Jonathan Blow

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1971 age 0

   Born

2. 2012 age 41

   CreditIndie Game: The Movie

• LPLisanne Pajot1 title
• JSJames Swirsky1 title
• JGJim Guthrie1 title
• EMEdmund McMillen1 title
• TRTommy Refenes1 title
• PFPhil Fish1 title

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  Photo:Official GDCCC BY 2.0
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  Photo:No author provided in image metadata. e.delage assumed (based on watermark).CC BY-SA 2.0
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  Photo:Vincent Diamante from Los Angeles, CA, USACC BY-SA 2.0
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  Photo:Gamelab Congreso VideojuegosPublic domain
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  Photo:Ethan Allen SmithCC BY-SA 4.0
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  Photo:sijm2007CC BY-SA 2.0

• The way I think about puzzles is a real puzzle, is something you may not ever figure out.

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I can complain about games for my whole life.

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0

• You know, in college, I never got either degree, but I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor's degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about.

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0

• A long time ago, I used to write fiction, short stories mainly. And I reached a point where I had honed my style so that it wasn't totally atrocious, and I kind of knew what I was doing when writing, and then the question was just, "What do I write about now?" And I couldn't really find anything that I felt was important enough to write about. So I just kind of gave up on writing.

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Finally, Braid was the thing where I felt that writing could enter into it. But the game design also is a different kind of writing. It's a different kind of idea communication. One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. But the problem is that writing isn't a good venue for that. Because as I said, you can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you're clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next – the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you're writing down is total bullshit. <br> But, you cannot do that in a game – or at least it's much harder – because in a game, you have to create a simulated universe that works according to some rules. Especially the way Braid is constructed. It has to be intact as a place that has laws, and consistency. And because of tha

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Well, it's very personal to me, because I have that kind of personality. The same sort of thing that drives somebody to study physics for 30 years, so they can discover a new particle. Just so they can know something more about the world. I have that same personality, but I didn't end up in physics. I ended up in game design. What does that mean? What is my outlet for that? <br> I have gone on record as talking about game design as a practice, like a scientific study, or like a spiritual practice, like yoga or tai chi. And that's part of what I'm doing when I design a game, is that I'm exploring the universe in a certain way. I'm trying to understand true things about it, or to uncover things about it, in ways again that are less bullshitty than just writing words on a paper. Because somehow, and I could be totally fooling myself about this, but I believe that somehow, there is something more meaningful about creating a system. Because the universe is a system, of some kind. And writin

  Jonathan Blow, CC BY-SA 4.0