Jonathan Blow on Innovation, Making a Living as an Indie Game Designer, How Game Design is Changing and His Future Projects

Now that Braid is a proven success, I thought it would be nice to offer up a portion of a conversation with the game's creator, Jonathan Blow, conducted shortly after his keynote at last year's Montreal International Game Summit. The conversation was long, running just under an hour and a half. To save you the time here are some of the more interesting ideas to come out of the talk. Keep in mind that this conversation was recorded and transcribed so any typos are mine, not Blow's.

[Update: Blow writes, on his blog, "Note: The MMO project hinted at, at the end of this interview, is not the post-Braid project any more. Since then I had an idea for a project I am much more motivated to pursue."]

You didn't mention innovation in your keynote. You actually made a point to mention that you didn't mention innovation. You said you used to be an innovation type of guy and I was wondering what you meant by an innovation type of guy and why you no longer are?

So I started this thing called the experimental gameplay workshop at GDC 2001 and the goal of that, very explicitly, was to promote gameplay innovation, not innovation in terms of characters or setting, or even necessarily in terms of what hard ware devices you play with, but what the actual activities are that the player does and the things that he thinks about while he's playing. And I still think that's important, but when I started that event my idea was that, games are something right now, they could be something much greater in the future, they could become this great form of art and how we get from here to there involves expanding what games are to something bigger and bigger until they're a big enough, deep enough form that we can create art pretty easily with them.

And I think that there is something to that idea, you can't expand the form without innovating. So that's an important thing. So I use to think that was the primary thing that one should do. But now I'm  more of the mind that innovation is important, but it will happen naturally if you have artistic goals to begin with. Unless you are just so conditioned by the games that you've played throughout your life that you just can't think of anything new, in which case maybe that designer is not a very good artist.

You say that innovation will happen if you begin from an artistic point?

So I actually also talked about this, I had a little rant at GDC last year in '06, about this, I don't if that is recorded anywhere [Blow on innovation and indie games can be found here]  It was just a little 7 min thing with the same idea, which is that you can actually make something innovative that is not very interesting to play or not very artful, actually that kind of thing happens all the time.

Most innovation falls into that category I would say, where it doesn't actually make the game deeper or more interesting. In fact, often the innovation is a negative because instead of having this well refined gameplay that everyone understands, we strike out and do something new, and it's clumsy. That's valuable because we can build on it later and make something cool with it, but that's also not necessarily in the direction of making games into art.

I now feel that is a separate direction that just has to do with the intent of the creator, and what he decided to put into his game, the way he chooses to make it. So when Rod Humble made The Marriage, his goal was not, "I'm going to make innovative game design." His goal was, "I'm going to make a game that communicates what it feels like to be in my marriage." And in the process of implementing that and not being tied to the traditional ideas of what a game is.

At the same time it's not super innovative, in this 'wow' way. You don't play the Marriage and feel like there is some new gameplay mechanic you've never seen before, because it's pretty simple. But if you think about it though, it doesn't play like any game you've ever played. So that's just an example of innovation happening as a result of intent. Rather than starting with innovation and seeing where you go. I think they're both good. If anyone wants to deliberately do innovation and see where it goes, that's great. I'm happy to see that, but  I feel that there are enough calls for that in the industry already anyway.

I don't know how long you've been into games, but at least for the last 11 or 12 years, certainly as long as I've been into it, everybody has been saying, "Wow, retail, publishing, are horrible for creativity, because creating games for the mass market, budgets are going up, everybody is risk averse, no body wants to innovate." So everybody is well aware of this problem that we ought to innovate more. That's great. I fully support people who say that, and I use to say that. But I'm turning my attention now to things that have a little bit less in the way of popular support among the developer  community, or things that people are less aware of.

To put it a different way: if I had gone up and given a keynote address and the subject of it was just, "there's not enough innovation in the games industry." And I had talked for an hour about, you know, here are some games that aren't very innovative and here are some games that are. That might have been a kind of interesting talk, but it certainly  wouldn't have been pushing on any boundaries, and I think that a lot of people would have been less interested in it because it would have been the kinds of things people say all the time.  

So one of the things you're saying, I think, if I can put it together, is, instead of looking at innovation first, you're saying just try to communicate some idea and different and strange gameplay might just come out of trying to express that particular idea.

Yes.

And I'm wondering if you think that this idea of communicating through the games, I mean obviously this is something that has happened forever, but is this something that's building, is this something that more people are doing nowadays? Or are more people focusing on communicating?

Interestingly enough, I just read a blog posting today that maybe I can point you to. [Jonathan boots up his laptop from sleep eventually pointing to this blog post from the Pickford Brothers]

Another one of the realizations I've come to, so when I started Braid games that I had worked on previously to Braid had pretty complicated interfaces. I saw how that interferes with players' experiences of the game, how it gets in the way of them feeling what you want them to feel or even understanding the basic rules of the game and being competent at it. But also from a commercial stand point there is the factor that people need to understand your game or they won't want to play it. If they go to a videogame store or they download a demo, the game needs to communicate to them what it's about and how to play it and how to be good at it.

Now I think that is something, even way back in the coin-op days, that is something that existed but they had a very low standard for that. They would say on the arcade cabinet how to play. As you got further into history, and we got home computer games and stuff like that, I think that idea was kind of lost, because anyone who would play a computer game was a hardcore player who was willing to suffer through a lot of not understanding things. But now that games are trying to appeal to much more mainstream people, there's much more  awareness on the part of designers that your game has to tell people how to play it and has to do that quickly and effectively at the very beginning of your session otherwise they're just not going to have to a very good experience. [At this point, with his laptop booted and online, Blow opens his history list saying, "Wow, you know I waste a lot of time during the day reading websites." (we do too) This is when he found that Pickford Brothers post.]

So there's these guys, the Pickford Brothers, who have been in the games business forever, and they have a blog entry here. You know it's interesting because they say the exact same kinds of things I've been thinking for awhile. You know they talk about Space Giraffe and how Jeff Minter was complaining that nobody bought it and their take on that was the same as mine, which is just that the game didn't explain to people what it was about and why they should play. It's very confusing and off putting when you first sit down and try and play it, unless you're this hardcore guy who gives a lot of benefit of the doubt and is willing to suffer through a lot. And so they talk about how, as downloadable demos become more prevalent, it becomes more important to have this communication aspect on the front  end, but I also think it goes deeper than that front end. One of the things I talked about at the beginning at that Montreal lecture, was that all games teach things and they way they teach  is by guiding you toward the goal by giving you feedback about whether you are accomplishing your tasks successfully or not, and that entire guidance is a communications process.

That's actually one of the main ways I think about games now is as communication. And this gets embodied in the design of Braid, not only in the separation of the foreground and background, which is trying to communicate to you the structure of this space very clearly so you know where you can go and what you can do, it has a very small number of enemies, the goal being to not complicate the situation, to communicate to you very early on the basic rules of the world and then be consistent by those. Then that consistency also communicates; that consistency says, "this game is not about monkeying around with random wacky guys that you encounter," or something like that, it's more about giving you this variety of situations and seeing how you deal with the different rules of time.

There's communication in everything, every design decision that goes into a game has utilitarian aspects, this will make the game harder or longer, it will make the game more interesting because it creates a puzzle that's interesting for the player, but it also has communications aspects because it is going to be perceived by the players, obviously, and anything that is perceived by the players they're going to have an opinion on, or they're just going to notice. So there's that communications channel and that utilitarian channel and the communications channel is not something that has necessarily received that much attention from a lot of game designers, but I do think that there is more awareness there now. And I think it started in the casual games space, because the games are simpler and you can look at them more directly as being about communication. So that is one of the things I touched on in my talk but is really a cornerstone of my thoughts now, that a game is basically a mediated communications process where the author of a game, he usually isn't present with the player, he's off in a room somewhere not connected at all, but he created this program in order to interact with the player and that program is the method by which what he wanted to communicate is mediated and given to the player. Once you take that view point there are a lot of ways in which game design becomes different. It becomes a different discipline than it was before.

How does it become different?

Well, what did it mean to design a game in the 80's? I'm going to make something that's kind of fun, but it's also going to be kind of hard, especially because it's a coin-op game and I'm going to have to kick you out, or make you put in a quarter every two minutes, or whatever the average was, and I kind of want you to have fun, but that was basically as deep as it went, what I just said there. And they would actually have a lot of creativity and try out these wacky ideas, but it wasn't super deep.

Then you get on into the 90's and you start having these people building these epic experience and the idea of game design became very different. it became, how do we make a compelling world in which this story takes place, and how do we maintain a player's interest over a linear 10-14 hour experience. Because coin-op games, you weren't supposed to play them, a single game, for 10 hours, a game might last ten minutes, and so game design became very different and the things that designers thought about were therefore different.

This idea of balance came into play. Games in the 80's didn't necessarily have very much complexity to them, so game balance wasn't something that you worried about too much, because you just got the basic thing implemented and then you tuned it and that's that. But then you go into the 90's and maybe  Street Fighter II was one of the first games that had a lot of balance issues. You've got all these different characters that players can play, and they have all these different moves, but you have to make it so that when one player competes against another player they're on an even footing, for the most part, at least in so far as the game mechanics are concerned, and any imbalance comes from the players' skills. That arose naturally because that game was a lot more complicated.

So as we moved into this era, even Street Fighter II isn't that complicated a game compared to today's games, so that complication kept increasing and progressing, therefore the things designers would think about followed that. Not just issues of balance, but issues of pacing, so if I'm supposed to play in a two to three hour sit you don't just want monotony, you don't just want fast action for a two hours straight because that will burn people out, or they'll degrade or whatever. You want some action and some rest and some action and some rest. You want to plot it. If it's a first person shooter, here's a big battle, now we're going to give you some health. Here's this room that is explicitly about you getting recharged and ready for the next thing. So those become the kinds of things that designers thought about.

Those are all game mechanical things, and the reason is, games got so complicated that if you didn't focus a lot on game mechanics issues like that than the game would kind of suck. If you didn't figure out the pacing about letting the player recharge his health then it would be too hard for people and they wouldn't understand why. So that understanding developed as a way of making game mechanics fit the larger setting and more epic play experiences.

Now we're kind of fanning out into this era where we have this casual games. We've got downloadable games and we also have epic games. We're spanning a much broader area now in game design. But also, in terms of these epic games, we're improving the graphics and stuff now, but the scale of the experience isn't exactly better than it was last generation. The games are not longer; they're not even necessarily more complicated in terms of the number of things that you do. The tech is a little higher for the graphics and maybe for some other things, like animations and AI, but that's it. So, because it hasn't advanced that much more, we're in a more comfortable position.

It's not out running us anymore, as designers, so we've caught up, and now that we understand these  issues of balance, and all these game mechanical things we need to do to make a large game work, and we're more competent at them, and we have more people in the industry who have a lot of experience at building games that work well in that way, now we're setting our sights on other things too. How do we make the experience more compelling and meaningful in an audio/visual way? So Call of Duty 1 was, I think, the first game that ever stole wholesale scenes from movies. They stole from Enemy at the Gates and Saving Private Ryan. I don't mean steal in a bad way; I think it's great that they did, but they exactly recreated the opening scene from Enemy at the Gates. I don't know if they ever got sued for that, I don't think they did. That was a way, it was a new way of creating a more compelling experience that didn't directly involve game mechanics. It was like, hey, we've got the game mechanics of this first person shooter game down, how do we bring it up to the next level? Let's make it more movie like.

That's one direction to go, but another direction to go is to try to broaden the market, and make games more understanding and more accessible. As soon as you state that as your goal you start thinking about things like the controls have to be simple. You have to play in less than a two hour spurt. You need to be able to have an engaging and meaningful experience in half an hour or fifteen minutes. People who aren't hardcore gamers need to be able to pick it up and start playing. I'm sure you've seen these kinds of things said. Those come as a result of, again, we've caught up and we have this broader set of things that we're thinking of now, and so when you start thinking about that, how to expand your audience, communication comes into play with that as well, because you're trying to communicate with these people you haven't communicated with before. So, consequently, to get back to the question, your design concerns now change, to solve these new problems, because you've already solved the old problems.

So, I feel that what you're saying is, that during the 80's and 90's a lot  of the issues that game designers mostly faced were issues of trying to perfect a craft, and that now the issue is, game designers have caught with the craft to the point where they can create art. Something that really communicates an idea.

Well, I think that's part of what I said, but the way you just said it gives a little too much credit to the games industry. We've certainly not perfected the craft, but what we have done is we've gotten to the point where we can build something that pretty much works. There's a lot of improvement still in game mechanics and stuff, but we know how to make a basic game that people will be interested in playing, for the most part. That wasn't true in the old days, even in the 90's when games started getting really big, a lot games would fail because people didn't do all the proper engineering involved, or they'd do it all but the gameplay sucked, and it wasn't anything anyone was  interested in. Tons of games just never got done.

Now games might get canceled, but it's not because they won't get finished, it's just because they won't compete well on the market with something bigger and flashier. We've kind of nailed that, there's a lot of room for improvement but we've nailed it. Because we've nailed that it opens the possibility to think about art if you want to. Where as before, if it was all you could possibly do, if practically killed yourself just getting something done and working, you can't think of art at that point because that's going to make the game harder to make, and if it was any harder to make you would have failed. Now that we have more breathing room it gives some of us who care more freedom to do other things. But the mainstream industry isn't necessarily art oriented and that's not going to be the direction they choose to go. They might go somewhere else with it, and where that will be I'm not sure.

There's different buzzwords all that time. One of the more recent ideas was, hey we're going to have these games that all have this big online component and you can hook up to them from your cellular phone and do things. Ideas like that that I think are just kind of bad and dilute the core idea. But that was the direction a lot of companies tried to go, and my impression is that that is not really working. But that's not an art kind of idea, that's a drive more revenue by showing people ads kind of idea.  That's the way a lot of people will choose to go, but they have the freedom to do that now, now that we've gotten better at constructing these things. But, again, I would not say perfection. We're no where near that.

So you financed Braid on your own, right?

That's right.

Are you confident that you can make back that money that you put into it?

Well, so what's not a secret about my deal is that there's no advance. So my deal is basically just a back end percentage. So I haven't made any money yet and will not until February or March, when people start buying the game [at the time Braid had a tentative release of February 2008] and after that it will be a couple of months. That's just how game publishing works. They tally up how many people have bought it and cut you a check every quarter or something like that. I actually don't know what it is in Microsoft's case. It'll be sometime mid-next year before I see money from the game. That might even be a little optimistic. I haven't seen, directly, any concrete sales numbers from Microsoft, for other Live games, but there are some websites that estimate how much Xbox Live games will sell, or have sold, and those numbers don't come from Microsoft, they come from various methods, either polling their readers and extrapolating that or tracing network traffic and things like that, and my impression is that if I can sell in the middle of that, there's been about 100 games released, so far on Live, it will be a little more by the time Braid's out, but if I can make 50 or 55 out of 110, that will be pretty comfortable. I will have made all my money back, and, hopefully, a little bit more to make the next game a little better in terms of budget. If the game does very well I have the chance of doing much better than that.

At the same time there's also the opposite chance, if the game does poorly I might be very sad. Going back to Jeff Minter, I don't know how much Space Giraffe has sold, but to read his blog posts it was really bad. He talked about not having enough money to pay the rent. It could go either way, but my expectation is that I'll be fine.

Do you think that this is a viable option for people? That more people could sell their games through Microsoft, or PSN or WiiWare? From your experiences this is something that you really could live off of?

Yeah, absolutely. Although, I have some friends who are thinking about quitting their mainstream industry jobs and making this kind of game and if you look at the number estimates on those websites and then you extrapolate out how much money that means after taxes, if you have some people working on a project for a couple of years, the amount of money you get is potentially really good for one person, it drops a lot if you start taking about two people, and if you've got four people, which is a team size many people would feel comfortable with for a game of that production value, then it's really maybe not enough money to be worth it. It's very risky. You might make enough to feed everybody, but you might not. So if you can do a game by yourself, or just two people, or have one or two people be the principle people working for two years on it, and maybe bring in a third person to work on it part-time, that's viable, but once you have too many people working on it, it's not quite there yet. Now maybe the market is still growing, and maybe it will get easier to deal with larger team sizes as time goes on.

Another factor though is that larger companies have seen that there's profit potential in this area and they're now starting to create games for Live. So in the same way that independent or smaller teams got squeezed out of retail publishing, there's a danger of that happening in the online world too. The question is will it happen or won't it.

It's actually kind of hard to make a small game like this that's good and that people will want to buy. There have been a lot of games on Live that were really kind of bad that nobody wanted to play. A recent couple of them that I thought of: in terms of a retro port there was a Missile Command game which was terrible. It was like  whoever ported that didn't understand what was good about the original Missile Command at all. From these sales estimates nobody bought it. I couldn't even play it hardly at all. It was terrible. Wing Commander Arena, which wasn't a port of anything, it was a new game, just didn't understand what would be fun about space battles, so they failed to make an engaging game. But that came from a larger publisher kind of route. The Yaris game, which came from a different route, it was totally corporately driven. It was free and still not that many people wanted to play it, because it was just so bad. So big companies can fail, and small companies can fail too, but what I'm hoping is that if it's just as easy for big companies to fail here, as with big games, then they might as well stay with big games because the profit multiplier is a lot higher, if you have the initial investment. So maybe that will leave a space for independent people to play in here, but maybe it won't. Maybe they'll just decide to jump in and try to squeeze it. I can't exactly predict what's going to happen there. For now, right now today, it's a very appealing space for an independent developer to go into. But if you start developing a game today and it's ready in two years or three years, who knows what it will be like in three years. The next console generation is going to be starting. I have no idea what that's going to look like. It's good but uncertain.

Well you're going to make a game after Braid, right? You're not done?

Yes, absolutely. I have a few ideas of what the next things is going to be, and I'm not necessarily going to design them with Xbox Live or Playstation network in mind, but for me that reason may happen differently than it does for most people. A lot of people might look at Xbox Live and say, hey we can do something potentially viable on there, what kind of games can we do that will be fun and that people will want to play? That's not the direction that I come at it from. Where I go is, what do I want to make that will be maximally compelling; that's going to feed my need to create in the right way? And then, where can I deploy that? Will it work on a console or not? So one of the ideas that I want to do, you know I talked in my lecture about how I am dissatisfied with MMO's and how their gameplay is not very interesting. One of the games that I want to do, that I actually have a little prototype for, is an MMO, but with very different core gameplay and very streamlined. So it's actually a fast MMO to play, as opposed to spending hours grouping and all that stuff. I would be very interested in making that my next game. The thing is, if I did that I would probably launch it on the PC instead of Live, simply because, well for a bunch reasons. Live is not really set up for that kind of persistent word, client/server based thing. And the audience just isn't there for that kind of game, whereas it's totally there on the PC. You have games like World of Warcraft, which have huge audiences, but even MMO's with different gameplay have been doing pretty well. There's this game, Puzzle Pirates, developed by Three Rings, which is kind of nice and kind of different, and they do well by it. They just launched it themselves off the PC without a publisher, and they've been very happy with how well that's gone. I think that the platforms on these consoles create a good possibility, but, also, people shouldn't restrict their design thought just to conform to that  market.

So the last question, just cause you brought it up, is there anything more you can tell me about the MMO you just described.

Well, it's really early so I'm not sure how much I want to say about it, and that's really just because it could change so much. But what do you want to ask?

I guess, since you did talk about MMO's so much in your keynote, and what you don't like about them, how is yours going to be different? I know you can't get into the details.

Yeah, well I can give you a core idea that probably won't change. In a typical MMO, like World of Warcraft, what you do is go out, you're probably in a party if you're not soloing, at higher levels you'll raid big instances and stuff, but at lower levels even you'll have a similar sort of group dynamic going on, but that's simpler. You get together, and your party members have different roles, there's a tank whose job is to attack and soak up damage, and there's guys whose job is to sit back and damage guys from afar and there's a healer who has to watch everybodys health bars. That's kind of group gameplay, but it's also strangely disembodied and separate group gameplay. If I'm the healer, in World of Warcraft, I'm not really interacting with the other players while we're fighting some guys. What I'm really doing is watching some bars and then casting on the guys who need health. It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. So I'm kind of doing an isolated, solitary activity. I'm not doing anything in conjunction with the players directly. I don't even know exactly what that would mean, but what if there was an MMO where you were fighting and one player had a blunt weapon where they had to strike a guy and stun him for a second so you could hit him with your sharp weapon. That's a totally dumb example, but that's a way in which you would be working more directly with another player because you're setting him up to do things together, and you need to watch what the other player is doing and work with him.

My game isn't like that because it's not combat oriented, but it's going to be a game about working as a group to solve problems where there's a lot of discussion. It's going to be slower paced than the combat like something in  a regular MMO. There's a lot discussion; a lot of people pitching in different ideas about how to solve this current problem that they are faced with. And that discussion is a very collaborative thing. You're actually communicating with the other players all the time. You're suggesting things for the other people. You're thinking about what the resources your teammates has to bear, and what they might want to spend and what they might not want to spend, and putting yourself in their shoes and things like that. As I've stated that, it's actually a kind of hard game design problem to take up because not that many games do that, but that's going to be the focus. But you know, in World of Warcraft, or any MMO, you have group communication, but it mostly happens between fights. You'll hang out and rest and re-arm and talk to each other about how it went, because during the fight there's not necessarily time to communicate all that much. Whereas this game is going to be all about the communication.

[Image via David Hellman's blog. Hellman is the visual artist behind Braid]