Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game. - John Carmack
I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues. - John Carmack
I think 'World of Warcraft' shows that people today still like a good fantasy hack and slash game. I always thought that a lot of computer fantasy games leapt into complex party-based play somewhat prematurely. - John Carmack
It is clearly a bad idea to try to just move games from other platforms directly over, but I'm sure we will see a lot of it, especially as the handsets surpass the hardware capabilities of previous generation consoles. - John Carmack
Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important. - John Carmack
The great games are the space sims and driving sims and these experiences where you're basically sitting at a table with nothing happening in front of you. A lot of interesting things are evolving there. There are great games that can be made. - John Carmack
To the game code, the world is still just a tile map, but for rendering, each map was exported as a general-purpose 3D model, and the artists could then go through it and spend the polygons any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones. - John Carmack
We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. - John Carmack
I decided to start making a game, a slightly bigger game, to basically get better at programming and have something to put on my resume. - Eric Barone
I think a lot of big game studios take the safe and uncontroversial route when it comes to social and political issues, for fear of losing sales. This leads to bland, focus tested experiences that maintain the status quo. - Eric Barone
I think I injected a little of myself into most of the characters, so I can identify with a lot of them. If I had to pick one, it would probably be Mr. Qi. - Eric Barone
I think that developers should just do the right thing regardless of where the money's at. - Eric Barone
[..] there's some line that divides games that are beneficial from games that are harmful. It's not really my business to draw that line today, I don't wanna try and convince you exactly what's beneficial and what's harmful, because again, that is up to the opinion of every designer and in fact the opinion of every player. But what I would like is for people to have an opinion about it. When people design a game to think about what that game is doing, and when people play a game to think about what that game is doing. And people don't, right now. They think about how it has cool graphics and a lot of levels and, like, they love the story about killing the bad guy. Which is not a very self-aware place to be standing when you're consuming something that affects your life for so many hours and therefore affects your mind for so many hours. And that bothers me. That makes me feel bad about being a game designer. - Jonathan Blow
Braid is not really a fun game for many people, probably most people, and it's not designed to be fun. It's designed to be interesting, and designed to provide the player with mental challenges. - Jonathan Blow
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. - Jonathan Blow
I want to respect my player's time. So I don't want to give the player a lot of filler just because I feel like gameplay ought to be 60 hours long. - Jonathan Blow
I'm not saying that all game designers are like that. I've encountered what I perceive to be that attitude. Whereas other game designers, who make games where you just run around killing a hundred dudes or whatever, I've had totally reasonable discussions with them and they're just like "no, I've really thought about it and here's what I think". And so, it's complicated. - Jonathan Blow
In movies you have all these different genres of movie and when you go to a different genre of movie, you have different emotional expectations. They are this sort of commercial experience in that you feel like, 'I paid to go see a comedy, so this better be funny', but that is not an expectation you would have going to see a drama or going to see a documentary or whatever, right. In games we don't seem to have that. Everybody expects this fun thing out of all games. - Jonathan Blow
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. - Jonathan Blow
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. - Jonathan Blow
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. - Jonathan Blow
What I strive to do in my own games, which you can see pretty clearly in Braid, is to respect the player as an intelligent person who can figure things out and who wants to discover things or come to understand more than they knew at the start of the game. - Jonathan Blow
