"Some people wanna be indie developers because theres a community of happy people who do the kind of things that they do and they can hang out with those people and its just not—I dont really get nourishment from that, Im 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 Im the kind of person who—I have small numbers of friends who I have quality time with, and thats 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 didnt really feel like part of that, and its 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 its like how to catch the whales using your shitty IAP whate—are we allowed to say that?"
Jonathan David Blow 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). Blow became interested in game programming while at middle school. He studied computer science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out to start a game company. After the company closed following the d
"I’m probably asking for trouble by doing this, because Blow’s known for skewering theorists who’ve gone looking to excavate ideas from his other game, Braid. (A game he’s said he had specific ideas about while crafting, but that no one’s yet pieced together fully.)"
"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 decades at least, but in video games especially. I mean crazy anti-intellectual. Part of that is because so much of the intellectualism we’ve had in video games is actually really pretentious and dumb. I feel like we’ve seen a lot of people just trying to be the person who says smart things about games, instead of doing the work to understand gaming well and discover things and then explore what those discoveries entail. And I think people have rightly reacted negatively to that sort of behavior. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people doing that work and genuinely figuring out what games can be and pushing them forward. I just hope that eventually we can get to a stage where that work’s more broadly celebrated as part of the medium, say in the way that film does."
"The way I think about puzzles is a real puzzle, is something you may not ever figure out."
"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 bachelors 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."
"Heres a thing I like to point out to people—Im not really anti-piracy, Im not really pro-piracy. I pirated stuff when I was a kid because I didnt feel like I had a choice. My mom wouldnt really buy video games for me. I actually—one time in like a Waldenbooks or something I stole a physical copy of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? from the store. And it wasnt even a good game! I was a little—I did some bad stuff when I was a kid."
"I can complain about games for my whole life."