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 de… - Jonathan Blow

As you get a game closer to done there are more graphical assets, and they get bigger and bigger and it takes longer to do things like load them or process them if you need to do some automated processing on them or recompute the lighting for the world, and it gets to a point where it becomes very sluggish to just try to get new things done and that was a real drag. And it's especially a drag when there's so many things to do and you feel like you can't do them very fast because of the computer. And part of that was programming in this programming language C++ that most engine programmers use to build things with, and I just had this very fatalistic attitude toward it like "Well... we can't do anything about that so I just have to like deal with this and get the game done". And then at some point I just changed thatI was like "Wait, is that really true? I know that that's what everybody thinks but is that really true?" And I was like "Yeah, no, it's not true". Like "I shouldn'tlike, we should finish this game in C++, but I don't have to accept that this is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I can actually change this and do a different thing", and that's what led me to work on this new programming language. But as soon as I decided to do itas soon as I said "This is actually not an unfixable problem; we can do something about this", I became much happier, immediately, because I was no longer in jail; I was no longer in C++ jail for the rest of my life. So I try to use that as an example for other things as well. WheneverI know that feeling now; I know smaller versions of it, like when it comes to the way a game is designed, like "Oh, I realize I'm having this 'I'm in jail' feeling like I don't like this part of this game's design, but I've assumed that it just has to be the case." And I just go back and look, "Does it really have to be the case? Well, I mean, I decided that because this but we could make that decision differently if we're willing to pay the cost of making the decision differently. Is that cost worth me being happier with the game because it's a better game? Well, yes." So once you learn to revisit those decisions it becomes a very good thing to do and so that C++ instance I think was the biggest one, but I've learned to do that more often from that example.

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.

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.