Interview with Jonathan Blow
by Jeff Lindsay

Jonathan Blow is quite exceptional. Part of what some might call the game industry's inner circle, Jonathan is well known for his strong participation in community initiatives to better the industry and the medium. Previously he wrote for Game Developer magazine's technical column called The Inner Product, and every year he organizes the popular Experimental Gameplay Sessions at the Game Developers Conference. He rants, he calls to action, he points out the beauty, he pushes boundaries, and he knows kung fu. All this and more as he remains completely independent.

In 2006 he won the IGF award for Innovation in Game Design for his game Braid , a puzzle platform game that expands your mind as you play with time unlike anything before it. As Braid nears release, he's been exploring and prototyping to find his next project, and more recently he's been reflecting on some of the ethical issues involved in modern game design. Here though, I came to Jonathan to talk about indie games, as he is probably one of the most bad-ass indies you'll ever meet.

Me: Braid is very close to release, though not to PC as many were expecting. How has working with Xbox Live Arcade been and what led to that decision for its initial release?

Jonathan Blow: Working with the Live Arcade team has been good so far, although Braid hasn't yet entered into the certification process, which is what you hear people usually complain about!

I had two reasons for not wanting to release on the PC yet.  First is just that trying to make a game work consistently on everyone's PCs is a huge pain in the ass.  Things always break.  I didn't want to deal with that while still actually finishing up the game itself (polishing the graphics and the level design, and all that stuff).  So I figured targeting a fixed platform would be easier.  As it turns out, it probably wasn't, because running on an Xbox 360 entails a lot of complications that I would rather not have.

But the second reason is financial.  I spent a lot of money developing Braid and would like to make that back.  On the PC, I probably would just lose money, because the market does not seem to be there.  If I release on Xbox Live first, where there is a reasonably-sized audience, I can probably at least break even; then a later PC release is gravy on top of that.  Plus, because it was an Xbox Live game, maybe more people on the PC will have heard about the game and will take it seriously enough to try it out.

Me: You recently had a lot of discussion on your blog about an ad for Braid. I know you dislike ads, as I'm sure lots of indie folk, but as indie developers need to support themselves, marketing their game becomes very important. How do you balance that need to get out there and pull people in without, I guess, harming your integrity as an indie? Do you think it's a necessary evil or are there more clever ways to approach it?

JB:

Ideally, marketing is about communicating what you've made to exactly the people who are interested in it.  I have no problem with this, but it is "ideal" in more than one sense: firstly, it is an impossible problem (how do we know who would be interested?), but secondly, it is also not the revenue-maximizing kind of marketing.  I don't care about maximizing revenue, but most businesses do, so for them marketing can have other purposes: convincing people that they want something when they naturally wouldn't, or else misrepresenting the nature of the thing being sold so that people mistake it for something they want.  This latter thing doesn't necessarily have to consist of outright lies about a product; it can just be overglamourization of the product or misrepresentation of reality (since reality is so complicated, and also people are being bombarded by so many advertising messages, it's easy to be confused about what is real and what isn't.)

The way you've formed the question is the way I think a lot of principled indies approach it -- "I want to have integrity, but I also need to get my game out there so people will buy it."  This is sort of true, but I think this way of looking at things inherently causes problems.  Making money is hard sometimes, and if you convince yourself that you need to make money (in order to eat, or fund the next game, or whatever), then you are automatically on a slippery slope and will start justifying all sorts of things, and eventually you are far from your original ideals but that doesn't seem too bad because you "just had to be realistic".

Well, fuck that.  I've seen a lot of developers go that way, and none of them are now in situations that I would be happy in.

So my current thinking about the right way to approach this is: marketing is not, in fact, a need.  Getting enough people to buy your game such that you make money is not a need, if you really care about the integrity of what you are making.  That integrity is the primary need; earning enough money through selling that thing, such that you can make more without taking up another job or whatever, is a luxury. People bend to this luxury all the time.  There are lots of ways to rationalize it.  But I think it is usually due to weakness -- or rather, lack of commitment to principles.

Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be "professional" about making games.  Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that.  But if you really care about games, it's a huge mistake, and being "professional" will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.

Me: Your last statement reminds me of one of the points you made recently in Design Reboot about many mainstream game designers lacking discernment, resorting to cheap tricks because it sells. That part got a lot of attention, and I know it was a major point, but I think there were other maybe subtler points you made leading up to it that were just as significant. For example: games are going to be huge. You propose that games will heavily influence the patterns of human thought. Can you elaborate on that and how that implication differs from the effects of books and film?

JB: I don't exactly know how games are going to affect people, because that depends on what they end up being, which I can't predict.  I am optimistic in that I believe they will become something much richer than what we have today.  But games as a medium could go many different ways (and probably will go in several at once), which will determine how they affect their players.

There are a lot of books and articles around, pontificating on what makes games different from other media (short answer: the interactivity), and I feel that's a dead horse that I don't want to beat here.

But what worries me is that we are misusing the medium's primary strength, in order to get easy short-term wins, and this may stunt the growth of the industry.  Specifically -- the very form of a game gives the player some agency.  But ever-more-often we are producing games in which the possibilities of the play session are so tightly-controlled, or dumbed down, that the agency becomes illusionary.  Then we pull out another bag of tricks, spending tons of effort to make the illusionary agency feel like real agency.  Well, instead of that, why don't we just let the player have some choices -- why don't we make room for the player as an individual within our game?

As I was saying in the lecture, this can have significant negative effects when employed on the scale of a whole society.  The games are about rewarding people to keep them playing, to make them feel good. (These are the cheap tricks that sell).  But there are secondary effects to that -- you are re-training people, changing the kinds of things that their brain expects rewards for -- which is really bad in conjunction with my next point.

Right now big companies are making primarily linear roller-coaster-ride experiences; then they focus test those games and decide which parts aren't fun, or are blocking the player, or whatever, and eliminate those.  They want to quality-control the experience, but the problem is if you force people to have what you deem is the maximum-quality experience, you remove the potential for them to have all the other experiences, many of which were probably better than the one you mistakenly chose as the best. 

Furthermore, games that are flattened out like this are not allowed to really expect anything of the player -- to require the player to do anything difficult or interesting.  Because a large percentage of players would not be able to do that, leading to a negative experience for much of the audience -- dragging down the focus test scores, or whatever.

So games become about lying to players -- putting up faux challenges (A bunch of guys are attacking you!  But you can kill them all without thinking, just mashing buttons, and you have to try really hard to actually die.  Match 3 gems of the same color!  But oh, most of your big scores happen due to gems randomly falling from the top of the screen into fortunate configurations, so it's impossible to do badly at this game.  There's a puzzle here that you need to solve to get deeper into the temple!  But it's not actually a puzzle, you just have to walk across this thing, flip this switch, and that opens the door over there, which you jump back to.  If we had put a puzzle you actually had to think about, you might not be able to get past it!)

So we put up these faux challenges, and then reward people for being sheep and passing through them.  If we do a good enough job at fooling the player into thinking these are real challenges, then we distort his long-term sense of what a real challenge is.  Anything that he isn't cakewalked through seems insurmountable, or at least not worth attending to.  Because why bother doing something hard, if his brain has been re-trained to know that it will be consistently rewarded for plodding through easy tasks?

I think some personality types are immune to this -- for example, most games just don't interest me anymore, for precisely the reasons I am talking about.  But I think those people are in the minority.

Now, if enough of us decide not to fall into this pandering-to-players behavior I have been talking about, we can develop games that are really interesting and challenging experiences, through which our players become slightly better / more interesting / more diverse / more powerful people through each game they play.  (The same way that a one-week trip to Europe, or reading something like Siddhartha, can expand someone's experience).  When I say "challenge" I don't just mean an action challenge, as in a fighting game.  It could be an intellectual challenge, an emotional challenge, or a moral or ethical one, an aesthetic or social challenge, etc.  We aren't very good at creating most of these, but that's at least in part because we haven't been trying much.

And I don't mean to say that all games have to be about challenge, either -- that's just one obvious kind of thing to make.

Me: So, are indie games the solution? Not that indie games are all a trove of new innovative experiences, but at least in this context there's less pressure to avoid risk and pander to the average player.

JB: I think there's a subset of indie games that can really help with these kinds of issues, but it's a small subset.  Most indie game developers are not trying to make things that push boundaries or do something different -- rather, they are just making the same kinds of things that mainstream companies make, but with less money.  Because they just want to make games and they are mostly pretty happy with what's coming out already.

The problem is that (for the commercial indies) they want to sell their games to people, but from the customer's point of view many of them have no reason to exist: If I can play game A made by a big publisher, with high production values and good QA, or else game B which is in the same  genre but has a much lower budget, is much less polished, and all that, which one am I going to pick?  In most cases A is obviously better than B, and there is no reason for B to exist. The exception is in genres that the mainstream industry no longer serves -- then you can make games that are patterned after games made in the 1990s and 1980s, but people will buy them because there is no higher-production-value source. (These are genres like: adventure games, turn-based strategy, hardcore RPGs).

At the same time, I like to point out that big companies do tend to innovate sometimes, usually in ways that are small enough that they don't risk the success of the entire project.  Though the innovations are small, they do help push games forward, even if just a little bit at a time.  For example: Gears of War had "active reload", which makes firefights just a magical extra bit more involved, and is the first time I've ever seen that someone made gun jamming feel fair and fun.  Max Payne did the bullet time thing.  etc.  If every mainstream game added a piece that large to the map of now-explored game design, then we would be in really good shape, because there are so many mainstream games.

Back to the indie side of things -- I'm not sure that it's true that there is less risk, ultimately.  Indie games cost a lot less, so if you look at things from some kind of objective external viewpoint, then it's not that big a deal if an indie game fails, but it's a huge deal if a game with a $20 million budget fails.  However, from the perspective of the indie developer, failure is just as bad -- if it's a game they really cared about, they probably put a huge amount of time and effort into it, and to watch that bomb is really painful.  So there is a tendency for indie developers to be risk-averse, just like big companies.  (And keep in mind that a lot of indies are trying to grow into big companies, so they want to be just as fiscally conservative -- the only problem is that they are not as competent at that as a big company is, due to having unrealistic notions about what is sellable, or what they will be able to develop.)

Some indies are not risk-averse, but these tend to be the people who care primarily about the nature of what they are making, rather than the money (as I was talking about before). But that's the thing -- the reduced pressure that is possible as an indie comes from accepting that it is okay to fail financially and have to go do something else for a while (if you ran out of money) and come back later.  It does *not* come from the lower price of game development, because usually the indies are making the most expensive game they can afford, so if they are in the mindset that they need to be a successful business, the pressure is just as high as in the mainstream.

Some indies just make little games that don't take very much effort, and give them away for free or whatever, so these commercial concerns don't come up.  And those games are great; I play many of them.  They can help push the boundaries of what is being done (just recently I played Cursor*10 and Flywrench, both free games that were very refreshing and interesting).  At the same time, though, I feel that a lot of the value that can be found through indie game development, you only get to by working hard on a game for a long time.  The more polished a game is, the more you have access to things that are subtle and sublime.  With games that are not polished, for the most part the player can only perceive things that are coarse -- because those things have to be rough and loud enough to make themselves noticed through the layer of interface problems, unhoned level design, and whatever else.

There are a few games that are relatively subtle and also quickly developed, which seem like exceptions to this, like The Marriage and Passage.  But I think those games would be much more effective with higher production values.  I don't mean things like 3D graphics, but rather, just a lot more attention spent on the way things are communicated to the player through visuals and sounds and other elements of "game feel" such as avatar accelerations, collision resolution, and whatever else.  That stuff takes a lot of time if you are very detail-oriented and want it to be right.

Me: So then it would seem that the indie game world is really not unlike the mainstream, just a scaled down version. You can find innovation in both, but in a small percentage of them. I guess though because of the nature of mainstream, you hear more about the crappy mainstream games than the crappy indie games. Nonetheless, it seems the indie that exists is not exactly the indie that is romanticized. Does that sound right?

JB: I don't think I would go that far.  When innovation does happen in the indie world, it tends to be deeper and more-different.  Games like "The Marriage" and "Passage" are not coming out from mainstream developers.

But yes, I think it's true that the indie that exists is not exactly the indie that is romanticized.  It's almost as though we need separate terms for "independent financially" and "independent artistically".

But I don't like focusing on the idea of innovation -- whereas I once thought about innovation in gameplay as the primary way to move independent games forward (for example when starting the Experimental Gameplay Workshop), now I look at it as a useful thing that is not required.  What I care about more, these days, is the intention behind the work.  Why was it created?  Is the game "just for fun" or is it something else?  Did the author care about the stuff that comprises the game, or did he just think it would be cool if a car drove off the top of a parking garage and then there was a big explosion?

What I find is that a deep core motivation will automatically create gameplay innovation.  I mentioned "The Marriage" and "Passage".  These games don't play like any others, but the reason their gameplay is different is that it was what best supported the theme.  The authors cared about the themes, and then the gameplay flowed from that.  Which is a very different situation than sitting down and saying "I want to make an RTS, except the gameplay innovation is that there is a shrink ray so you can have battles on multiple scales simultaneously."

Me: It seems like it’s one of those situations where people get the means confused with the end. Losing sight of the bigger picture. Like when Paul Graham writes about passionately doing what you love, and out of that the money will likely figure itself out. I think a lot of people that were caught up in the idea of innovation in games eventually came to the conclusion that it is more of a means than an end.

But we are looking for innovation in the sense of progress, right? Maybe not direct innovation in gameplay, but as you said maybe in the intention or higher level theme. Maybe innovation is the wrong word for those situations... perhaps unexplored? Unexplored intentions, unexplored themes...

JB: The "innovation is more of a means than an end" is definitely true now for large companies like Electronic Arts.  They have this thing called "Feature IP" which is a way of saying innovation but that also says "heavily monetizable".  They realized that players were getting tired of stale games, and wanted things that were new, so they came up with a very suit-like way of thinking about it.

The issue of terminology is a tough one. "Unexplored" is interesting but at the same time that still seems like the wrong neighborhood.  For example, stories have been pretty well-explored, but we find reasons to tell new ones.  People are interested in that.  But games haven't reached that level yet, which means the medium is incomplete (or else some of us designers were being optimistic, and it is inherently a less-powerful medium than linear storytelling).

At the same time -- "game" is not a good word for what some of us do, and "video game" is even worse.  I met an attractive woman today and of course the question comes up of what I do for a living.  And it's very hard to communicate to a normal person (especially an attractive person who doesn't spend all her time performing mentally regressive activities involving shooting stuff) how a video game can be worthwhile.  Her last experience was watching someone play Doom (which was even more unappealing to her than the mere gameplay content, because it also made her motion-sick!)  I think this is an individual example of what happens societally as a whole; when we say "video game", the general population thinks a certain thing, but that thing is not very much like what some of us are doing.  Having a new term for "meaningful/interesting/non-pandering video game" might help, but it's difficult to come up with a good one that is not pompous.  "Interactive Ludological Experience" is unappealing to me, and it's also a bit more cumbersome than "game".

I've had this explain-what-I-do-to-a-cute-girl experience a lot now (and with other kinds of normal people too), and every time I slightly refine my method of talking about what I do, and why, and it's a lot better than it used to be, and sometimes I even successfully communicate some of the ideas.  But it's generally not a successful because I am starting at a deficit.

Here in America the Republican Party beat the Democrats in 2000, and pretty much stomped them again in 2004, despite four disastrous years of an incompetent Presidency that any reasonable person would have wanted to change ASAP.  A big factor in this was an old political saying that Karl Rove is said to have used as one of his core philosophies: "If you're explaining, you're losing."  The Democrats spent all their time trying to explain difficult issues and why their approaches were the rationally best choice.  But they were losing, because the Republicans were just saying stupid shit that sounds good as long as you don't think about it, appealing to religious passions and patriotism and instinctual bigotry.

If you manage to anonymously leak a lie about a competitor that is infectious enough for people to latch onto, it is a very powerful weapon.  (For example: "John Kerry was a traitor in Vietnam" or "John McCain has an illegitimate half-black child."  Because it doesn't cost you very much, but then that guy has to spend a lot of time and energy explaining why this is a blatant lie -- i.e. he is engaged in a long process of losing.  And a lot of people still won't believe him, because to them the passions stirred by the accusation are stronger than all this boring explaining that the guy is doing.  Then the guy you smeared can never get back all the reputation he once had.  It's like being arrested for being a pedophile, and everyone in your town is gossiping about you.  And then it comes out in court that the two kids who raised the accusations were conspiring in order to get attention, or blackmail you for money, or something.  So you're cleared of all charges and go home free.  But every time someone sees you around town, you're still "that guy who got arrested for being a pedophile" and there are always people who will question the verdict, and rumors about how you were really guilty but the judge also shares your perversion.

So when I start out trying to explain "I try to make progressive video games"... (feeling of ickiness comes upon listener as soon as I say 'video games')... "that are meaningful and try to provide growth-oriented experiences," it ends up being this 15-sentence spiel and I am losing the whole time.  At the end I almost never get out of the negative numbers, back up to 0.  If I were to say "I'm a fireman" or "I manage a branch of a bank" or "I am a writer of Hollywood screenplays", I would usually be looked upon much more positively.

And that is a large bummer for people who do this kind of work.

Me: Well I'd really love to keep going, but we should really wrap up. You're giving several sessions this year at GDC right? Why don't you share what those are about real quick.

JB: There are two main things I am doing at the GDC this year.

One is the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, where we invite people who are exploring new and interesting gameplay mechanics to come give 15-minute presentations on their work.  It's nice because you get to see a large variety of presentations in a short time.

The other session is called Nuances of Design.  This is a new thing that I just started last year, but it went very well.  The idea is that all the attendees bring laptops to the session in order to play the games that the speakers are talking about. The speaking part is just meant to draw the players' attention to certain aspects of the games, to provide a semi-guided experience.  It's patterned after experiences I have had in dance and martial arts training.  It always struck me as strange that we have this huge conference about a fundamentally interactive medium, and then choose to try and communicate things about that medium without the interactivity.  I don't think it works very well; we're only in general successful at communicating coarse, obvious things.  That's why this new session is called "Nuances of Design"; it's about communicating things that are subtle and very difficult to put into words.