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" "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.
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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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.
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.
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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.