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 t… - Jonathan Blow

People have this reaction, ‘Why would I be interested in a game where you just walk around and draw lines on a bunch of panels? Why is there even a world there? Why is this not just a cheap iOS game or something?’ There are very good answers to that, but you don’t want to give people those answers because you then spoil the game for them.

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.

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.