When you think what someone thinks & do what they do, you'll find that you'll produce a similar result. - Marshall Sylver
I really value that click that happens in your head between you see something and you don't quite understand it and then suddenly you do understand it. That is a fundamental part of human existence in the world. It's that kind of mental growth - that kind of expanding my sphere of understanding the world around me. - 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
If you don't see a vulnerability in somebody, you're probably not relating with them on a very personal level. - Jonathan Blow
If you keep asking yourself what you care about, and not accepting the previous answer, you just ask again, ask again, eventually you make it to something you really care about. - 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
It's a common thing among game designers, especially these days, to get into discussions about fun. And they're difficult discussions to have because fun is a very amorphous word - what it means to you may not even be the same thing that means to me. - Jonathan Blow
One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. - Jonathan Blow
Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we've learned from a mistake and become better for it, shouldn't we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake? - Jonathan Blow
The problem is that most people don't know how to find something that strong in game development. - 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
To do a really long project, that drive needs to be very deep. It needs to come from your core. - Jonathan Blow
We can do some very interesting things if we put down language as a crutch for communication. - 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
What's interesting to me is that in terms of people who I feel are getting what my game is about - and here I'm not even talking about what the elements of the story mean, like, whatever symbolism and metaphors and things are in there. But even the structure of the game, like, there's a fundamental structure and reasons in the way things are laid out, and parts of the game that are meant to draw people's attention to certain things, regardless of what's contained in that structure. And what's interesting to me is that some people get that, and some people don't. - Jonathan Blow
You could make a very focused exploration game, that was about player creativity and exploration. But then it wouldn't have these very meticulous scientific kinds of puzzles in it, that Braid has. And so, it was just about picking something and understanding what it was that was chosen, and sticking to it, ruthlessly. - Jonathan Blow
You might play a game that has a good story. But compare the quality of that story to a novel, and the novel just beats the shit out of the game in every dimension. - Jonathan Blow
All my friends were going off to be professionals, and I said I wanted to be an actor. - Harrison Ford
Bikes and planes aren't about going fast or having fun; they're toys, but serious ones. - Harrison Ford
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