Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Jonathan Blow on Consciousness, Video Game Design, True Art vs. False, and Free Will

Starting point is 00:00:00 Jonathan Blow is a universally acclaimed video game designer and programmer who's best known as the creator of the video games Braid and The Witness. Jonathan is distinguished as a game designer in that he doesn't think video games should be considered escapism, or shouldn't be designed to be escapes, but rather they should be experiences to advise you in your everyday life in the same way that superlative literature does. We touch on what creativity means, free will, physics, at least with regard to Wolfram's model, and what consciousness has to do with video games and art in general. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro.

Starting point is 00:00:35 For those new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jeimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness physics dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are even knowable to us. If you enjoy witnessing and engaging in conversation on the topics of psychology, physics, consciousness, and so on, then check the description for an invitation to the Discord and the Theories of Everything subreddit. There's also a link to the Patreon, that is patreon.com slash c-u-r-t j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l, Kurt Jaimungal, if you'd like to support this podcast as the

Starting point is 00:01:16 patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full-time. It would be near impossible, at least for me, to have conversations on loop quantum gravity, non-dualism, consciousness, even geometric unity, with any sort of fidelity, if not for your support. Thank you, and that link again is patreon.com slash kurtjaimungle. With regard to sponsors, there are two. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write-downs, while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI, headed by a bright

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Starting point is 00:02:36 you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects that you previously had difficulty grokking. Thank you, and enjoy this conversation with the world-renowned Jonathan Blow. Before conducting the podcast, I was asking Jonathan about why he accepted this interview, given that he's requested to be on many channels and says no to the majority of them. Um, I think these days it's down to, like, what do I feel like is the motivation of the person doing the interview, right? Like if it's somebody who, you know, just wants clicks or, I mean, it's worse actually to, to tangent a little bit. Um, I've had really bad experiences like at live physical conferences,

Starting point is 00:03:21 because those, like I prepare a different speech to do every time I put a lot of last minute work into doing this thing. And then I go have the interaction with the person running the conference. And I realized, oh, this person just wants me here to like, get some audience and doesn't really care about anything that I have, you know, and and those that has, You know, and, and those, um, that has, it's just gotten me to be more, to conserve my energy more, I guess, and try to use it in, in cases where, um, where I feel like somebody just wants to legitimately have a conversation, right. As opposed to like, you know, whatever. And so there's all sorts of emails that I get that I don't, I don't even reply to, you know, ranging from, do you want to speak?

Starting point is 00:04:11 I mean, these days it's usually online conferences, right? Do you want to speak at our online conference to like, I'm in high school and my teacher wants us to interview people, right? And it's like, I mean, maybe i mean maybe but also maybe not like because maybe it's just oh i just picked someone i don't know it could be a ruse or that they're not genuinely interested in you yeah um it's hard to know like it's also just hard which is um like i generally only want to do talks when i really have something to say which is interesting to see how this is going to go because it's not like i have a particular idea uh for what what i want to get across, right? It's totally open conversation. But like I've just, I've seen a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:05:11 this is a kind of an industry lens on things or something. But you see people and they seem like smart people in a certain field, but then you watch them for years or they're the people around you and they're just talking and talking. And it eventually turns out they were like playing this talking game as opposed to like really being the people invested in like wanting to know and wanting to work hard and do the thing. And so I always I have this secondary reflex to like check that tendency in myself, like, hey, is it really better if you maybe don't talk so much right now and just go, just go work on something? What do you mean when you say they're playing the talking game, that they want to be a guru or a pundit of some sort, more than they care about the message

Starting point is 00:06:03 they're delivering? They want to be someone who's seen as a message deliverer. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a very fundamental human motivation, right? Or, I mean, not fundamental to everybody. Let's say common. It's a common thing that people do, either to get ahead societally or to just feel to themselves like they're succeeding, right? Like we all sort of, especially these days, um, in the U S there's not a lot of like social prescription for how to, who you're supposed to be, right? Like the, at least the culture that I grew up in, um, was just sort of like, here you go, go figure it out, right?

Starting point is 00:06:47 Go figure out what you're doing. And that means there's this thing that happens where people figure out their own angle on some particular thing. And they think that they're, it maybe looks like two people are doing the same thing. So if I do video game stuff and I go to a conference and here's a guy giving a speech about something, and here's another guy giving a speech about something. And one of them may be doing this in order to be a pundit, right? And think, but, but he doesn't realize that's what he's doing, right? Because he, he just thinks he's being smart about the topic and whatever, but his way of figuring out how to orient in the world just somehow has more of this, more of the pundit,

Starting point is 00:07:48 more of this more of the pundit in pundit ingredient and less of the actual fascination with the fundamental material ingredient and it can be hard to tell those things apart and sometimes it takes time but then you see the trajectory of what happens over time and it sort of it separates these things out right i don't know you know i've been following you for when i say following you i've known about you and i've been a fan of you for more than 10 years many more than 10 years all right i don't remember exactly what it was but you influenced me so i'm a filmmaker i always say i'm a filmmaker first more than i'm a podcaster or a or someone who dabbles in math and physics and so on i'm a filmmaker i'm more of a formal artist and what i mean by that is i i play with the form of art i'm interested in games that let's say they only

Starting point is 00:08:39 consist of endings or sure yeah braid was a great example. Braid, I love the ending, particularly the last part of Braid where, not to spoil it, spoiler alert, where you reverse the direction of time and you see that you thought that you were saving this person, but you were the villain from her perspective. My films, basically, I try to play with the formal aspect and I realized as I was performing some introspection that plenty of that is owed to you. That's always nice to hear. You know, I mean, what I do is hard. It takes a lot of work, right?

Starting point is 00:09:15 Somehow I ended up in this medium that probably takes more work than any other medium like per thing produced, at least the way that I do it. any other medium like per thing produced, at least the way that I do it. Um, so, uh, it's, it's really nice to hear that these things have an impact in one way or another, you know? Yeah. Do you have a video game philosophy? And if so, can you just give the overview of it for the audience? Um, I'm not sure that I think about it exactly that way. I mean, I think that I could give a good answer to that question if we go into it by more specific parts, you know, because what I have is something that I've put together over decades as a result of a few different things, right? One is like, how did I get into this?

Starting point is 00:10:07 It seems on the one hand, it seems really natural that I ended up where I am. But on the other hand, it seems really weird. And so like whatever my motivations were originally gave me a certain angle on things, right? Okay, how about this? You said in one of the interviews, I believe it's a recent one, a few months ago, that one of your goals in life

Starting point is 00:10:34 is to understand the universe. Maybe that's your dominant goal. So firstly, what does it mean to understand the universe? Yeah, you know, I'm not actually... yeah you know i'm not actually this is a difficult question right i mean so so yeah no i mean what i would say in response to that question is um that was very very definitely um a strong guiding motivator or maybe the only motivator when I was young, before I was actually officially in games. In the 80s when I had home computers and I was just doing hobbyist stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:21 But even then, I knew it was a hard question and I knew that any answer that I could predict would be extremely unsatisfactory, right? It wouldn't be a real answer. And so I knew I was setting myself up for a very, very, very hard thing. Now, like what's interesting is I sort of got into doing game stuff almost as a temporary reprieve from that as like, oh man, you know, this thing, it's too hard. Um, I'm in, there was a time in life when I felt like I am insufficient to approach this problem without being completely destroyed. Therefore, my job is actually to go away for a little bit and get stronger. And later, I'll know something better about how to approach this. When you say this, you mean the problem of understanding the universe?

Starting point is 00:12:30 And what do you mean that you'll be destroyed? And also, how old were you when you had that thought? So two questions. How old were you when you had that thought, and what do you mean by you'll be destroyed by your search? This was around sometime when I was in college, so I was probably like 20 years old or something like that. Um, 19 maybe. Um,

Starting point is 00:12:50 and I would say that, that part of my personality at this time was so, you know, I knew looking around, Hey, we, we have a world full of people who also kind of claim to want to understand the world, but also seem to be satisfied by obviously insufficient answers, right? And well, part of my personality was, no, we're not going to take insufficient answers, right? We're going to look at things and go all the way to the root of them. Like what happens if you play this out, if you play this belief out to the end, right? Or if you play this idea of how things are supposed to work out to the end. And I would say I was a little bit overzealous in that because I was a little too young to do that kind of thinking. But, um, one thing I got very good at is, which was probably largely true, One thing I got very good at is, which was probably largely true, was just playing an idea out and saying, OK, this thing, if you really look at it, already maps to this other thing, which I already decided is meaningless.

Starting point is 00:14:16 And so this is meaningless, too. And so you can look at everything and see that there's nothing there for you. and see that there's nothing there for you. If what you really want is some kind of deep truth that will somehow answer this question of understanding the universe, it is very easy to look at things and realize that they do not, that they are not representative of that truth or answering. Let's give some examples because right now it's extremely abstract. I don't, I mean, the problem is it's going to be hard for me to give you

Starting point is 00:14:56 accurate examples because this is 30 years ago. Right. And so I don't exactly remember the exact thought process that I process that I had. It's more, I remember these, I remember what it felt like to be there, right? And what it felt like was, you know, I can look at any concept and very rapidly understand that it has nothing for me. And so I'm just in this void where there's nothing for me anywhere. Right. Have you gotten over that? Not a hundred percent, but, um, like I said, so the,

Starting point is 00:15:38 the plan was just to, uh, just to take a break and get stronger and smarter and develop, somehow develop a view that would enable me to just be in a better position to ask some of these questions, right? Um, okay, so you're around 20, 21, 22. Something like that. You had aspirations of answering some of the largest questions that there are, and you realized you couldn't do so. Or the answers that were provided to you were, you didn't find admissible. It's not like I wanted to publicly answer something or like, you know, win the Nobel Prize for answering something. It was just a very deep interior drive. Right. I just wanted to

Starting point is 00:16:50 like saying, saying wanting to know is not even right because it wasn't about knowing it was about wanting, like I'm here in the world as a human being and like, what should I be doing? Or what, where should my attention be going? Or like, what is the, you know, what is the point of doing anything? Obviously, I want the things that I do to be in concordance with something, right? Or it's just, it's very difficult to verbalize because it's very deep desire that I had at that age. This sounds more about direction in life rather than, well, what is the origin of the universe? What are the fundamental laws of physics and so on? Am I correct or is that, are they related somehow? I mean, they're sort of the same thing, right?

Starting point is 00:17:42 For somebody who feels this way, because... All right, let's explore that. How are these similar? For the average person listening, I imagine they would think, okay, well, the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, or the direction of time, let's say the large mysteries that we have, those seem unrelated to what should I do with my life? So how are those two related? Well? What should you do with your life?

Starting point is 00:18:12 right um either So again, you know as I mentioned I was I was raised in this social Situation where it's like well, you figure out the answer to that yourself, right? And so what is my answer to that? Is it going to be a high quality answer or is it going to be a low quality answer? Am I just going to do whatever, right? There's some very obvious things even as a kid I knew I didn't want to do. So like, do I want to go put on a suit and work at a company every day and like make money and then

Starting point is 00:18:55 feel accomplished because I have a big title and a lot of money or whatever. And very clearly the answer to that was no, right. To that kind of thing. Right. And so it's like, well, what is, what is a high quality answer? What is a good answer? And, um, I just had this, this feeling that I needed to pursue whatever was actually true, regardless of how far away it is or how difficult that was. Right. And by actually true in this sense, I mean, well, I don't know. Right. That's like part of what makes it hard. well, I don't know, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:19:44 That's like part of what makes it hard. If you could nail it down very specifically, like, oh, it's purple and it's like, you know, three feet long and two feet high, then maybe that's not that hard of a problem, right? Yeah, it's almost, it's like a meta-truth problem. Some people say, I want to know the set of true statements, the set of answers. But then you also want to know, well, what does it mean to be true?

Starting point is 00:20:08 Does it mean true in an objective sense, so you can measure it, and then you can falsify it, repeat it? Yeah. I mean, here, I think we're getting to... There are places where language can actually start to confuse things, right? Because we use the same word to mean different things, and often those things have some semblance to each other, right? Like when you say, you know, what is the set of true statements or whatever? I'm like, okay, I could imagine wanting to know that, but that doesn't necessarily bear much relation to what I was feeling at this young age. It was more like, um, like if you imagine, imagine that you had to like, um, like you had to make one choice and like dedicate your life in some direction. And then you were going to go that way.

Starting point is 00:21:13 Like that choice is final and you're going to go that way. So it's a very important choice. It's not really the way life is usually, but just imagine that, right? right? What is the absolute most important thing that you could dedicate yourself to? That's what I was feeling, right? So that's, and to have that much to do with like the set of true statements where true statement is defined as like satisfies some kind of Boolean algebra, you know, when you substitute the things or whatever. It's just a very, it's different. Although I do think it's not completely separate. The reason we call this other thing truth is because there is a relation.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Right, right, right. It's just hard to pin down. What made you go into video games? You know, I was just very fascinated by them. very fascinated by them. It's weird because these things happened one step at a time. And again, they're obvious in retrospect. I think also technology has been developing a lot, right? And so from today, things look obvious that didn't look obvious to me at the time. So when I was even like seven years old or something, I really liked playing arcade games, you know, like from the late seventies, early eighties, that you would, those would be relatively common in those days for a while. You would see them

Starting point is 00:22:58 like in the corner store or whatever, they would have a couple arcade games. And I really liked playing those. And then, um, when I got into the sixth grade, so then I was about 10, they happened to have a computer class at the school where I was at, which I think was, um, I was probably a little bit lucky. Like, I don't know if every school had that at that time. And, um, but I, I mean, I guess I signed up for it. Um, but, but from the first day of that class, I was just really excited and really hyped. Right. Um, I just like love being in that class and doing the stuff. Um, and it was like, I had this memory of, um, or I have this memory of I went back like in fifth grade. It was it was like going from elementary school to middle school.

Starting point is 00:23:50 And at one point I went back to visit my elementary school and I talked to my math teacher who was sort of my favorite teacher there. And I was like, oh, man, you got to check it out. They have these computers and you can like do all this stuff. And to me, that was like the thing that was exciting about math, but more so. But from talking to the teacher, I remember even at that age, I was like reading him socially and I was like, wait, he's not as excited about this as I am. He doesn't like understand why this has the stuff of math, but better. He's just like, oh, you know, that's cool. So I realized even then that not everybody was into this.

Starting point is 00:24:26 But one of the first things I did in that class was make a very stupid video game. It was actually, it was almost like a slot machine or something where, you know, it was written in the basic programming language, which is what, these were Commodore VIC-20 computers from the 1980s. So you would turn them on, You could program them right away. You didn't need to like run things to program them, which was one of the things that made personal computers of that time very accessible. And, you know, I didn't have ideas about what to make, but I knew that I could make something simple.

Starting point is 00:25:04 And so it was a thing that like counted a number up from like one to a hundred and then started over and it would say you know stop the counter at like 37 it would pick a different number every time and you had to like try to hit it right so that's what i was doing when i was 10 years old um now how did video games this let's say aside when you were 20 21 you called it a reprieve how did video games, this, let's say, aside, when you were 20, 21, you called it a reprieve. How did it aid your understanding of the universe? So this is something that I've, this understanding of, this answer that I'm about to give is something that I built up in retrospect. So it's not exactly something that I knew at the time.

Starting point is 00:25:47 I built up in retrospect, so it's not exactly something that I knew at the time. The fascinating thing about games is, about video games specifically, right? And so I'm not actually that into other kinds of games. I'm not super into board games or card games or whatever, which other people are. The thing about a video game is, you know, it's running on a computer at a relatively interactive rate. And even if it's, whether it's, it could be running slow, like a turn-based game where you're marching around a board, or it could be running fast, like one of these action games where you run around all over the place, right? But either case, what is happening is there is a recurrence of a certain series of steps. And the steps are, we read the input from whoever's playing, right? Or across the network or whatever, right? We do some simulation, which is we have some state

Starting point is 00:26:41 of the objects in the world of our game. And based on the input plus whatever those objects we're doing, which is like the simplified laws of physics of that game, we go from the state of the world at time zero to the state of the world at time one, right? And then the third part is we output that to a screen and the speaker or something. And then we go back and do that over again, right? And so to make, I mean, so there are different kinds of games that more or less conform to what I'm about to say, but at least for certain kinds of games, to make them, you're essentially designing a smaller, simpler universe than the one that we currently inhabit, right?

Starting point is 00:27:32 And that lets you maybe understand some things in a certain way that other people don't have a lens on, right? So, you know, in math or physics or something, if you have a really hard problem that you don't understand, maybe you look at a simplified idealized version of the problem and you see something about it. Right. And so that's part of what's fascinating to me about games. There's actually a few part of what I've been doing over my career is find these different things that I think are interesting and like put them together into one thing. But that's one of them for sure. And so the thing is, if I want to write some fiction, for example, and I want to say there's a world and it works, there's like magic or something and the magic works a certain way, right? You can just

Starting point is 00:28:28 say that. And if you're rhetorically convincing, then people will like your fiction, right? But the thing that you said about how the things in that world work doesn't really have to hold together beyond some very cursory level of inspection. You just, you just have to, you know, especially these days, people don't think that much about what they see or read. In the older days, it used to be a little more. But you just have to pass that level of inspection and then it's like a good book or whatever. In games, that's not really true. In games, if you want to, if you want things to work a certain way, um, you have to actually make them work that way down to the core. And you have to

Starting point is 00:29:13 come up with some consistent system by which this kind of thing happens. And now, now there's categories of games where that's not true. So we have these like older, you know, point and click adventures or whatever, which are basically a bunch of if statements for the programmers out there. then it's actually a very fascinating pursuit to try to find a way to make certain kinds of things happen that doesn't that isn't self-contradictory or doesn't you know destroy right? And what you realize is that pursuit is not, it's not arbitrary in some sense, right? Like you, you don't get to just decide what happens in that simulation because most decisions that you would make, especially if you're inexperienced, would result in things that cannot actually be made because they don't make sense. They're not consistent, right? But if you come to it with an idea and then you explore how things actually work, and

Starting point is 00:30:38 then you use that to modify your idea and aim your idea in a slightly different direction and use that slightly different direction of your idea to go back and inform you about what to explore, about what the possibilities are, about where you could take this system. There's this nice back and forth that you can engage in that eventually takes you to places that are very interesting. Do you mind giving an example? Well, to go back to Braid, which was the first game that I released that was a big popular game that came out in about 2008, a lot of the decisions that I was making when I was designing that were like, how does time behave? This game is about going to different worlds and time is different in those worlds. But

Starting point is 00:31:38 okay, that's a very broad statement. What do you actually do when you sit down and make the game? statement. What do you actually do when you sit down and make the game? Well, and there's actually multiple layers of constraints. There's an artistic layer of constraints, like does this idea of how time should behave fit with what I'm trying to do aesthetically with the rest of the game. And then there's like, technically, we'll call it a technical problem, the systems design problem of how do you make a system? You have to keep stepping back from it because you would think the problem is, how do you make a system that does what I want? But like I said, that doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:32:33 So it's like, how do I correctly engage in it or successfully engage in a process where I start with an idea for a system and what I want and iterate back and forth on those things until I have a final what I want that mostly coincides with a final what am I able to build that then fits with the rest of this thing. And so to try to get more concrete about it, it's hard. It's hard to give because the problem is this permeates every, every instance of decision-making always like when you're experienced and you know what you're doing. So it's like every decision is made this way, but a lot of the decisions that I do from moment to moment are so small that they can't really be explained absent the context of all these other things.

Starting point is 00:33:23 moment are so small that they can't really be explained absent the context of all these other things. The examples that are coming to mind right away are actually examples more of something else that's more about design. When you said that you had this constraint, so you want to play with time and braid, but then you also wanted to make sense aesthetically, can you give me an example of what would and wouldn't make sense? Do you mean aesthetically for the last part? Okay. Well, part of the idea of the game is not just that it's fictionally about playing with time. This actually does kind of dovetail into the previous question that I feel

Starting point is 00:34:06 like I wish I knew how to answer better at this point. Great, great, great. It's supposed to be about actually how time is different. And it's supposed to be about understanding the interesting details that arise there. So you go from world to world in that game and time changes how it behaves in each world and that leads to puzzles. But so firstly, the puzzles that you solve in each world should have to do with the particular way that time behaves there. If I could do a puzzle on world four, but I also could have done that puzzle in world two, it doesn't really belong on world four because world four is about understanding this other thing, the way time behaves there. To give an example, again, to try to be more concrete, in the beginning of this game, you learn that you can just rewind,

Starting point is 00:35:05 like you would rewind a video. You can rewind your gameplay anytime you want, and that's unlimited. And then later, as you go through the different worlds, there are different elaborations on that. So in the next world, you can rewind, but then some things don't ever rewind. They always just go forward, right? And that gives you sort of two classes of things. In the next world, you can rewind, but also even when you're not rewinding, space and time are projected onto each other. So time passes as you walk this way and it goes backwards as you walk this way, right? And so forth. There's just variations that occur as you walk this way. Right. And so forth. Like there's, there's just variations that occur as you move through the game. Um, now, so I said puzzles, but even the word puzzle is

Starting point is 00:35:53 misleading because the point of it isn't really to be hard, right? The point of it is to, um, is to inspire an understanding of the things that this particular world in the game is about. If the way time behaves in World 4 is that it goes forward or backward as you walk right or left. Well, that basic rule leads to consequences. In the same way that if you do some math and you start with a particular equation and you can start factoring that and combining it with other things to see what the consequences are, starting with that idea, it leads to some consequences, right? Paired with the initial conditions of these are the kinds of objects in the game and whatever, right? And so those consequences are interesting. And the goal of a puzzle in this kind of a game is to illustrate a consequence in such a way that hopefully, when you've seen the consequence, it makes the puzzle understandable and solvable.

Starting point is 00:37:10 Whereas when you haven't seen the consequence, the puzzle is not understandable. So it's not like an arbitrary, you know, difficult to perform thing. It's like has an idea behind it, right? It serves as a pointer to point at a certain kind of idea. Like, oh, you know, when time goes backwards, you know, when you walk left, well, you thought you had stomped on this monster's head before. And in some other level, he would be gone and you could get past him. But now, because you have to walk left to go up here, he's in your way now. You can't do that. Right.

Starting point is 00:37:56 That sounds very silly, like of its own. Right. But the point of all of this, right? So human beings actually, um, find this kind of thing delightful. And I'm talking about it in a very sterile way, but human beings, um, there's this, well, it actually, it's a thing about human beings. Um, we like to come to understandings of things that we didn't understand before. And there, there are many reasons for that. Right. And so the art, at least the, the, the, one of the personal arts that I've gotten into is how do we, how do we refine this way of setting up ideas and curating them so that people have a rewarding experience having these realizations, right? So it's not just like, how do we make games with

Starting point is 00:38:59 tricky puzzles and then you feel smart when you solve them, which is like what I think is the, and then you feel smart when you solve them, which is like what I think is the, like through the game industry, generally there's some idea that that's what a puzzle game is. It's not really what I do. Yeah. So now why is that interesting or important?

Starting point is 00:39:18 Right. Aside from, well, I mean, if you can make a positive time for people that legitimately gives them things to think about, then that's interesting. But then there's a more tying back to my desire to understand the universe originally. What people do when they play this kind of a thing what people do when they play this kind of a thing is they're trying to understand a universe, but it's like a smaller, simpler universe than the real one. Right. And it's one, it's one that was made by human beings and is therefore, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:00 less grand in many dimensions, but, but because it is embedded in our actual universe, it can reflect things from the actual universe back at the player. And that is actually very powerful. And it can do this in a way that other media can't really do or have a hard time doing right. So in fiction, again, if you want to reflect back something about the universe, I mean, you can do that. It's a different kind of reflection. I almost don't know what more to

Starting point is 00:40:43 say about it. But in this type of thing where you have a system operating and evolving over time, right? Like in fiction, you can illustrate something that might or could happen, and you can talk about generally how things happen. Like patterns, like archetypal patterns? Well, just, I don't know, you know, like I just finished reading a novel where, you know, by the end there was a big war and it went badly for the people who, you know, played a part in bringing it about and stuff. Right. And, and so there's this big human theme about the way things play out over a long period of time. That's the kind of thing that you can talk about in fiction.

Starting point is 00:41:34 In a video game, you actually have things playing out over time actually, right? And so the way that you can reflect back aspects of our universe is by actually doing the thing that the universe does, as opposed to talking about it. And that's actually pretty powerful, right? And so to step back, maybe I'm skipping a step or two here, but what's very interesting to me about the ability to work in this art form is not just that you're giving people a hopefully positive interesting experience where they got to wrestle with tricks or puzzles that seemed impossible and then they and then they solve them and they got this great feeling that they solved them. Right. It's that a, um, you know, when, when people get all spiritual, there's certain kinds of things that they'll say.

Starting point is 00:42:39 Um, and these are things like, um, you know, like the, the universe is a process of change or, um, or, uh, play like even, um, you know, ideas about, about divine play of form and whatever. Right. Um, and the thing is when you show somebody a simplified universe that is doing that, and I have to emphasize it is doing that because it borrows it from the bigger universe that we're in. It can't do it by itself, or at least I don't. If I ever knew how to make that happen, that would be amazing.

Starting point is 00:43:33 But you give people a feeling for that thing, right? You let people experience a bit of divine play, of this delight that the universe has in changing one situation into a new situation. If you do that enough or if people do that enough, they can get a feel for this thing in a different way than they could from other places. And I think that's very interesting. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem. It's an extension problem. Henson is a family owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience.

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Starting point is 00:45:43 about the mechanism of the universe? So here's an example. In Braid, there was the ring. Now, I'm recalling 15 years or however long ago it was. So there was a ring. And what I got the sense of was that it was almost like it weighted you down in the same way that some people feel like marriage does that for them, or at least horrible marriages do that for them.

Starting point is 00:46:02 And time, there was a spatial temporal aspect where the closer you are to that ring the slower time was okay so that in a sense you could have done that with any object you could have done that with a box you could have done that with the player's character itself you could have done that with an, but instead you chose a ring because, well, I imagine it's because it ties in thematically. The theme thing plays a different role than gives the story coherence, right? Or whatever, right? And when we think about theme in those contexts, we think about fictional elements that cohere with each other, I guess, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:05 Okay. In games, when I do them, I feel like, okay, there's a certain kind of storytelling that people in film or people who write novels already do. They've got that covered. I don't really need to do that, right? What I should be thinking about is what I can do over here that their media don't really do, right?

Starting point is 00:47:33 Or can't do. Or can't do, or maybe even are just 30% less effective at doing, like whatever, right? And that's actually, it's a fascinating process of exploration to try to discover that because this is a relatively new medium and this stuff hasn't been mapped out really. Right. It's like in the early days of film, in the earliest days of film, um, it was more like you're recording a stage play and playing it back. So they didn't have this language of cinematography that they developed later

Starting point is 00:48:06 about when they realized that they could start cutting between scenes and people would follow it. And then that they could even move the cameras and whatever. That, that was a big, those were big steps in developing the language of film, which would be impoverished without having discovered those things. Right.

Starting point is 00:48:22 And so we haven't figured out all those things in games yet, but in part, I think because games are so complicated, it's going to take us quite a while to do all that. Um, so anyway, so, so to go back to this ring example that you brought up, um, I definitely had as part of the original picture of that specific game that there was this fictional like brace around it that tied it together but the the gameplay was the absolute core of it and the fiction like I wouldn't say it was less important to me, but it was, like, the fiction was something that I could do somewhere else if I just wanted to write fiction, right? and where that came from and what that is. Those are decisions that I think I think I do this the way a number of artists do

Starting point is 00:49:41 where these decisions are considered to be very important and they're also there's some kind of very subtle balance of many factors that tries to help the decision or help make that decision right in this particular case well okay there's a there's a kind of a right making of things that I don't think we have a very clear idea of in the West. I somehow absorbed it a little bit from some Eastern stuff, but I can't even tell you what. It must've been when I was growing up or something, right? But you want elements that harmonize with each other to build something that is more than the sum of its parts, right?

Starting point is 00:50:30 Okay, so going back to this time slowdown effect, which is in Braid in World 6. Well, the idea that I had was, you know, I'd originally started with, you know, physics concepts or something. So I was like, oh, well, maybe there's something like a black hole and there's this time effect as you get closer to the middle. Well, if you know any physics, like what's the most natural, simplest shape of that distortion, right? It's going to be spherical or in a 2D world, it's going to be

Starting point is 00:51:06 circular. It's going to be, you know, radial with the intensity increasing from the center. And so if I wanted to be like the physical world, I wanted it to act in that kind of a way. So if I, if I have the idea that there's this world with this time slowdown effect, that effect is going to be circular to be natural. So I already have this picture of something that's circular. All right. So what should be emanating this circular effect? Probably something that's also circular. Well, what is it that's circular, but also, you know, embedded in this fiction that is something about a relationship or desired relationship between two people, right?

Starting point is 00:51:53 Well, so a ring made sense and that's a sign of devotion to a cause, which is another element of the theme. And so there's a way of all these things multidimensionally coming together and making like, what's the right, what's the right choice. So that's really what it's about. It's, it's not really, um, oh, I think this would be cool to add to the story. So I'm going to add this one thing. It's like, it fits into this very complex webbing of, of stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:28 So in that example, you have the property of time slowing down. Then you're wondering, okay, well it's circular. And then what's circular that's related to this relationship. And then you also, so that's one element that you want to relate it to. Then you also have some other elements, which most of them are probably unconscious, but you have other elements, which most of them are probably unconscious, but you have other elements. Are you consciously trying to relate it to as many elements as you possibly can? And when you're doing this, like, are you thinking out loud by speaking to someone? Are you just writing? Are you going for a walk? And obviously, I imagine it varies.

Starting point is 00:53:02 Yeah, I mean, broadly speaking, what you said about maximizing the connections feels kind of right to me, but not entirely right. Because you can make arbitrary, meaningless connections, too. And those aren't necessarily good, right? They're too contrived? Yeah, or they don't serve any purpose, They're too contrived? Yeah, or they don't serve any purpose other than being connections. Or they're just about trying to show off as opposed to trying to communicate something coherent, right? But in general, because these things are hard to do, then it's usually a sign of success if you find a new connection that makes sense and fits into

Starting point is 00:53:56 the scheme of what you're trying to do, right? Those are the kinds of things that are very difficult to think about logically and linearly, right? Because your logical mind is kind of slow, right? place where it can then keep going and, and solve, solve the rest of this intricate problem of how do you make this thing? Um, and those leaps of intuition for me, I don't, I've, I've never controlled them, right? They just, they show up. Um, if I'm in a more receptive state, they show up um if i'm in a more receptive state they might show up more easily um definitely when dancing yeah um there's something about that because um you know it gives the mind a rest because i'm doing these other things um but also just preparing matters in a certain or not even deliberately preparing, but, you know, sometimes I do a lot of creative work and sometimes I do a lot of, um, just technical

Starting point is 00:55:14 problem solving work that is creative in its own way, but not the same way, I don't think. And when I'm doing a lot of creative work, that's the time when I have more of those, more of those, you know, just dawning of good ideas that fit in and help, right? And other times when I'm doing just a lot of technical work um i don't know that probably happens too to a degree but um not as much like i they don't seem to need to be as deep when i'm like trying to figure out a technical system you know in the witness there are plenty of what look like tetris pieces and then puzzles where you have to draw outlines of some of those pieces. How are those related thematically?

Starting point is 00:56:11 I know that you don't care. Well, theme is not the predominant factor in your mind. Well, the other thing is I'm never going to sit here and tell you really what a game is about. Because first, like I feel it's not really possible to say that, like that's something that I felt from a very young age. And it took me a while to realize most people don't feel that way. But it feels like actually somebody was asking me last night,

Starting point is 00:56:41 Hey, what, what do you think of this particular director's movie or whatever? And I'm like, it's offensive for me to say what I think of it in that way, because it's actually a very deep thing that he obviously cared about very much. And it's this subtle, you know, multi-dimensional expression. And I can't like what that thing is. I can't like say, and so to presume to say it is, um, uh, paying less respect than it deserves before I even get to the point where um where uh

Starting point is 00:57:27 where i do that well or not right and i'm not going to do the best job i'm unsure about the example that you're thinking about what is it with regard to blame or praise like evaluating the movies to being good no i mean it's more about just saying what they're what what are they about um why is that offensive or doing a disservice to the filmmaker or to whoever was the artist why can't you say well here's what i think it's about what do you think it's about and then you have a conversation and perhaps the artist intended for you to have a conversation why is being silent paying it more service than not this is a hard question because on the one hand it's very obvious to me and on the other hand i don't i haven't ever really tried to articulate this with people so i don't just i don't have spitball it's all right extemporized um you're among friends the audience loves yeah let me relate this back to what i try to do a little

Starting point is 00:58:32 bit because i can't i can't really speak for other people of course other artists making things right but when I make something, OK, there's this idea that I was taught in grade school about fiction. You know, like you're supposed to read the fiction and you do your book report. And what I was taught was that works of fiction have messages in them like morals or something. of fiction have messages in them like morals or something, and sometimes they're buried in there like secret messages that you have to interpret, right? And then you get it, and then you can write it in your book report. And these are overly simplistic, and the reason they are overly simplistic is they're overly simplistic for the work of many artists. Some artists, and this is actually very popular today, I would say, today a lot of politically motivated things are written, right? And if you want to write a work with a political message, that can be stated plainly, like, you know, you know, communism is good or something. And if you don't like communism, you're bad.

Starting point is 00:59:57 Then you can make some fiction that illustrates that. And then you can say that that's what that's about. But that's not the school of art that I'm in, and that's really not the school of art that a number of people are in, right? And so the school of art that I'm in is art is like good art that is worth me spending my time. Well, okay, I'm not the judge. Like thinking your own art is good is pompous, right? But obviously I'm trying to make it

Starting point is 01:00:26 good okay that's why you work hard on these things right don't worry about the disclaimers i'm trying to make it good yeah um it has to be about something that i don't completely have a grasp of. If I can sit here and say, the moral of the story is always look before you leap, and that's what this piece of art is about, or whatever, that's not interesting enough to me to spend years of my life grappling very tightly with something and trying to figure it out,

Starting point is 01:01:06 right? So when I make a game that's built around something, it's because I'm reaching a little bit. It's like, here's a direction that I find interesting and fascinating. And there's something that's a little bit beyond my grasp in this direction. And the function of art is to somehow help with that. There's the old parable of pointing at the moon. I'm sure you've heard this one. I'm going to butcher it because I don't really remember it, but it's i i'm gonna butcher it because i don't really remember it but um you know it's it's a metaphor for enlightenment right and the guru is pointing at the moon and the initiate is looking and seeing the the finger right and thinking he's talking about his finger right, um, what I'm speaking about now is, is in a, in a smaller, smaller sphere of understanding and grappling than that. Um, but, um,

Starting point is 01:02:35 like, like in some sense, if I'm going to engage in this act of, of communication of, of this multi-dimensional putting all this stuff together and giving it to you and say, here, look at this, right. Um, it's going to be about whatever is the most important thing that I know to make it and tell you like what The Witness is about, I'm picking that one because it's a bigger game than Braid by like a lot, right? It's got way more stuff in it. We spent longer on it. I can't even satisfyingly tell you what that's about because it's not really verbalizable to me. The most important parts of it are not verbalizable to me. So the best that I can do, and when I say so verbalizable,

Starting point is 01:03:32 that's linguistic communication, right? But then part of the reason I'm interested in video games is there's this other kind of communication that is about systems and stuff that I've mentioned. And that gives you another sort of piece of structure that you can use. And so maybe you can put together enough pieces of structure to go around the thing you can't quite handle or point at it or something like that. And so that's what these processes are like to me. So how, you know, how am I ever going to talk about what somebody else's thing is about?

Starting point is 01:04:23 How am I ever going to talk about what somebody else's thing is about? If it's, if it's something that was made in that light, right. In that, in that manner of, of action. You know, if I want to tell you what like Avengers infinity war is about, like that's not very hard, but I also don't care that much about that movie. Right. That's not very hard, but I also don't care that much about that movie. Right. So this is really, you know, so, so I like a couple of David Lynch's movies really a lot.

Starting point is 01:04:56 Right. And so I'm not going to try to get an interview with them actually. Oh yeah. That might be hard. But the point is, it would be extremely inappropriate and somewhat belittling. Not belittling, because belittling would mean that you successfully diminished something. disrespectful and not acknowledging of what is there in order to say, oh, the movie Mulholland Drive is about the following thing and write a paragraph. Like that just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. Sorry, I feel like I've gone on about this for a long time.

Starting point is 01:05:39 No, that's fine. You actually remind me, I was listening to a conversation with you speaking about art and I have similar feelings with you speaking about art, and I have similar feelings with regard to modern art. I'm not a fan of modern art. I'm really not either. At least for me, the reason, it's somewhat like Carl Jung's reasons, although I don't know if he comments at all on modern art, but he would make a delineation that art that you described

Starting point is 01:06:07 initially is propaganda art so it's art following one's own construction and then the other type of art it's the exploration of the unknown yes and when i see modern art it's people making a statement and i don't think art should be about, you shouldn't, as the artist, you shouldn't know what it's about while you're creating it. You could post, post hoc, come up with what it's about, but you shouldn't while you're creating it say,

Starting point is 01:06:34 this is going to be about so-and-so because at least from one perspective, true art is perhaps stretching and finding out where your worldview is incomplete or wrong, or past this domain that you, or past your existing knowledge set. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you haven't, if the process of making the art hasn't developed you as a person in some way, maybe it wasn't that good. So modern art, I don't have much interest in, or contemporary art, I should say. Because modern art means a school of art that was a certain thing.

Starting point is 01:07:27 Like art museums turned into like fashion galleries at some point and they sort of became. So there's this element that has been in art for all of history, which is here's an idea that was encapsulated in this thing. And it was an idea that nobody had really done before or had executed on it quite this way. And so, you know, therefore, like somehow those ideas became fetishized and to the exclusion of all else. And it's, it's very easy to like make a canvas or some juxtaposition of objects that has some idea in it. Maybe the idea is not very good, but that seems to be all that people care about in contemporary art now. And there are just things like skill matters, and I think that's been lost.

Starting point is 01:08:21 If you look at these Renaissance paintings of like people who obviously devoted a great deal of time and energy to be able to paint beautiful things, right? And then when you execute a work using the skill that is a result of all that time and energy, it's devotional in a certain way. It's like it adds to the magnitude of the expression. You know, it's like, you've got skin in the game now, right? Why do you think it is that now skill doesn't seem to matter as much? Well, again, I think because it's fashion, right? They just want new stuff to put. It's a social scene, right? Like most people don't really go to a contemporary art gallery more than once or twice out of their own interest, right? Because what's in there is not really

Starting point is 01:09:20 relevant to most people. But if you want either to be in the scene of people who are really into contemporary art, that's one function. Or if you want to signal to other people that like I'm sophisticated, therefore I go to this art gallery. That's another function of it. But I think it's actually, I don't know. It's not, it's not completely a write-off. Like you can go into someplace like that and find a couple things that are interesting, but I have not been able to find interest in most of it. makes me want to cry and drop to my knees at how first of all gorgeous it is how much mastery there is in almost every square inch and then if i look at a piece of modern art it's as if the amount of skill it's like like i was saying it's more about the commentary than it is about the piece yeah and none of it makes me want to weep let's say or think man that it sometimes that's creative and i like that because like i mentioned from you i like playing

Starting point is 01:10:33 with the form so i do like let's say something simple like a painting is meant to be seen at an angle so it's askew but it makes sense because it's so like if you look okay you get the idea yeah so i like that but it rarely evokes something in me yeah i feel like we are we are in times that are a little bit dark when it comes to art where like the current educational institutions, right. Have all kinds of reasons about why our current, you know, if you, like, I know, I know some people who I could get into an argument with these things about

Starting point is 01:11:16 where, you know, they have all sorts of reasons why our current way of doing art is the most enlightened, right? Because if you go back in history, like this artist did this to show this, and that artist did that to show that, and all of these things have an element of truth in them, right? But there's this thing that human beings do where they overcompensate and they take things way too far. And I think that's what we've done and we haven't properly seen all the things that we've given up, including really the things that make art most beautiful.

Starting point is 01:12:02 They've been abandoned and decided that they're arbitrary right um so what would be a better question to ask you instead of what did you think let's say you were speaking with this person last night about a movie instead of this person saying what do you think about this movie or what do you think the artist meant what would be a better question i'm not very good how do you feel that question. How do you feel about this movie? I don't like talking about stuff like that after seeing it at all. I would rather just spend time with people and talk about something else. Well, also because...

Starting point is 01:12:38 So if you're talking about a movie, for example, maybe you go out to the movie and then you go to dinner or something afterward and I haven't had time to sit with the movie yet. I haven't really absorbed it yet. If it's good, I'm going to be, it's going to be occurring back to me for several days afterward. And what I would tell you a month from now about this movie is different from what I would tell you now. And maybe it's just my personality. I mean, I'm not saying that it's objectively wrong to talk to your friend about the movie, but, um, um, it, again, it feels a little bit like I, the word that came to mind is profane. I don't think that's

Starting point is 01:13:27 quite the right word, but you know, I don't mean that in like the modern sense of like the expletives. I mean it in like the monks. Something blasphemous about it. A little bit, or not, not even quite blasphemous, but just, just spoiling something a little bit sacred by just messing it up. Like besmirching it. Yes. Debauchery. That's how I feel about it, and that's just my personal thing, and so I just don't like it at all.

Starting point is 01:13:58 Do you like hearing about what other people think, or do you want to sit alone with your thoughts? Well, do you mean about? About movies or video games or any piece of art that you experience um not really it depends okay this is um let me tell you the reason i'm asking well for one i want to know for myself is it necessarily good that i like to talk about movies and video games with other people or read about other people's commentaries such as video game reviews? So one is a personal question.

Starting point is 01:14:31 And then the second is, I'm curious about how you view other people talking about your games. Do you not like the way they talk about them? Do you think they shouldn't and so on? So that's my hidden motivation. Yeah, I mean, those are two different things, right? Let's talk about the general video game discourse one first. And I did used to, back in the nineties, when I first got into games, I used to read game reviews a lot and stuff like that, but I wasn't really approaching them with an eye to them being a very serious art form in the way that I am now.

Starting point is 01:15:15 That's like something that happened probably in the early 2000s, like 2002, 2004. probably in the early 2000s, like 2002, 2004. And in some way, it was that attitude from when I was a little younger, coming back and finding a home, I would say, in my way of doing video game stuff. It was like, oh, I see what there is about this pursuit that can be taken seriously and that if I work very hard, I can do a good job with. So at that point, I became more serious. But prior to that point, I was just learning about games more. And I was absorbed in this popular discourse and so forth, right? But at some point, I knew enough about them and had thought hard enough about them and had developed my own angle on them enough that I don't find the popular discourse very satisfying or interesting at all at this point. And I think there's a lot,

Starting point is 01:16:26 one of those is maybe just being older, right? Like after you've had so many decades of talking about something, well, somebody else who's many decades earlier in that process of talking about the things just is that much earlier in maybe the same process, right? And so is there that much reason for me to be in that conversation? Not really, right? But secondly, like I have, you know, this way of talking about games and using them as ways of reflecting the universe in particular ways is not a very popular way to view video games.

Starting point is 01:17:10 Very few people in the world see them that way. And the ones who do might well describe what they do in very different terms than I describe to you and think about them in very different terms, right? So it's kind of lonely territory. And when you live in lonely territory, you just see what other think people are talking about. And it's like, well,

Starting point is 01:17:33 that doesn't have much to do with me. That's not like, you know, the people who make a game like, you know, call of duty, whatever the new one is that came out, right? Like that's a video game and it does even have some of the properties that I, what I was talking

Starting point is 01:17:53 about, but the company that makes that is in a totally different business than I am. And the people who play that game are in to some degree, a different business than the people who play the kinds of games that I make, right? Not completely, right? Like people can go back and forth and play both, but they play them for different reasons. And the difference between those reasons is pretty far. And so these days, I do not really pay much attention to what people say about games, even though when I was much younger, I did. And that was important in learning, I think. Now, when it comes to my own stuff, I'm just not really interested at all. In fact, it's a little bit painful. And the reason it's a little bit painful is taking the example of The Witness. You know, I worked hard on that for six and a half years. Even someone who's smart

Starting point is 01:18:48 and a good game reviewer or something who comes along and plays the game seriously for two weeks and pretty much plays most of it. That's such a big game that very few people have played the whole thing. They have two weeks of experience with something that I have 330 weeks thinking about, right? So you just can't... can't... well, and, you know, lots of skin in the game and like blood and sweat and the person writing the review doesn't. This is just another game that they've played along with all the others. They have very little skin in the game and so it's this big asymmetry and it makes things very uncomfortable. Um, and for me, I don't, I don't really want to read it, you know, um, because also it doesn't really, it doesn't really help me in any way, you know, um, it doesn't like, I, I know what's in the witness and I know what's good and I know what's not good about it. Um, but I doubt,

Starting point is 01:20:14 I doubt that my assessment of what's not good about it is going to agree with what most people are going to write on the internet. And so therefore, if my goal is to progress, it. And so therefore, if my goal is to progress, I don't necessarily want to look that way at things that don't have much to do with where I'm going. Right. So with the witness, I read a small number of reviews like on the first day and I was like, yeah, I don't need to do this. This isn't good for me, first of all. And it doesn't help me. It doesn't help me see where to go for the next thing. Now, is it that it doesn't help you at all? Or is it that it's so painful to look at that it would hinder you and perhaps even mislead you because what are the priorities of the reviewer aren't yours? There's both. There's both, right? So, you know, there's all kinds of reviews. One kind of review

Starting point is 01:21:15 is a commercial product review. That's useless to me because I'm not making commercial products. I intentionally make my games less fun than they could be quote fun unquote. Right. Um, in order to support other aspects of them. And so if somebody says this game isn't as fun as I wish it was, I'm like, I know, you know, um, that's the choice I made when I decided, you know, this isn't Avengers infinity war. Right. Um, yeah, I get that. So that's one aspect of it. Now, the other aspect of it that you mentioned is pretty interesting. Like there is, like, if I work hard on something for six and a half years, and either people dislike it because it's not a commercial product, or they dislike it because it doesn't conform to their idea of what the art scene in games should be doing right now

Starting point is 01:22:06 Or they just dislike it because they had a bad time and it wasn't for them Which is totally fine right things that I make or not. I don't try to make things for everybody There is that aspect of like personal pain sometimes like when you work on something so hard and you care about it so much and somebody thinks it's terrible or you just, whatever, they say mean things about it. Um, even if I know intellectually that that person is wrong and has no standing to be saying these things, there's, you know, something about the human organism reacting that makes it hesitant to do more things that could cause criticism, right? And I don't want to be

Starting point is 01:22:58 encumbered by that flinching away from whatever, right? Because the next things that I do, I mean, I only have flawed human judgment about what I choose to do, but I'm trying hard to make them the best, most interesting, most important things that I know how to do. important things that I know how to do. And that job is already hard before I make it more hard by, you know, being hesitant because I felt burned because people didn't like something I did or whatever. Right. And this is especially weird in the internet age because, um, there's just so much more of this kind of communication and so much more amplification. And it's just a well understood phenomenon that the negative stuff stings more than the positive

Starting point is 01:23:53 stuff helps you. Right. Like I've heard lots of, lots of positive feedback from people who, of lots of positive feedback from people who, you know, these games that I've made that were very meaningful to them and very helpful to them and, um, or inspiring or gave them ideas about, about things, all sorts of positive things that you could name. And those alone, um, And those alone all certainly make it worth doing this stuff. But I still mostly remember the negative stuff, right? And that's just part of that is that that's my job too. Like when I work on something, going back to that conversation about Braid that we had before about trying to find the best forms for certain pieces of the expression to take in order for it to build into this rightly made larger thing. That's hard, and it involves actually exercising acute judgment on the developing work for years and on ideas that come up that maybe never make

Starting point is 01:25:10 it in or whatever, like, oh, that's a stupid idea because it doesn't do this and it doesn't do that, et cetera. Right. Um, and my, my personal critical voice is actually, uh, very direct and very uncompromising. Um, sorry, your personal critical voice toward yourself. Yeah. Like when I look at something I'm working on and like, what do I think of it? Right. And it's not, it's not mean it's not unnecessarily harsh. It's just like, look, here are the deficiencies of this thing. Here are the things I wish were better. And if you're going to make something good, you have to spend most of your time thinking about those things because fixing those things is what makes the thing better, right? Now, especially the longer you get into development of something complicated like this, there's all sorts of great things about it that we succeeded at. But if I just sit there and spend most of my time reflecting on all the great things about it, it's not really getting better because we're not working on

Starting point is 01:26:15 the things holding it back. Right. And so I think, you know, we're in it. you know, we're in it. Sometimes like judgment gets a bad rap, you know, like people think being judgmental is bad. And I, there are certain kinds of judgmental that are probably, you know, not good, like being overly judgmental about other people when you don't know anything about them, right? But judgment, actually, if you're trying to build something that is very complicated and very hard to make, then judgment is actually very important and very useful and actually gives you a positive outlet for that part of your mind. And then maybe it doesn't need negative or less productive outlets anymore, right? I hope. Let's get back to that witness puzzle question about how is it that those Tetris pieces relate to the larger aspects of the witness?

Starting point is 01:27:20 Oh, I forgot. We left that a while ago in the discussion. When you were putting that together in a similar way that you would weigh several factors with regard to the ring in Braid, what are you using to come up with, okay, let's come up with a puzzle that looks like so-and-so in Braid and witness specifically Tetris pieces. It was pretty different, right? The goals of the witness are pretty different from Braid. What I was trying to do there, I wanted a system of puzzles where you start out early in the game and you don't know what they mean at all, right? And then eventually you figure out what they mean without having any verbal instruction, right? That was important. And so there is communication that's happening through the game, but it's happening in this nonverbal way. And then I wanted there to be a way for these puzzles to, for the theme or the idea of each puzzle to interact with each other and create combinatoric surprise and delight of two different kinds. One, like, oh, that's interesting what happens when I see this kind of thing together with this kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:28:45 It makes me have to think about it in a way that I didn't have to yet. And then secondly, you can use the other types of puzzles to build surprises like, hey, you think you understand this one completely and how it all works, but actually when interacting with this other thing, certain things become important or salient that weren't before, that you didn't have to think about, and you realize that there's details to the way things worked that you didn't have to think about, and you realize that there's details to the way things worked that you didn't understand or that you assumed, but they're actually different from what you assumed, right? And so that's the broad canvas statement of what's going on there. Specifically with those, I was trying to do something where...

Starting point is 01:30:01 So the kind of puzzles you're talking about, they're all about relatively abstract concepts because they take place on these little idealized puzzle boards. You walk around this world that has trees and buildings in it and stuff, but then you walk up to a little puzzle board and you do it. And on that puzzle board, there's things like, well, there's little dots and it's not much of a spoiler, but you have to draw the line through the dots, right? Or there's different colors of things and, oh, these ones you have to separate from each

Starting point is 01:30:35 other, right? So there's, and the question was like, what are different relations of space that we can play with? relations of space that we can play with. Which, going back to this idea about reflecting the universe, it's like, okay, even this simple idealized notion of space like you have in these little puzzle grids, what are the kinds of things that we can do. What is suggested by this idea of space and what kind of interplay can we have in that domain? And so with this puzzle area that you're talking about, you know, I'd had the idea of separating things. So this one was sort of combining things, but in a different, there's a different thing. And the question was just how to combine things. And it was just easier

Starting point is 01:32:11 in the game broadly, you know, these panels, you can just have arbitrarily shaped things on them. But in that area, I kept it to grids because it's just easier to think about and deal with. And, um, because, well, so again, going back to math and physics, if you have two dimensions, right. Um, a grid is actually very natural in a certain way, right? Because you have, when something is two dimensional, that means there are exactly two directions where going in one of those directions means you're not going in the other direction at all, right? They're perpendicular to each other is what we call that in 2D or orthogonal in higher dimensions, right? And so like a regular grid is in some sense the simplest way to divide a two-dimensional space. I mean, certainly if it's a Euclidean space, right? So that was just that. It was about playing with this idea. And so the fact that they're shaped like irregular pieces was just a way to give more possibilities and more grit to that.

Starting point is 01:33:15 There is, of course, a little bit of a mental callback to earlier video games like Tetris, right? But that's like secondary or tertiary, right? Although there is one... Fairly blatant reference. No, there's one puzzle that I think of as having more to do with Tetris, but probably players don't really in reality. So maybe it's not worth talking about. But really that one was, had very little of a fictional element to it, right? And just much more of a

Starting point is 01:33:55 part of constructing this system of interacting ideas. Okay. Now, practically speaking, I may get into your creative process here but do you have a google doc with bullet points of all the different types of puzzle elements like let's say this one was shape delineation then another one with the apple tree is something like visual environmental clue and then another one may be audio discernment with the birds chirping. So then do you have... Spoilers, everybody. So then do you have... Massive spoilers are happening. So do you have a Google doc of a, or whatever doc of a bullet point of these are the types of puzzle elements.

Starting point is 01:34:34 Now, as I progress through the story, I would like to include more and more of these simultaneously. Or does that happen unconsciously? Or do you not even care if that happens? It's different depending on where you are building the thing, right? In the beginning, I'm just like, I want to find enough ideas that even are interesting at all, right? And then, like, putting things in a spreadsheet or something is not a very, um, I mean, it helps you list them and remember what they are, but the thing is in games, um, it's much

Starting point is 01:35:14 better to just build a very early version of the game. And so that's what I did. Like from the very, I would say week, probably week two or three of development of the six and a half year project I had some version of the game where you could walk around and it was really ugly not much to look at not much there but then if I made new puzzles I could just put them there I could program them first of all and then put them there by programming them you see how they actually behave and whether their ideas in there that you didn't think of

Starting point is 01:35:47 Right whereas if it's just written in a spreadsheet It's not doing anything so you can't see what it does right and so that was the development process was program new puzzles Put them in the world if I thought there was going to be an area Where to be an area where things might go, I would just sort of throw them on the map there and we would put walls around it or something and figure it out later. Actually, I think it's still up. We have a blog that we were doing that whole time and it shows, you can see screenshots of what the game looked like in this state when it was like very plain and ugly. I believe I was following it back then.

Starting point is 01:36:29 Okay. Yeah. So that was really the primary method of organization of the game, really. You know, probably the art team, when they were working on stuff, had probably some spreadsheets and stuff about who was going to work on what, when, but like that kind of thing. But in terms of the overall ideas of the game, it was just there in the game. And that's still true with what we work on now. Why was it being nonverbal so important to you? Is this something like in filmmaking, there's that is don't tell, but show?

Starting point is 01:37:02 Is it somehow more pure or less pure if you are direct it's probably related to the personality aspect that i was telling you about before where i don't like to talk about some things like um there are ways of like speech is very linearizing, right? Like it goes, whether it's spoken or written, it goes into a series of words that then you listen to and rebuild into something nonlinear in your head, right? And that has a certain bandwidth to it of what you, how much you can do. It actually could be quite high if you and the person you're talking to have shared assumptions about what things mean, then words call back to what those things mean and help you build an ally.

Starting point is 01:37:54 That's why speech works, right? But if you want to tell people about something they don't already know, the bandwidth is actually pretty low because you don't have things to refer back to that are big and rich informationally. So that's one thing. But secondly, I was just really interested in this idea of nonverbal communication and I wanted to see what it could do in the medium of games. Like, is this something that games can do that they have a talent for, right? Relative to other media. And I found that it seemed to be so, um, because in, in that game, you know, if somebody gets toward the end of the game and they're playing some puzzle that they're stuck on, it looks complicated. And you ask them, what are you trying to do? Tell me everything about what you're trying to do. If they start trying to explain like, well, you know, I'm trying to

Starting point is 01:38:49 draw this line to go through this thing and around this thing, but not around that thing, because with this thing over here, and if they try to explain to you everything that they're trying to do, it could take five minutes actually for the late game, right? It could take five minutes, actually, for the late game, right? None of that was ever communicated verbally, ever, right? And so that's very interesting. It's an interesting study of what could be done that way. Now, that said, then, also, one of the things that the game was primarily concerned with was this moment of epiphany that

Starting point is 01:39:31 I was talking about before, when you understand something that you didn't understand before, right? Like in a puzzle game, when you finally are able to solve the puzzle, hopefully it's not because you did a bunch of brute force things and then you finally accidentally Did a thing and it said it's solved. That's not a very good puzzle, right? A good puzzle is You didn't see something now you see it and Now it's very clear and Add something to your knowledge and you can use that To solve the puzzle and move on to the next thing, right?

Starting point is 01:40:09 So I felt like a game that's talking at you all the time was not very helpful. So part of what I was trying to do was, okay, at a very baseline, just give people a positive experience that has that kind of moment of epiphany in it, because that's interesting and fun and nice for people, right? One level above that, can we create these moments of epiphany from different angles on different topics all the time

Starting point is 01:40:39 to give people a sense of what all these topics are, either about space and light and shadow and sound or about abstract notions like, you know, number and group and all these things. Can we build an appreciation for that, right? And then maybe one level above that is, can we exercise people's feeling of epiphany in this simple world that shares a lot with our world even though it's a simpler version so this game has lights colors and shadows and sounds and our world has these things, at least in human experience. So if we can exercise the feeling of epiphany well and from enough different directions in the field of this game, can that then give people something that they can carry out a little bit, right?

Starting point is 01:41:45 That maybe in the real world, they have more of a taste of what this sudden understanding is like, and maybe that can be interesting to them in some way. And I felt like a game that was just talking to you all the time wasn't good for any of those layers, right? Especially, I don't know, like if somebody tells you how to do something, you didn't really figure anything out, right? So it's a weird thing too, because one of the decisions that I'm still not sure if it was right was how much talking

Starting point is 01:42:27 to have in the game at all, because there are all these recordings, um, from various people that are, the game is like laced with them, but they're kind of all hidden in corners and stuff. You probably have to be deliberately looking for them to find most of them. Um, once, you know, there's a few that are like placed out in the open just to give people the idea that these things are there. And maybe it would have been the right thing to not have any of those and have the game be completely silent.

Starting point is 01:42:54 But that didn't feel right to me either, even though it's more pure in a certain way. And the original idea of the game was to have a very explicit storyline in it with like a fiction and things that were happening, like a narrator and all this stuff. And I cut that because that didn't feel good either. So it's somewhere in this middle ground, but, so it's weird because there is talking in the game,

Starting point is 01:43:23 but all the talking in the game is not at all about the puzzles ever. Right. And you have to kind of ask the game for the talking because otherwise you won't get it. Why was Rupert Spira included? That's a very long. I don't know if I can explain that very well from the point in the conversation where we are. I will say, so he's in there as one of the videos that you can find. Those videos are supposed to be things.

Starting point is 01:44:09 So as I said earlier, when I make a game like this, it's about things that I do not have a complete grasp on. And I wanted to return to this theme of like trying to understand the world to understand the universe and so this is i mean i really don't like saying anything about what games are about but one element of this game right those videos videos illustrate the process of understanding what the universe is about from the point of view of different people who have very, very different views of what the universe is about. Because I felt, okay, if I want to talk about the pursuit of understanding, right? Then it's kind of a mistake.

Starting point is 01:45:23 I'm not sure how to say this in the most effective way. It's a mistake to only have one perspective and not follow many or not be sort of like the temptation is the temptation is to present yourself to the audience as Oh, I have, I have answers about the universe and this is how you will discover them, right? And that would not have been truthful for me to do that. So I made these things, this part of the game, about this desire that we spoke of at the beginning to understand the universe in the best way possible.

Starting point is 01:46:12 And so, you know, these videos come from different directions of understanding things. So one very different video, the first video that players are likely to find is from James Burke, the English documentarian, and it's a very pro-science, anti-religion way of making sense of the world. And it's a very eloquent, like well presented thing, right? Um, it's a viewpoint that does not really satisfy me, right? I would not, if that was the way that I thought about the world, I would feel like something was missing from my viewpoint. But very strong in some other ways. And a very, like in composition with these other things, because that's what I'm always trying to do is compose, right? In composition with these other things together,

Starting point is 01:47:28 right in composition with these other things together um they hopefully cover a reasonable gamut of different ways of thinking about the universe and what it means that that okay and then the other thing to say that all were very personally important to me at some time or another. So the reason it's that particular video from Rupert is because I was there in that room. That was my first exposure to him. So I was there at that event and it was very meaningful to me. Like I really, sometimes you hear people say something

Starting point is 01:48:06 and you're like, oh, I, yeah, you know. So that's what that was. And so all of these videos have a very personal element to them as well that help pick them out from all the things, because there are many things that could have been in the game to make some kind of philosophical point, but these ones all really mattered to me personally in one way or another. One of the reasons I'm so interested,

Starting point is 01:48:39 I was and am interested in speaking with you, is because we have so many overlapping interests. So one is this multifaceted, this kaleidoscopic approach to understanding truth by hearing other people's perspectives, especially those you disagree with, or that are so far out from what you accept. And then I also heard you talk about Stephen Wolfram, which we're going to talk about. And so I'm interested in Stephen Wolfram and his physics project. I would like to get to how you come up with your own thoughts. It sounds like a trivial matter for most people. How is it that you have an original thought? But I think that having your own point of view is exceedingly difficult. One of the reasons I was attracted to you initially was hearing you excoriate the general trends in games. For example, even though I'm a huge fan of Metal

Starting point is 01:49:30 Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto and so on, you were saying, well, here's what I don't like about so-and-so's story, supposedly story-driven games and whatever. You had your own point of view. So how is it that you come up with your own ideas? How do you have your own positions? and at that time, I didn't necessarily have, I hadn't come to many of these conclusions that you're referring to that I later talked about, but what I did want to do is I just, I had a desire to be very good at this, right? Like, I want to design the most interesting, best thing, right? I want to program the most interesting, best thing. And that just, that impulse serves as a motivator to just work hard on the things and keep thinking about them. And if you do that, it always has seemed to me that I end up eventually forming my own viewpoint that's informed by all the things that I learned. So it may just be an attribute of time and effort.

Starting point is 01:50:59 But I don't know how other people think, so I'm not sure that I could say anything useful there. Do you meditate? Not as much as I should, but yeah, I do. So what type of meditation is it? Mindfulness? Gratefulness? You know, I almost don't even really know what kinds of words that people use, because people use, like even the word mindfulness i don't know what that means and i know a number of different people who teach mindfulness and they teach different things so um or why don't you just describe it if you're comfortable doing so well okay i have training in a number of things um and they're all different, right? So I have training in Kung Fu and Tai Chi. I've done a fair bit of Tai Chi, although not,

Starting point is 01:51:51 I wouldn't say at expert level by any means. I have been to a number of Vipassana retreats, like the shorter ones, like 10 days silent retreat kind of things. And I found those to be very interesting and effective. And a nice... like Vipassana is, I personally find it a nice meditation to be able to do and sustain if I'm somewhere, because,

Starting point is 01:52:32 because there's an active component of it, then it's like, because you're doing something, then it's easier to not get distracted, I guess. That description may not make sense to people who haven't done it. But the most powerful one for me has been the kind of meditation that Rupert talks about and that some other people talk about, which may or may not be related to mindfulness, depending on who you're talking to. Right. Um, but definitely, uh, just at, at any time, you know, uh, if I just drop into a more direct mode of perceiving and being, it's a very relaxing thing. And, you know, at some point I just

Starting point is 01:53:30 found out how easy it is to do that. Um, and it's been, it's been a good thing for me. Um, but, but I, but I can't, so, so the other thing I will say is I cannot claim to be an example in all of these things because I spend a great deal of time programming, had very little time meditating in comparison. So I would not hold myself up in that regard. What does the meditation do for you? Why is it important? It evokes calmness, presence, graciousness, ideas.

Starting point is 01:54:09 What? I mean, I've always been taught by all the people teaching all of these kinds of meditations that they're not necessarily goal-oriented. What I will say is, and also any goal that's short term, I don't particularly value anyway. So like, Oh, if I meditate and it makes me feel nice for an hour afterward. Okay, cool. Like I like feeling nice, but is it really that important to me that I feel nice? Right. Is that in my top three priorities for life? Not really.

Starting point is 01:54:50 That's actually another thing that I realized that I differ from a lot of people on. For a lot of people, feeling nice is in the top priorities, and for me, it's not. So, you know. But what I will say is that there have been positive effects and it's just very hard to pin a particular effect to a particular practice or cause when you talk about things that you've been doing for a long time. you did mention on a podcast that there's this one question something along the lines of are you conscious that you're conscious something spirean like rupert spire like yes and that from that question in one second you've gotten some insights that have carried with you throughout

Starting point is 01:55:36 your entire life yeah there have definitely been a few um occasions where there are things like that where like very very briefly briefly, you know, I happen to be in the right state at the right time and just got over something or unlocked something, you know, that has been nice to understand or be over or be rid of to understand that i'm not bound by right do you mind sharing ones that's specific that you're comfortable with obviously um sure uh this one is not from that kind okay so there's there's another kind of meditation I know that probably is also some kind of mindfulness, right? It's a catch-all word. But it's a kind of inquiry where you look interiorly to see what's going on, right?

Starting point is 01:56:44 And it's hard to explain to people who haven't done this, what that's like, but you just look and you see what's happening. Um, and I had gone to a meditation retreat where, um, where, you know, I'd been to a number of them that were doing this practice, and I had flown back from that one, and on the plane back, I just felt like I'd understood something to a little bit of a further level than I had before, even though there was no concrete indicator of that. I was like, I don't, I don't know. Um, and then I just had good experiences from then on. Like, so the next day it was, I remember it was Saturday morning and I was living in this place

Starting point is 01:57:35 in San Francisco and it's, you know, six or seven blocks away from some places to eat. Uh, but the hill is very steep. So I would drive that six or seven blocks because from some places to eat. But the hill is very steep. So I would drive that six or seven blocks because to walk up that hill with a full stomach is like very bad, right? It's like a super steep San Francisco hill. Yeah. And then I was like, I had just come back from this meditation retreat and I was very grumpy.

Starting point is 01:58:02 I was like, Oh my God, it's Saturday. I'm not going to be able to park anywhere and like eat because it's going to be all these people out for an hour for brunch ahead of time. And like, why can't I even just get something to eat in my own neighborhood? What is wrong? It was like terrible. Right. Um, but I realized, so, you know, we have all these stories stacked up about ourselves and I realized, for example, um, oh, I, I have this idea that I get, you know, grumpy in the morning when I don't eat, which is something, you know, not totally uncommon. A number of people feel that way. Um, and I just had this idea that this was part of me and this was part of my, it was because I have a

Starting point is 01:58:45 high metabolism or something, even though I was probably getting kind of chubby at that point. And, but, but I noticed that I was feeling this way and I had had this training into inquiring into feelings. And so I was literally like halfway down this hill, driving down the hill in San Francisco. And I just looked for a second at this feeling of hunger that I knew I must've had. Right. And just in, in one second I saw, Oh, there's an actual feeling of, of hunger there, like a physical, it's so small. It's like a tiny, tiny pinpoint. And it's surrounded by all this amplification to make a big deal out of it. And all this amplification is made up. And if I actually just look at the actual feeling, it's no big deal. And I could put up with this feeling for a long time. Right.

Starting point is 01:59:38 And so right there, like it wasn't this big, you know, epic, I went to meditate for a month and I came out and it was just one second in one day, I realized that this whole grumpiness that I thought was just part of my personality was completely self constructed and fake, essentially, right? Like you could imagine how that happens. Maybe you're a baby and you're hungry and you realize when you make a big deal out of being hungry, people bring you stuff and that's good or something like, I don't know. That's just an idea about how it could be. Um, but, but in that one second, while I was driving down a hill, uh, I just changed that part of myself. And like anytime, like I never really have had the same kind of response just naturally. And anytime that

Starting point is 02:00:33 I start to, it's just like, no, I, I saw that it's not a big deal. It's not real. Like I see, you know, now that's a relatively mundane situation. Like being grumpy because you're hungry is a relatively mundane situation. But it's probably the most concrete one for me where it's like, oh, I saw this. I saw it happen. Right. At the same time, I think that when you're engaged in these techniques, there are lots of things that you don't see happen. Right. Um, at the same time, I think that when you're engaged in these techniques, there are lots of things that you don't see happen. And there may be much deeper than,

Starting point is 02:01:10 than that, or maybe much more numerous and subtler. I don't know about deeper, deeper is a weird word. Um, but so that's like, that's a benefit of meditation, right? I don't have this particular problem anymore that I hadn't even thought was necessarily, cause I thought it was a physiological process, right? We, we have these stories like, oh, there's chemicals in our body and our brain that make us feel a certain way. And like, okay, I'm sure there's something to that but i very clearly saw that most of this was made up right so um let's explore that for a little bit why do you say that it's made up because it sounds intuitively obvious to most let's say materialists um if you take a pill that has a certain amount of a neurochemical or can cause a different

Starting point is 02:02:01 neuromodulator in your brain to be ramped up or ramped down, then that has an effect on your qualia or your perception. Yeah. So why do you see that as not being as big of a deal as most people think? Like, okay. Okay. I'm not saying that you don't have biochemistry that affects you. right? What I am saying is that, I mean, I'm not a biologist and even most biologists have not gone and measured their own processes. I mean, nobody actually has a full view of cause and effect in the human body, right? And so we're guessing a lot of the time. And for me, as someone who's scientifically educated, but not biologically scientifically educated, right? I'm making extra levels of guesses beyond what a lot of people would. And it's like, oh, I've heard stories about,

Starting point is 02:02:53 you know, how things happen in the body. And then here's a way that I feel sometimes. And I made an explanation earlier in life about what must be happening. And therefore it's not really changeable. Like, okay, for my biochemistry, it must be that this happens and it's cause and effect. But then I got some insight into the fact that that wasn't, that explanation was not true. Right. Um, It doesn't mean that there aren't physical processes in the physical world. It just means that my particular explanation was naive of what was happening, right? So I don't know. Again, I don mean to make too much of out of that example because it's a very small thing, but it was just, it was very concrete and clear.

Starting point is 02:03:50 When you use the word story, that this is simply a story that one tells oneself. Are you using that in a similar way to this is a model that one has or are models and stories different? I think that varies based on the person. I think for somebody who's got some kind of scientific education, then there's a model attached to a story. But the story also, to be frank about it... It's pre-model? No, I just want to say it's more like the story serves as an excuse of some kind and then the model helps justify the excuse right um interesting like okay if i'm grumpy

Starting point is 02:04:38 uh it's not it's certainly not a personality aspect that i could change and be better at it's just how things are because of like chemicals right um that's an excuse actually have you heard ian mcgillchrist's master and its emissary um that i saw a portion of that uh that interview you did with him because it was one of the ones that I checked out prior to doing this. The reason is that... But I haven't, you know, I don't know the original work. Man, you should read his book.

Starting point is 02:05:15 There are a few books that I recommend. That's one of them. It's essentially, you can think of it as the elephant and then the monkey on top, and the elephant is choosing the direction, but the monkey justifies that direction post. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's very clear that human beings do this all the time, right? Like, we're in this time when we think very highly of being scientific, being rational, right? That the world is some objective thing, the rules of which can be understood, and then you can have an understanding

Starting point is 02:05:58 in detail of those rules and use that to formulate the plans that are the best or something, right? of those rules and use that to formulate the plans that are the best or something, right? Now, regardless of the truth of that, let's say you have 10 people in a room who all say they're doing that. Okay. Maybe three of the people are really trying to do it, but they're fallible as human beings. And so all these ego things also come in and help steer the conclusions, right? But then the other seven people aren't even trying. The other seven people are just pretending to care about being objective and going according to principle and really are just doing the thing that human beings

Starting point is 02:06:45 always do. Just whatever they think helps them right now. Right. And, and, oh, here's an excuse. Here's a way that people currently socially believe is justified. Like we have this picture where the people standing over there are the people who are smart and correct. So I'm going to go stand over there. Right. As opposed to being drawn to stand over there by a priori understanding and belief in this kind of a thing. Right. And so like that's as old as humanity.

Starting point is 02:07:20 Right. It's going on now. It's gone on now. It's, it's gone on forever. And, um, and people will say that, no, no, no, I am standing here because of an a priori dispassionate assessment. Yes. But, but you'll see over time and maybe that's related to what I was saying at the beginning about pundits versus not, um, you see eventually who those people are. is not, you see eventually who those people are. I don't know how much that matters, because as soon as you see how those people are, now you're in some new situation where there are different people who you don't know.

Starting point is 02:07:59 So maybe you just have to make good friends who you trust and go through life that way. So while we're speaking about models and rationality and science and using that to build up one's worldview, or as I say, Veltan Shawung, you said that you were reading a book called A New Kind of Science, which is Stephen Wolfram's. Yes. You said that you found it extremely interesting. I'm curious what aspects of it. extremely interesting i'm curious what aspects of it well because it's interesting because in that book i think he hinted at the kinds of things that he's doing very explicitly now right where he's trying to build a theory of the universe uh based on cellular cellular i can't the word word cellular, cellular automata. Yeah. Though it's hypergraphs now.

Starting point is 02:08:47 It's like a generalization. And, you know, that's a little bit related to the kind of thing that I think about, but, but in a different sphere, right? He's looking at, okay, here's this certain class of models of what are essentially simulations where they take in a state at time t and they output a state at time t plus one but if you're trying to have an elevated view t is not necessarily time because if you're building this model you're standing outside of the time that's interior to the model and you're just trying to understand it and see what

Starting point is 02:09:22 it does and maybe pick design parameters. Like you've got a large space within which you can navigate by tuning design parameters and you try to pick the ones that give you the most interesting and powerful thing, right? So I think that's very interesting. I don't know, like I'm not a physicist, right? So I do not actually know what his chances are of doing something with that, right? And furthermore, there is sort of the metaphysical question of if he succeeds to some arbitrary degree of specificity in reproducing known laws and or predicting new things. I mean, of course, predicting new things is always like the gold standard of like how you know you're into something. But there's always the question of,

Starting point is 02:10:21 is this just one of a large number of models that are isomorphic to each other? And because he likes cellular automata, he found the cellular automata one, which, which would be a big deal anyway. Right. But it doesn't really answer the question of like, are cellular automata fundamental or something, you know? Although, like, he probably has some angles in which he would argue that it does having to do with computational irreducibility and stuff like that. Okay, speaking of computational irreducibility, Wolfram thinks free will is tied to that. Computational irreducibility. Okay.

Starting point is 02:11:04 Wolfram thinks free will is tied to that. I'm curious. But the way that he defines free will, I don't think is the way that most people would think of the word free will being defined. More that you can't predict your own actions, so it has to do with predictivity. Either way, do you believe that people have free will? Or do you believe that you have free will? Let's say that. You're asking the hard questions today. What I think is that the idea of free will,

Starting point is 02:11:41 the question, do I have free will, idea of free will, the question, do I have free will, it takes as assumptions for the question to make sense. It requires a picture of reality that is too simple. And that by the time you develop a picture of reality that is sophisticated enough, that question kind of doesn't make sense anymore. I'm not claiming that I'm at that level of understanding of reality, but I am saying, yeah. Can you explain to me the simple background assumptions that go into a question like that? And then how with more articulated assumptions or more advanced assumptions that dissolves the question?

Starting point is 02:12:30 I mean, I feel like this is ground that has been covered at least okay. I mean, I don't know. I'm often very unsatisfied by discussions about these topics, but, um, the, the problem is to do, to do a convincing explanation on this requires going into a lot of subtopics that if people who haven't heard them before hear them first from me, I'm not going to give a particularly convincing version of them because it's not my shtick. I don't go around talking about free will. But there are, for example, things you can Google that'll give you good starting points. So for example, there's a thing called the second time around problem, right? Which is that it seems to be indistinguishable whether like this is the first time things were happening and we chose what could happen or whether it's a fully deterministic playback of that.

Starting point is 02:13:49 And so that's a simpler question that you could start with. Like, how would I even know the difference between those two things? Because in the first time around. So our our reasons for believing we have free will are the primary one is that we feel like it. Right. We feel like we have free will, the primary one is that we feel like it. We feel like we have free will. Maybe the first time we felt like we had free will because we had free will. But the second time, it's a reproduction of the first time.

Starting point is 02:14:20 So we have to feel the same way or it's not a good reproduction. But it's a deterministic reproduction. So it's not like we could have changed our mind right and so thinking about a simpler sub problem like that is much easier than thinking about the problem of the actual whole universe that we're in right now but by thinking about smaller problems like that you can broaden your horizons in a certain way. You can broaden the scope of things that you think about, right? So in that second time around problem kind of case, it's unclear whether you had free will or not, because which one of those, are you in the original or the replay changes the answer but then

Starting point is 02:15:06 it's exactly the same experience in both of them so uh is that one experience or two experiences do you even know right do they like map to the same thing or are they two separate right um another another um dang oh you know so for people who know a bit of quantum mechanics, right, you know, that there are, uh, the Everettians have become quite well represented currently, um, in terms of the way that people interpret what's happening and the way to interpret things from an Everettian standpoint is that just all things that can happen do happen, right? And so what does it mean to have free will in that case? It doesn't mean what people naively think determinism means, which is that only one thing happens and must happen.

Starting point is 02:15:57 It's like, no, actually a bunch of things happen, but then does it maybe, But then does it maybe like maybe the question of free will is orthogonal to that in some sense anyway, because it changes the weighting on how much of things happen or not. Like it's unclear. But so I think that rather than trying to answer this question directly of do we have free will, I think the best that people can do right now is like go to the gym and work out right and like pump some iron get buff and come back later and answer these questions um do you mean that metaphorically go to the gym yeah but you know it might help non-metaphorically as well um so what do you mean metaphorically by that? Do you mean go study philosophy, go live your life, go try and develop a skill? Well, I mean, if you're interested in the question of free will, then thinking about these sub-problems, I think can very quickly get you at least to a point where you realize why the question as originally posed is too simple to really make sense.

Starting point is 02:17:06 But that's then been replaced by all these possibilities of how things could be. Are those possibilities fictional? Are they real? That's sort of the material you would be contending with in that domain. But then there's maybe equivalent questions that are something like, do I have free will, but that are more answerable and maybe more specific, right? Okay, we'll get to some rapid fire questions. Okay. And then we have so many audience questions,

Starting point is 02:17:47 we probably won't get a chance to go through all of them. Oh no, that's a lot. And this is legal-sized paper. Bullet points. Okay, so one of the questions, so these next few are from me. I want to know if you've watched Super Bunnyhop's review of The Witness

Starting point is 02:18:04 or Joseph Anderson's review of The Witness or Joseph Anderson's review of The Witness. No. Do you watch Video Game Donkey? Sometimes. Man, I'm a huge fan of Video Game Donkey. He's very funny. Okay, what is your opinion on now this is an open-ended one, but

Starting point is 02:18:19 please answer succinctly, briefly. What's your opinion on VR? I think VR is very interesting, but not for the reason people think, especially VR developers, right? So people think that VR is about being more immersed in a game so that it feels real

Starting point is 02:18:43 and therefore can be more compelling or something. And nobody in the game industry seems to want to hear this, but like there is a little bit of truth to that, that immersion. I will get back to it in a minute about what's true about it, but it's mostly false because when you're watching a good movie, you're immersed. When you're reading a good book, you're immersed. When you're listening to music that you good movie, you're immersed. When you're reading a good book, you're immersed. When you're listening to music that you find beautiful, you're immersed. Like immersion doesn't require you to wear a bucket on your head, right? That's uncomfortable and heavy and all these things. Now, the thing that it does do that's immersive is you get a tighter feedback loop

Starting point is 02:19:27 between your proprioceptive sense, like where your head's moving and like what you see, which is absent when you're playing like a 3d game on a monitor, because the monitor doesn't move in response to your head. So it, it incorporates a little bit more of your body. And this is the more important part, I think. Just the tracking on both the headset and the controllers tends to be very good these days. Actually better on the controllers than the headset. And what that means is you have more bandwidth for communicating to the game, right? In ways that are natural, because you know how to move your hands. You know how communicating to the game, right? In ways that are natural,

Starting point is 02:20:06 because you know how to move your hands, you know how to move your head, right? And you can move your body to move your head around to change where you are. And those are relatively natural things compared to, you know, I'm using this mouse and keyboard or something, which is not something that came naturally to humans before we invented it, right? You can learn it in that way that we learned to drive and stuff, but it's one step more removed. And so the opportunity of VR is to use this added bandwidth

Starting point is 02:20:33 in order to create experiences that are better in some way. So if you think about, if I'm playing a 3D game with a mouse and keyboard, my mouse is like, let's call that two analog degrees of freedom. It's even not that much, but whatever. And then maybe the keyboard,

Starting point is 02:20:56 I have like five or six keys I'm going to hit. So it's like five or six bits plus two scalar numbers, right? It's more like VR's advantage isn't that it inputs something that's more immersive to you. It's more what you output that the game can then use. That's the one that is the most overlooked,

Starting point is 02:21:14 I think, yes. So, you know, just to quantify again, these are technically six DOF controllers because in 3D space, there's three degrees of translation and three of rotation. So you have like 18 scalars compared to two in your mouse. And it's not actually that much because humans don't really use them independently,

Starting point is 02:21:33 but it's still, it's like a lot more, right? And so until now, games mostly talk and don't listen very much. You know, like think about if you're playing a game at 4k at 24 bit color at 60 frames per second, that's like a lot of bits per second coming at you. The number of bits per second going in is like several orders of magnitude less than that. Right. Like way less. So, um, what can you do when you have more? We don't exactly know because I think designers dropped the ball a little bit, um, in this last wave of VR. I think this last wave of VR would have been like, people usually think,

Starting point is 02:22:18 oh, it's because the hardware technology isn't good enough. Um, I do think VR will get more successful as the hardware gets better, but I think designers dropped the ball and it would have been more successful if designers had understood the opportunity and taken advantage of it. You called it a wave, meaning that we're on the lower end now yeah it's pretty clear at this point that vr like okay so when you know when palmer lucky started oculus and then you know valve had also been working on vr at that time and then sony got into it and like everybody was releasing vr systems there was this possibility at that time that maybe this is like the future of all this stuff from now you're like it's just going to be this gets better and you know i think most of the people who bought vr systems during that time those are like in their closet right now or

Starting point is 02:23:17 something or they're not being used daily right that's true for me and And so, well, what causes people to get those things out of their closet? Or what's the next system that does better that won't go into the closet quite so fast, right? Are you planning on making a VR game and or do you have ideas for VR games? I have lots of ideas for VR games. Not super, super deep ones. They're just more like starting points because like I said, this process of making games is pretty hard and you have to get really into it. And we never really started on any of these ideas. So it's hard to say where they would have gone, but for sure, for sure. I see interesting places to start. For a studio of our size, we can't really make VR games right now because we can't afford to.

Starting point is 02:24:14 Because if nobody buys it, it's out of business, right? That might change in the future. But at this time, it's just not really something that we could do. Have you played The Stanley parable? Yeah. What do you think of it? I know you don't like to espouse. I mean, the things that I remember the most about the Stanley parable are just, you know,

Starting point is 02:24:36 the character of the narrator, right. And, you know, the way it's playing with breaking the fourth wall with regard to the narration and all that, like all things that, you know, like they're obvious. Right. But I think it was it was a really interesting and funny execution of that. All that was there. So Stanley Parable originally, if I remember correctly, was like a free small demo kind of a thing. And then the bigger game came substantially later. But I felt like a lot of this stuff was nailed actually in the original version. And then the bigger game just did more of it, I would say. What do you think of open AI as applied to video

Starting point is 02:25:12 games? I don't know. I'm not really that familiar with everything open AI is doing. I know they've done the GPT models of language processing, and then people have found weird ways of applying that to all sorts of things that are not the original application. I don't know what else they're working on. I do think that that general kind of deep learning neural network thing has a lot of applicability in games. Places that come to mind right away are like making animations more believable oh that's interesting stuff like that maybe uh making voice synthesis finally happen right because there's this thing where in a game you have voice you have voice actors reading pre-written stuff and if you're trying to do a world like Fallout

Starting point is 02:26:07 or something where a lot of different things could happen, you just have to pre-record a bunch of lines. But the actors can't really act the lines that well because it's this super non-linear space of like, they don't know what's happening, right? Also, honestly, the procedure by which video games record this kind of acting is not actually conducive to good acting. So the actors who are good have done a really good job of like working within that format to generate good results, right? I forgot where I was going to go from there. You were thinking of applications of open AI to video games? Yeah. I mean, so there's sort of a trade-off, right?

Starting point is 02:26:56 I think if you wanted to do a game like that by actually generating the text procedurally and then having a character speak it with like an AI generated voice. I think in the short term that's not as good of acting nearly as like if you have an actual actor do it. But then again, there's lots of video games with bad acting and people think that's fine. So maybe you can make a trade-off where the amount of stuff you could do in the game is so much higher or the amount of possibility space is so much bigger that it's fine that the acting isn't necessarily that good

Starting point is 02:27:29 and you consciously make that trade-off. What's your thoughts on the potential of Unreal Engine 5? Do you see it as completely game-changing? I mean, it's doing. I don't use off the shelf engines, right? I'm a do it yourself kind of guy. Part of what I value in having our own company is the ability to craft something technically that will do exactly what we want, right?

Starting point is 02:27:58 I think engines like that are useful for a lot of people, obviously. that are useful for a lot of people, obviously. With Unreal, I think that the stuff they showed off this year, if it was this year and not late last year, I've sort of lost my remembrance of when they announced the Nanite stuff and all that. I mean, I think that's just the latest in the kind of Unreal Engine playbook that they've been following since the beginning, really. So that's been successful for them, obviously, right?

Starting point is 02:28:37 Like they build things that look really good. People want to use those things in their games. And so they license the engine. And this is another step of that. It is another step of that in a time when it's harder to do. So that's really interesting. Like in the early days of games, in the very beginning, it was just people like mostly John Carmack, figuring out how to do stuff in 3D at all in real time, right? But then once we kind of had the basics of that,

Starting point is 02:29:08 there was a great deal of like computer graphics research that had been done that was still mostly too slow for real time, but that we could figure out how to incorporate elements of and go forward, right? And so we kind of had a roadmap for a while, figure out how to incorporate elements of and go forward. We kind of had a roadmap for a while, like, oh, how do we do more complex reflectance models, but do that in real time on the hardware that we have? That's a very concrete problem.

Starting point is 02:29:37 Now it's like, well, we kind of caught up with everything that's obviously good. Something like a Pixar movie does do way more expensive rendering than we do, but it's unclear how much of that is really conducive to real time and whatever. And so there's not like a clear roadmap anymore, like there used to be. And so if this is your job is to advance the field, now you're kind of striking out in your own direction. And so that's what they've been doing here. And it looks like they've been doing that successfully. We'll see.

Starting point is 02:30:11 I think there's some downsides to that kind of model that they were advertising, just practical downsides in terms of how do you make a game. But that's also what I thought when they gave the demos for what became Gears of War. I was like, I don't know how I would ever deal with this. And then that became industry standard. So we'll see.

Starting point is 02:30:31 I was looking up some of the tech demos on Nanite. It seems like what's being done is revolutionary. And I don't know what it is, what that secret sauce is that allows them to render so many polygons. They've actually published some technical papers that explain it, right? I think they're so not worried about other engines catching up to them that they're just like, here's how we do it, mostly. Because in something like that, a lot of what makes it work is just that you got in there and really figured out

Starting point is 02:31:02 hundreds of little practical problems, right? And they probably didn't publish all those, because how would you? But yeah, I think there are some relatively in-depth explanations if you're interested. Now, do you see that as game-changing outside of the visual aspects, like it's visual eye candy? Do you see it as actually changing the mechanics of the game, or the way that either that it saves developers time so they could spend it elsewhere or they can use it to tell a story i don't see an obvious way yeah no design wise i don't see an obvious thing that that does um it's an obvious increase in the

Starting point is 02:31:35 visual fidelity that you could have in a scene right um that said like the way that they pitched it and at least one of the things that I saw was, hey, your artists don't have to deal with all these level of detail tools and whatever. They can just dump this source polygons that they're working with into the game and run with that. And on the one hand, that sounds very easy, right? On the other hand, that sounds like a giant pain in the ass because now the amount of data that I have in source control is like several orders of magnitude bigger.

Starting point is 02:32:09 And like that becomes its own. Like, I want to see what people do about that. Right. That said, well, and also it does seem a little bit impractical for most games. Just because it's a little too high end. But that's the history of all these things is they get built, they get announced, they're probably too slow to really use right now. But then next generation or a few years go by and things get faster. And then, you know, so that's the same playbook that's been going on for a long time. Now, that said, systems aren't getting as much faster over time as they used to.

Starting point is 02:32:51 But still, yeah, I don't know. Like, I would just like to see I'm interested to see what they do with it and where they go with it. All right, we're going to get to audience questions. Okay. This one comes from Forcefield. I want so bad to ask Jonathan Blow if he's familiar with the work of Henry Berkson. The theme of The Witness resonates so much with his philosophy, and all of what Jonathan said in this interview just underscores that.

Starting point is 02:33:12 I don't know why he says in this interview. Maybe I pulled this from someone's YouTube comment. So, okay. So my understanding of Henry Berkson, this is funny because it came up actually also in that other interview of yours that I was watching. My impression of him is that he was quite prolific and said a lot of things. Right. And I don't know very much. I don't have a comprehensive picture of what he did.

Starting point is 02:34:03 My impression of him from what I did see, which is maybe some long-form articles about that time, combined with, I think I have a book of his and tried to read a little bit of it, is that I'm really not favorable to the kind of things that he said and wrote. But that is a relatively ignorant statement. Because you don't know enough yet. Because I don't totally know. We're surrounded by so much information that we have to early on make judgments about what to look further into and what to ignore. And I put him in the to ignore pile. But that might be wrong.

Starting point is 02:34:20 Right, right. Okay, so this question comes from Steph. How do you achieve subconscious artistic expression in game making? So for example, Beethoven said that music just came to him, he channeled it more than anything. And David Lynch said that great ideas are like big fish in our subconscious that we have to catch. Yes, he wrote a book about that called Catching the Big Fish. It's very short and easy to read for people who are interested. I mean, I don't have anything to add. How is it that you allow your subconscious to create?

Starting point is 02:34:59 I mean, I don't like if I try too hard to make it happen, then I'm trying too hard and it's either not good or it doesn't really happen. Right. So I've definitely been the beneficiary of ideas popping up. Right. Um, I have a speech that I did about this topic that I could link to. I'll have to dig it up and email you afterward. Maybe you could put it in notes or something. Um, I, I've, I've been the beneficiary of this kind of thing sometimes, not as much as I would like.

Starting point is 02:35:35 It always makes the work that I do better when those come in. I don't, like if I could tell you how to do it, I could tell you how to do it I could tell me how to do it I do think that working hard on something is one of the ingredients you know you can't just be lazy and not care about something and get these kind of ideas you have to really care about it and want to know. Aside from that, I don't know, man. All right, well, we'll move on to the next one. Stephen Brent says,

Starting point is 02:36:14 it seems to me that you, Jonathan Blow, one of your goals as a game designer is to produce not just a physical response in the player, but to cultivate a state of mind or awareness. Do you think that video games are uniquely suited for this goal over other media, other forms of media or entertainment? They have their own thing that they can do. I mean, we covered this earlier, right? There are things about the medium that we haven't yet completely figured out that are ways of expressing things that are different from what other media do. And that doesn't just mean the way is different. It means that the thing you're actually expressing is different.

Starting point is 02:37:00 You know, like if you read a poem in a book that's different than listening to someone say a poem. It's very different, right? The meaning that you get from the thing is just different in each of those cases. And so games has its own version of that. And something later that comes after games will also have its own version of that, right? comes after games will also have its own version of that. Right. And so I don't think that there's anything that like, it's not like games are better at everything than anything else. I think games are worse at some things. I'm quite vocally have said that I think games are worse at storytelling

Starting point is 02:37:40 than the traditional storytelling media, uh, which gets some people very mad, but I think it's pretty obvious. And yeah. However, that doesn't, so it's, it's not like it's better than other things, but it is its own very useful direction at which to come at things, and most of which is to date underutilized, right? Maybe someday we'll start doing it in a bigger, more powerful way. We'll see. Pooja Soni says, do you think video games can be designed to cure mental illness? Such as being implemented as therapy?

Starting point is 02:38:31 As said, no. I don't know very much about actual mental illness, so I'm not about to prescribe any way of dealing with it. right? So I'm not about to prescribe any way of dealing with it. I think a game could be an ingredient in something, but I should certainly, for the foreseeable future, if I were to plan some regime of how to deal with this, I would say you want somebody to talk to who's very competent in dealing with mental illness and who has a lot of experience and who can make a very informed and very likely beneficial choices about how to deal with it. And then among the choices that that person picks, maybe there could be some game approaches

Starting point is 02:39:18 in there, right? It's not like, it's not like you could play a game that acts like a pill that you take that would cure mental illness. That's just not going to be a thing. Yeah, it seems clear that some video games for many people are therapeutic. They say, this game got me out of my depression. This game helped me see so-and-so from another perspective. Oh, yeah. That was the thing I want to say, though, too. Sure.

Starting point is 02:39:42 They definitely can be very beneficial before you get to the point of mental illness, right? If you were in danger of having some kind of a spiral downward or just even in making people's lives better. However, we don't really use them that way. And actually a lot of games, I think are net negative, maybe most games in that they seem fun, they seem interesting, they seem compelling, and maybe they are those things in the short term, but they cause you to make trade-offs that are bad in the long term, right? And that make you less happy in the long term, right? so if you just sit there playing like world of warcraft every day for 10 years was that really a good thing to do i have to advise people against things like that

Starting point is 02:40:31 it doesn't seem very good to me right it sounds similar to social media where initially could be connecting connecting you with your family and your friends, but then maybe in week one, even it becomes destructive and becomes habit forming. Yeah. I mean, there are many things in life like that, but I think once we unpacked computers and software, we like discovered a whole bunch of new ones, right? Social media is definitely one. Social media, probably more dangerous than video games, right? Video games get a bad rap, but I think social media is worse. But, but games think it should be regulated. I don't know, maybe.

Starting point is 02:41:24 Sorry, if I'm putting you on the spot it's just I'm curious no no no I just I don't know what I think with regard because broadly speaking I think we have way too much regulation right now in too many places they're unhelpful that doesn't mean there isn't regulation that could be made that would be helpful in specific places like so on net I think we need to delete a lot of laws. Um, but maybe that's a place where we could have some, I don't know. Um, yeah. All right. Think about that. James R wants to know what are his thoughts on mind uploading, digital consciousness, and such ideas? I think those ideas are, again, we're in this world where people get excited about ideas like that that haven't been fully thought out. So similar to the free will question being simplistic.

Starting point is 02:42:24 Yes, it's too simple. So let me at least say why so that people don't get mad. So uploading your brain into a computer, right? And then you're supposed to be a conscious dude who like walks around and does all sorts of cool stuff inside the computer, all right? Well, that implies that thinking is what makes you conscious because that's like the computer would be doing simple manipulation. We already know that's not

Starting point is 02:42:49 true and in fact anyone who's been done any successful meditation at all for even like a minute knows that thinking is not what makes you conscious. Thinking is a thing that you're conscious of, right? So you have to be talking about replicating something besides the thinking part. That's actually the vast majority of your experience. Okay. So that's part A. Part B. If that is suddenly conscious, why are other things that computers are already doing not conscious? They're pretty complicated, right? And if something a computer does can be conscious, why? What's a computation? Do you even know? I actually don't understand to this day what a computation is. I still am trying to understand that. And so there's this rhetorical magic doing

Starting point is 02:43:42 a lot of work where like, oh, if a computer is computing things and simulating you, then that simulation will be conscious. And it's like, if that's true, then it has some implications that you haven't thought about, that maybe other things are conscious that you don't think are conscious, or that maybe, you know, maybe material has aspects to it. If you have a materialist view, maybe material has aspects to it that you haven't considered, right? And so I don't want to try to make the full complete case here for that because I haven't prepared it or thought about it lately. But I will say one of the speeches that I gave a private version of a year ago that I want

Starting point is 02:44:26 to give a full version of is, you know, one version of this is the simulation argument has been pretty popular among people who talk about stuff. And that is like, oh, if you do the math, it's actually likely that we're living in a simulation right now that's in a computer, right? And so therefore, of course, you could simulate yourself in another computer because you already are in one. And I think that argument is basically meaningless, and I can make a pretty good case as to why it doesn't actually mean anything, but it probably takes an hour to make that case. Or more, or two hours. The next question comes from Tom. This is quite long, but most of it is plotted.

Starting point is 02:45:06 Thank you, Kurt, for arranging this interview. A very pleasant surprise, which has motivated me to comment for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Blow, for your willingness to be interviewed. Here are my two questions. What further insights into the tension between the analytical and rational versus intuitive slash supra-ra rational mindsets presented in the witness have you seen have you had since its initial release okay wait let me think about how to yeah please reread the sentence at least what further insights into the tension between

Starting point is 02:45:37 the analytical mind and the intuitive mind presented in the witness have you had since its initial release i i mean, I understand the question. I would say that I don't break it down that way for myself. I understand. So that is, that is a dichotomy that we toss around, like our society has tossed around and has found to be useful in thinking about things sometimes. It's not really the way I thought about what I was doing there necessarily. Or maybe it's a little bit related, but again, I wouldn't be satisfied by thinking about things in that way. Okay, then his second question is, have you heard of Jonathan Pajel's work concerning symbols understood as basic structures of reality um i've heard of it i'm not familiar with the actual work yeah he said i would like this is the end of it it's not a question i would like to kindly ask

Starting point is 02:46:37 you kurt to send my and many other people around here warmest regards to mr blow and well that's great it's always nice to hear you know like we work so hard on these things you know it's it's always good to hear when when they actually do something for someone. Chris Morolla, any puzzle games in the past 10 years that you loved? Well, so right around the time The Witness came out, a couple months later, a game came out called Stephen Sausage Roll, which sounds like a very silly name. It really is one of the best puzzle games ever made. And I recommend people play it. I don't wanna spoil anything.

Starting point is 02:47:32 I can't tell you why. You may bounce off it, it's pretty hard. But if you're interested in puzzle games, it's amazing. I got to play it actually before The the witness came out because i was playing a pre-release version and i i had this feeling like wow this might be better than the kind of stuff that i'm doing that's i mean that's a pretty amazing to see but also worrisome it's like oh man is this thing that i'm working on gonna actually be good um there's some other games that came out since since then um i mean i really like the zachtronics games which are kind of puzzly they're kind of a lot

Starting point is 02:48:17 about programming there's one particular game of his called opus magnum that i think is very approachable um so you know um you just said man i don't know if my game will be any good now when you say that what are you referring to as being good is it if people enjoy them is it if people like what is that's an overstatement because like the feeling was more it's an oversimplification because i knew it was good right um for my you know again for my metric of what's good um but um there there's a certain uh way that we went into at length before about going into a possibility space of a game of like what, how things work and discovering what can happen from that and, and finding the best things and giving them to the player. Right. And, um, I had done a bunch

Starting point is 02:49:20 of talks where I discussed that process, but I hadn't really seen much in the way of other games that did that. And Steven's Sausage Roll actually does that. And it's just an amazing game. Very happy that I got to play it. So it does that in a different way, I would say, than The Witness did. And so it was like, wow, somebody else is doing the same kind of a thing. Whereas I thought I was sort of the only person doing it, I guess, is the feeling, right? So it's a good feeling because you don't feel as alone anymore. Have you reached out to the developer? Oh, I mean, he sent me a pre-release copy. feeling because you don't feel as alone anymore have you reached out to the developer oh um i mean he sent me a pre-release copy so you know he's someone who i've never met in person but you know knew about and we'd corresponded and stuff champion chap asks i seem to remember john

Starting point is 02:50:18 saying he has effantasia could you ask him if he if well if he does and does it show in the game design? Yes, we'll define for the people out there. This is something, it's a relatively new concept, I think, from the past couple decades. But the idea is some people, when they close their eyes and you ask them to visualize something, they actually see a picture of some kind. I do not. I don't. It's not that I can't because I have in rare occasions seen quite vivid mental pictures. But from day to day, I simply don't have a picture of anything.

Starting point is 02:51:06 Does that show up in the design? I don't know. I mean, probably in some way, because it's part of who I am and things that I do are a product of who I am, but not in any direct, obvious way. Brian Mouch asks, ask why the industry has gone to shit

Starting point is 02:51:29 and why studios and publishers are comfortable releasing unfinished games full of bugs at full AAA prices. Because they can, because people can buy them. But also games have legitimately gotten harder and harder to make because they're so complicated and so expensive.

Starting point is 02:51:50 I, you know, with my programming language stuff, I'm working on one axis of that where I'm trying to make the technical part of game creation less insane and just more simple and robust and easy to deal with. That seems to be succeeding, but who knows? Having a programming language be adopted by the world is a whole thing, also the thing to say is that people have been saying some variation of that the entire time i've been in the games industry right it used to be triple a games are so unimaginative and uh you know don't don't do anything creative. That's actually still true, right?

Starting point is 02:52:50 It used to be, well, there was a time when it was that they were super buggy when we were first starting to do 3D because it was so hard, and then we kind of figured it out and they became less buggy for a while, but now they're more buggy again because they're more complicated. I'm not sure that games are uniquely bad in that respect now. It's just AAA doing

Starting point is 02:53:09 their thing as they have. James Joan asks, do you have any ideas on using Neuralink or any other brain software interfaces in the future? No. I mean, with that kind of thing, what you have in your mind right now is like what you imagine it might be like. You don't know what it's going to be like, right? And you can't design for something unless you know what it is. So we just have to see. Okay. Ein Ethne says, oh, exciting, as I'm a software engineer.

Starting point is 02:53:41 Question for him. Do you use machine learning and or AI development when working on game design and development? If so, how? Not on any current projects. There's one that we were doing for a little bit, but it turned out we were working on too many things at once. So that's on pause right now.

Starting point is 02:53:58 But we were using it to try and generate facial animation from vocal tracks. So a little bit the opposite of what I was talking about before, but like if you have a voice actor read some lines and it's well acted and all that stuff, now you want the character on the screen to like say the lines and have their face move in the right way. Historically, you might try to record that by having the actor like where all this stuff. And then, you know,

Starting point is 02:54:26 but, but there's a lot of drawbacks to that. So we were like, Hey, can we just generate the animation? And we had some beginning of that, but we hadn't gotten very far before we pushed pause, pause on the project. There's this great YouTube channel called two minute papers.

Starting point is 02:54:44 Do you subscribe to it no but i've seen a couple of them i think man like every week or so it makes me wonder man the implications of this for game development but it's also like you hear about there's a pill that works in rats such that they can eat as much food as they want and they don't get fat and then you then you wonder well man that'll be great once it comes to humans and then you just wait a long time yeah okay so this guy this guy named johannes norbaka from a programming language designer's perspective where jai has been described as data-oriented. What is his opinion on other data-oriented languages like Erlang, Elixir, Clojure? And in context to that, what languages, virtual machines, and paradigms inspired you while you were designing Jai? So how does it compare and contrast to other

Starting point is 02:55:38 data-oriented? All those languages mentioned seem very different to me. So, and, and I, some of them, I know more about how they work than others. So I find it hard to make a statement that crosses all of those. Um, I also would say, I wouldn't necessarily say data oriented is the motivator behind what I'm doing. I think it's compatible with a data oriented approach, but I wouldn't say that that's the lens from which it's being designed. In terms of inspirations, it's gonna be hard to say this in a way that's gonna be taken correctly, but like Lisp and Standard ML of New Jersey, which is like a later functional language that I used in the early nineties, um, are inspirations, but not in any obvious way because the way this language works is nothing like the way those work. But, um, like Lisp especially was a messy programming

Starting point is 02:56:39 language that was pretty bad in a lot of ways. Like there's a lot of Lisp evangelists that say like, Oh, it's great. It's actually pretty bad in a lot of ways, but it had some things about it that were really good and that never really were reproduced. At least certainly not in systems languages like C. And the failure to reproduce those things has led to a lot of practical problems today. So for example, in any interpreted language, so even like Python today or something, but going back to Lisp, you don't need to have a build process to know what the program is. It's just like whatever file you load first loads some other files, and then it starts running because it's an interpreted language. And so your program defines

Starting point is 02:57:23 itself in that way, right? Whereas in languages like C and all the languages that came down from C, that's not true. You like need an entire, at least one, probably multiple programming languages outside your original language to say what the program is, to define what all the files are and how they get put together. And that's a very severe deficiency actually, but nobody seems to take that deficiency seriously, but we all suffer from it all the time. So, um, it's things like that. It's like, okay, let's do a systems language, but let's take this good part about Lisp that we figured out in like fricking 1965. Right. And actually bring that to these languages. Um, yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:02 and actually bring that to these languages. Yeah. Laura Lebu wants to know what connects him, what connects you, John, to non-dualist teachers like Rupert Spira? What connects me? I mean, aren't we all connected, right? I mean, is, you know,

Starting point is 02:58:26 I ran into Rupert's teachings somewhere and I resonated with them quite well I don't know I don't know what more I can say you don't know why it resonated with you well I wouldn't even say that I just would say.

Starting point is 02:59:03 It's very hard to say things about this without feeling like I'm telling people what they should do or what they should resonate with or et cetera. Right. It's your own opinion. Yeah. I mean, I think all of us are drawn to things and, you know, repelled by other things. I wouldn't say, however, like sometimes the impulses that draw us to something are impulses to be respected and paid attention to. And sometimes those impulses are like, you know, shallower and maybe things that we would be better to do without. Right. And so so I don't think like it's a very contemporary statement to say, oh, well, people just like different things and it's all equally good. I don't think it's actually all equally good.

Starting point is 02:59:52 Um, and I think that this idea that it's all equally good is kind of part of why societally we're at a stagnant point right now. But all that said, it is a rather personal thing what makes sense to me and what resonates with me. And to try to project that onto other people, I don't think is my job. And so if I make a game that deals with material like this, it's a challenge to do that without attempting to throw it at you so that it tries to stick or something, right? That's not, you know, it's a different thing. It's like, oh.

Starting point is 03:00:39 You're not trying to indoctrinate anyone, nor do you want it to feel like that. Yeah, it's just like just like hey look at this thing and if you want to and maybe there's an opportunity for you to have some kind of feeling like i had in the process of encountering this material but maybe not right and if not that's cool but if so that's great right and so maybe we've gone far afield from the original question, but that's how I feel about it. You also mentioned that this insistence that there is no skill or competence or that we're all equal in some manner is one of the reasons why we're at a societal stagnation point. OK, so firstly, what's meant by this stagnation and then how is it drawn from this insistence on equality of skill or merit and so on?

Starting point is 03:01:30 Well, so to go back to that insistence, it comes from something that's true originally, and it's just over extrapolated, right? The thing that's true is that, you know, we're all born here and none of us is better than anybody else. And we're all equivalent to each other in some way right there. But for the grace of God, go I kind of realization, right? But that doesn't mean you can't make bad choices. And that doesn't mean that, in fact... I mean, okay. See, when you talk, start talking about spiritual stuff, um,

Starting point is 03:02:19 let me just, when you start talking about spiritual stuff, you almost can't say anything. Because even what I just said is not actually true. Of course you can't make bad choices. It's actually not possible to make bad choices. But if you go to the world of human beings just trying to do human being life stuff, then you can make bad choices. We somehow have a society where we kind of want to think that that's not true. If somebody ends up in an unfortunate place, it's because of the forces that were acting on them, right? They were underprivileged and had a bad, you know, fell into the undertow of society, whatever, right?

Starting point is 03:03:16 And all that is true to some degree. But at the same time, if we don't have this idea that people are also responsible for themselves, there's no energy to go to a good place that comes from anywhere. to a good place, there are some attitudes that are much more conducive to that than other attitudes. And I think we've got some attitudes that don't help. And, you know, personally, I see this at all levels of society. So like, if you look at people who are the experts in various things or who are the societally designated experts, like the people who have the degrees, the people who have the positions in government and whatever, I don't think most of those people are very good at what they do. There are occasional outliers, right? But for the most part, it's just we set up a system of how do you rise in the ranks of these various things. Those systems were founded originally in ways that were functional, you know, like, like originally having a PhD was a really big deal, right now it's well, and when we set up that system, it was a system to help with that kind of learning and discovery of new knowledge.

Starting point is 03:04:46 Now, getting a PhD is basically filling out a tax form, but it takes four or five years. Not for everybody. Some people do PhDs that are actually closer to the spirit of what the original thing was. But we've kind of slowly over time replaced the original thing with this other thing that is actually quite different, right. And produces different output. And, um, you know, there are consequences to that, I think. And that's all, I mean, we're getting into like personal rants at this point. But that's how I feel about it. Mr. K wants to know what the F is going on. What the F is Kojima working on?

Starting point is 03:05:43 I have no idea. I live in the US. Does he still live in Japan, or did he move? I don't think so. I think he's in America now. Okay. Well, that shows you how much I know about what's going on there. Xeno Evil says, I suppose the main question I have is why he thinks the success of Braid didn't lead to more copycat games. It's still pretty much one of a kind. Okay. Actually, there sort of were copycat games but in a different way and because the motivation was different right so as we discussed when doing braid part of the motivation was an exploration of the universe in like how do you make a little mini universe that has these fascinating aspects that in some way reflects

Starting point is 03:06:26 the big universe back at us in an interesting way, right? What the game is taken to be by a lot of people who play it, as well as many people who would want to copy it, is like, well, it's a fun platformer game and it's got some trippy time stuff, which is true, actually, and it's got some trippy time stuff, which is true actually, right? But the goal wasn't exactly to do trippy time stuff, you know? If you start to make a game and your goal is to do trippy time stuff, which you might do if you were going to make a copycat game, there's a lot easier ways to do it because it's actually pretty hard to program the system that has all these different time behaviors that all mesh in the same simulator. It's much easier to make a game where the fiction is about time travel, because anybody can write a story about

Starting point is 03:07:10 time travel, right? And then maybe we'll have some animated scenes that you can make the animation go backwards and it looks cool. Like there's a castle that's destroyed and you press rewind and it undestroys itself and that looks cool, right? There are definitely a number of games who have done stuff like that. And those things are just a lot easier. And there's no need to do the hard thing if you're just trying to make money or whatever would be your reason. Or even if you're just trying to do something that looks cool,

Starting point is 03:07:46 these games do the thing that looks cool, right? So, yeah, I'm not aware of any game that is a copycat of Braid in the deep sense. And I think it's just because there's easier things to do. Okay, this person, Wes Lord wants to know, I'd love to hear more about John's past struggles with burnout and motivation and his approach to getting work done, how his approach to getting work done has changed. I mean, I have a whole speech about that that I can link you to as well.

Starting point is 03:08:20 All right, please do. I will write it down. I will write it down. Just check the description. Well, you heard it, please do. I will write a chat description. You know, in terms of individual motivation, I'll say one other thing, which is, I mean, obviously this was a very short question and I don't know the questioner's background and all these things, but a lot of the time I get a lot of questions these days by like people who are asking how, how do you do a lot of work or how do you get started and all that? And

Starting point is 03:08:46 very often these questions are themselves a procrastination, right? It's like, obviously, I'm in the state where I can't do a lot of work right now. So I need somebody to give me the answer before I can. And actually, the secret is you sit down and decide to do it. That's all it is, right? Seinfeld is like that. That's his famous advice to comics, to comedians. Yeah. Comedians always want to know what's the secret.

Starting point is 03:09:18 He says, just work. Stop talking about it. Yeah. Because it's like, oh, someday i have permission to not actually do this work until someday somebody bestows upon me the magical you know i don't know baton from olympic baton passing right it's that's not how it is it's like, um, now it might be that people don't want to work that much on something. Maybe they don't actually think it's as important as they would like to think it is right. Like what you intellectually think should be important versus how you actually

Starting point is 03:09:59 respond to things is very different. And you might have a mismatch there. Maybe there's nothing that's important enough to you yet. Maybe you haven't discovered that, and so maybe you go to the gym and work out for a while, right? Yeah, that's probably enough on that topic. BC 1 and 0. Many people have said some similar sentiments. Please, beta access to Jai, I will pay $100 for access. We're working on rolling it out wider. It's been... So one of my goals in doing this language has been to solve problems that are

Starting point is 03:10:41 happening with the way things are currently done. And one of those problems is we have all this messy software that doesn't really work. And why do we have that? Well, people make stuff and they don't work that hard on it and then they give it out and then they let for people who are using it to run into problems and then report the problems. And like, well, meanwhile, you have all these people experiencing a lot of problems or slowness or unreliability, right? And if your piece of software is very successful, add up all the time that those people spent experiencing those problems. It's quite large, right? Imagine only 100 people used your thing and you cost them each an hour. that's a hundred hours, right? That's three

Starting point is 03:11:25 and a half weeks or no, two and a half weeks of full-time work. So if you could have fixed this problem in, let's say it would have taken you two very hard days of work to fix this problem that costs these people an hour. The net benefit to everybody is still a couple of weeks, right? The net benefit to everybody is still a couple weeks, right? Now, 100 users is a very unsuccessful piece of software, actually, right? Once you get to the tens of thousands or millions, these factors are just insane how big they are, right? And so what I'm trying to do is not create pollution of that kind, right? I'm trying to not have negative externalities.

Starting point is 03:12:06 So we're starting with a small group. We're refining the language. We're making it better. And we're slowly growing the number of people. Right now, there's about 100 people. And I do want to start looking at widening that soon in some way that lets people opt in. But I don't exactly, you know, we haven't totally figured it out yet. Michael Bezpalov says thoughts on Supergiant's success with Hades early access model. Do you think this model will be more prevalent in the industry? Seems like it minimizes risk and provides valuable feedback in early stages, but doesn't hurt the artistic vision. I mean, I think it's great that their game was so successful. I don't care that much about business models in the sense

Starting point is 03:12:52 that if I spend most of my time, like spending a lot of time thinking about business models is what most game companies do. And if I want to be different from that, I probably shouldn't do that. Right. Um, also my idea of an artistic process is probably very different from theirs. And I just don't really do feedback that much, honestly. Like I use feedback as, um, as a reality check. Right. So like we might go play test a game somewhere and we see does the game work um does does it uh like if there are things that we thought were going to be good did people get it get some kind of reasonable response from them you know but what we don't do is what

Starting point is 03:13:43 play testing typically is, which is have people answer some questions about what they like the most and put more of that in and what didn't they like, and then change those things or cut them out. I mean, even if a lot of people don't like something in one of my games, if it's the right thing for that game, it's in the game, you know a very different thing. But that's just a different way of development than what Supergiant does. That's fine. That's why you want a lot of different developers in the world is because they can do different things different ways and there's variety. So early access also, I think it's better for some kinds of games than others,

Starting point is 03:14:23 right? A game with a lot of replayability, like something like Hades, early access makes sense because when you play the better version later, you're like, oh, cool, right? I'm playing the better. If you do a puzzle, a single player puzzle game, like the last couple that we've done, if you play the bad version initially, you can't replay it later because you know how everything goes so you just played the bad version right and then so you're giving your most enthusiastic people the bad version of the game and it's just not good for that kind of a thing of a thing how does the side question just for me how does play testing work do you get your family and friends to do it is there a company that play

Starting point is 03:15:03 tests and you just put your game there how is it that people don't break the ndas because ndas are broken all the time but oh yeah i rarely hear but i'm i don't follow game rumors but i rarely hear about what's happening grand theft auto 6 for example or some other major releases how does that work we don't play test that much like way less than most development studios we We will playtest this next game, probably more than previous games. But that's because it's so big, and we just need to do that to detect problems.

Starting point is 03:15:36 The way that we have playtested in the past was sort of in the beginning, you just have a small number of people that you know, like friends who are maybe other game developers or something, play it just because you just want to see how it works just in the beginning, right? It's not refined. It doesn't have all the polish. Like it probably doesn't even have good art, visual art for most of it. So you don't even expect, like even if your design is correct and all that, and even if the parameters are all tuned, you wouldn't expect the same final response that you would get from the finished game

Starting point is 03:16:10 because it doesn't look good. It doesn't feel good. All these things, right? So you're looking for a different thing early on. Later, it's more about testing the final thing to make sure if it's polished and make sure weird things don't happen when people go into some corner that you never Walked into that way and whatever now for that kind of thing. They're also like QA right quality assurance houses, which is kind of like play testing But it's different like play testing is like hey you play it kind of the way a player would It's different. Like playtesting is like, hey, you play it kind of the way a player would. QA is like, it's their job to just try and break the game all day for weeks or months, right? And that's a very useful service, but it's very different from playtesting. But we do engage

Starting point is 03:16:55 that in some way on every game as well. Ivan wants to know, these are the last three questions. Ivan wants to know if political questions are allowed, what are his thoughts on the state of free speech in the world now? Thanks. I'm trying to get away from political questions. There are definitely political issues that could rile me up. And I do think, I will say very briefly that I do think the loss of free speech is kind of a mistake, right? But I'm also finding that in the days that we are living in right now, having political opinions is very easy. Everybody has one. Being loud about them now is very easy now that we have all this social media. So like, I'm not sure that I'm adding very much by having opinions.

Starting point is 03:17:45 I will say there is some value to being a little contrarian haven. Like if you believe something that's different than what's being broadcast from mainstream news media or something, then you can serve as a little pocket of like, hey, there's at least some people who don't believe this. And maybe people can feel less crazy if they're hanging out. But the thing is, again, like the political rhetoric is almost completely disingenuous, because people will pretend that they're standing by big principles when they say all these things. But then they're not really right. They just want whatever the

Starting point is 03:18:25 ends are that, you know, and, and so arguing about principles almost is beside the point, right. Because most people are faking, right. Like free speech was made to be this big principle in the sixties and seventies, even in the eighties. right? When I was growing up. But like, for some reason, now, all the people in some particular political area that used to be very in favor of free speech is now very anti-free speech, when a lot of the other underlying values supposedly didn't change. And it's like, oh, wait, that was never really a principle. That was just a thing that was being said. Well, for some people, it was a principle. Okay. But for other people, it was just a thing that was being said, an appeal to principles in order to try to achieve some ends

Starting point is 03:19:19 that they desired. Right. And so I think that's the majority of what's going on. Um, I don't want to participate in that. I think there's just more important things to think about. On the other hand, if we destroy our entire society through fighting over these things, then maybe that's bad too. Right. Um, one thing that I've definitely learned from some spiritually helpful people is that you do give energy to something in ways that you don't intend. And I don't mean energy in a new wave thing. I just mean like, look, if you, if you disagree with someone about something, right? If you argue with them about it, first of all, they're going to argue back and solidify their stance, right?

Starting point is 03:20:13 So you're actually, whereas they might have just said no big deal and changed their mind two weeks later. So you're causing the thing that you don't want to cause, right? But secondly, you are becoming the thing that you thought was not good by engaging in these arguments and so forth and spending time and energy on those that are better served in other directions, whatever you think those directions should be. Now, I will say I have spent occasional times now and again arguing with people on social media about these things, mostly before it became apparent how widespread some of these

Starting point is 03:20:52 beliefs were going to be and how I wouldn't make a difference by saying anything about them, right? Like if you think ideas are still in play, then there are reasons to try and convince people, right? But if something is just a wave that's going to just annihilate everything, then it's like, well, maybe I should just save my energy and use it over here instead of over there. But also, you know, like, see, that's the confusing thing is there's always utility to all these things. So like arguing with somebody about something seems useless, but then maybe someday it's actually important that you have these argumentative skills or have thought about these things.

Starting point is 03:21:40 Because maybe you end up in an argument where somebody's going to make a decision based on something and that decision matters in some way. Again, we're on the human level and not like the spiritual level here. Maybe that matters in some human level way. If you didn't think about those things or you didn't practice arguing with somebody about them, you're kind of not prepared. It's like not training to fight or something. Like if you, if you're supposed to protect your wife and kid in a rough neighborhood that you live in, right. Um, if you never learned to fight and then the day comes that you have to, maybe you were derelict in your duty a little bit.

Starting point is 03:22:31 That said, though, it's not like people need excuses to argue with each other, right? Like our egos want to argue with each other all the time. So one has to be very careful coming up with excuses why that's okay, right? When you were talking about the problems with our culture, you also mentioned stagnation, and around since 1970 or so, or mid-1970s, Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein have thoughts on that. I'm curious if you've seen their thoughts or heard their thoughts. Yeah, I've seen a bunch that both of those guys have said. I have a relatively contrarian view here in that I agree with Peter Thiel about the general state of things. But I also think that he's a little too charitable because what he says is that the domain of software is most of the advancement in recent decades. I actually don't think that's true.

Starting point is 03:23:27 I think software stopped advancing around 1990 for the most part. We've had small things that happened, but I think this is an area where people are pretty confused about if they don't think about it all the time because they look and they say, what do you mean?

Starting point is 03:23:42 There's all these web companies. There's all these websites. They're IPO-ing.'s like billions of dollars and all that. But what's really happening there is technologies that we figured out in prior decades, like integrated circuits that go very fast, made by companies like Intel, AMD, whatever, you know, various chip fabs and all this stuff, combined with networking and communications hardware and the material science that went into that, have made this scenario where you can have software that a lot of people use and that's network connected in a very easy way.

Starting point is 03:24:16 That's actually what created all of this. The actual software, in most cases, is pretty dumb and pretty bad and doesn't really have new ideas because it doesn't have to, because, you know, if you want to make a website that makes a bunch of money, it's not like you have to have some new technical software idea to make that work. You just need to make the website. And we've actually known the technology that you need to work, make the website we've known since like 1965. None of that stuff is new. Um, well let's, if we're talking about networking specifically, let's say 1975 to like give it more time to percolate. But like by 1975, you basically had

Starting point is 03:24:58 everything that you need to build a modern website. It's just, we've made it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. And so people think, people think that things are more rocket science-y than they actually are. And so when Peter Thiel says, like one of his big catch phrases, I don't want to, you know, that's a little bit of a denigrating way to say it, but like he says, you know, we've had very little progress in the world of atoms and mostly in the world of bits. I don't think we've had very much progress in the world of bits. What we've had is the use of the world of bits to generate a lot of economic, um, windfall, which is legitimate, right? Because we're replacing all sorts of things that used to have large costs due to requiring

Starting point is 03:25:41 physical manufacturing and all this stuff. Right. And so those costs go away. So I think it makes sense that companies make money by replacing that. Um, but that's not technological advancement at all. It's just figuring out how to apply computers to food delivery or whatever. Right. So the other way that I say this is, uh, like, like everybody in Silicon Valley says they work in tech, right? Like, oh, I work in tech. I don't think almost any of these companies are tech companies. So for example, if you meet a truck driver and he's driving just a regular truck, not even a

Starting point is 03:26:19 Tesla electric truck or anything, a regular old diesel truck. And he's driving across the interstate from, you know, Texas to California to deliver a bunch of goods. Does he work in tech? And the answer is probably not right. Um, but a truck actually was amazing technology at some time that was completely new. And even a modern truck is an iterated, refined, much better truck than what we originally knew how to make. So he is driving this amazing technological artifact, right? But like, we don't say he works in tech. He works in the application of a particular piece of technology to transport. And that's not to say anything, you know, negative about truck drivers. Those dudes,

Starting point is 03:27:06 if they all quit right now, we would be in a lot of trouble. We should have a great deal of respect for what they do. But there's this pretend that goes on that what's happening at all these web companies is fundamentally different from that, but it's not. It's basically driving trucks from the database to the web client, right? But they make it a lot harder than it has to be, so it seems like it's more than that. Last question, man. Sure. Rari VK says, if it's not... Oh, I think there was a question about the work process, but I don't have the person. Is it Scrum?

Starting point is 03:27:47 Is it like Lean Startup where you do MVP feedback iterate? Like, is there a title for what you use as your work process with your team? You know, here's the thing. We're not necessarily, we don't necessarily have the optimal work process and that's by design because what I was really worried about working on The Witness especially, because that's when the team started becoming big, I was worried about killing the art by making it too much of a business or making it too much of a process, right? That outputs a product. Like sometimes you need time to figure things out, like how to make them the best version that they a product. Like sometimes you need time to figure things out,

Starting point is 03:28:26 like how to make them the best version that they could be. So there were many times on The Witness where it was like, you know, I don't think people are doing that much work right now because I'm not guiding them to the right things that need to be done. But I don't know right now. So I need the time just to take the break. Right. Um, now that's bad as the team gets bigger and bigger and it's more expensive. Right. Um, and I think we do some of that still today, but, um, less, um, but also,

Starting point is 03:29:00 you know, our, our model is very loose. We have occasional meetings once in a while. We're working still remotely because of COVID. But even before that, we had some remote people. We have occasional meetings, but not a lot, you know. And for the most part, we trust people we hire to be able to execute some idea all the way down to the end with only maybe feedback from a couple teammates or something about how it's going not not from me or the whole company we don't do like any of these programming methodologies like agile or scrum or I think those are all.

Starting point is 03:29:49 Okay, those fall into a certain category of thing, right? Traps? Not exactly traps, because they're useful in a certain way. There's this broad category of process that is helpful to people who would otherwise be totally unproductive, whether they're new to programming or just find it very hard to focus or whatever, right? You put in this certain level of regularity and discipline and expected results and all that, and you improve results for that, those people,

Starting point is 03:30:20 right? And also maybe people who this is just a job for them. Like they're working on it to make money and to feed their family or whatever, nothing wrong with that, but they're not like in it. Right. Um, okay. However, that acts for people who know some math. It acts kind of like a band pass filter where you filter out the poor results, but you also filter out the amazing outlier results. Because like sometimes you just need a dude who's bad at certain things to be on the team because he's good at certain other. He's amazing at certain other things. Right. Or sometimes you need, you know, people who don't really show results on something for a long time, because they're ruminating on it. And then eventually something good comes out, right?

Starting point is 03:31:11 And so if you forbid all those things from happening, then that's bad, right? Because you're you're selecting away those results. So that's why we don't do those. Final question. Rari VK says, if it's not too late, she submitted this last month. Why is it called The Witness? I can't tell you that. Sorry. You know, it was the name that was, it was the name that was most right for the game that I was able to come up with. Um, and the reasons for that are many and they're intertwined and there are things that I don't really, cause like I said, I don't want to be in the business of saying what games are about. They're things like that. And so I think that's all I can say on that. Jonathan, I'm honored to have spoken with you.

Starting point is 03:32:20 Yeah, it was a good time. I mean, we went almost five hours. We started late. Or no, we didn't. Three and a half, four a half. Yeah. That's, that's plenty long, you know? Thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for talking to me. And I, um, you know, have, have a good time continuing to do your, your interview series and I hope it continues to go well. The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, your interview series, and I hope it continues to go well. from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Jonathan Blow on Consciousness, Video Game Design, True Art vs. False, and Free Will

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