen to be coming out of school, usually—it's a very valuable time where you're kind of in your prime in terms of learning new stuff and adapting and having energy and inspiration and all this. Or at the last, you'll probably match any later time in your life, whether those impulses decline or not—very good time right now. And sort of one of the worst things you can do is go work at some company that's kinda big and bureaucratic and slow, at that age, because you're still learning and you wanna run the engine fast, you wanna learn things quickly because learning is like compound interest and the more you learn, the more you'll learn from your later experience because you can handle it better or whatever.
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Some people wanna be indie developers because there's a community of happy people who do the kind of things that they do and they can hang out with those people and it's just not—I don't really get nourishment from that, I'm not even really—ideally, I wish I was a community person, I wish I could find my community out in the world but I never have. So I'm the kind of person who—I have small numbers of friends who I have quality time with, and that's just how I do it. And so when you speak of the "community of game developers", even in the late '90s, when I was going to—in the first few years I was going to the GDC I didn't really feel like part of that, and it's so much less of a community now than it was—back then it was people working hard to make real games for the most part, and now you go to the GDC and it's like how to catch the whales using your shitty IAP whate—are we allowed to say that?