Jonathan Blow’s Design Reboot

If you’re a game designer, you should probably listen to the lecture Jonathan Blow gave at the Montreal International Games Summit.

Not only do the opinions expressed sound similar to our own. It’s refreshing to hear these points spoken out loud, and so eloquently illustrated.

Contrary to us, Mr. Blow still firmly believes in games as rule-based challenges to achieve a certain goal. But he posits that the learning required to engage in such an activity should be worthwhile. A game should teach us something interesting. And game designers should be aware of what their game is teaching players.

The latter could be a serious problem as the quality of games is currently almost exclusively judged by whether a game is fun or not. This is where Mr. Blow’s tremendously insightful analogy with drugs and fast food comes in. He advocates designing games with rewards that are intellectually nutritious and not simply addictive.

Doing so will not only improve the quality of life of the player. But it will also open up the interactive medium to being capable of addressing the many different types of content that have made cinema, literature and music into the dominant forms of entertainment and enlightment that they are today. Mr. Blow urges game designers to design with the intention of making something “worthwhile or deep or interesting”. Something that is oddly very rare today indeed.

A recording of the talk is available from his website.