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 deca… - Jonathan Blow

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?’

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.

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.