The Ledger, every show

“Tennis is as silly or sillier than Overwatch.”

“I haven't seen it yet become like a place where there's a lot of established work that you can point to and say, oh yeah, this is clearly just, you know, this is an industry, and this is a place where you can do work and find an audience.”

“Because that's what happens when you play a game. You enter into this mind state where you're just... In dogged pursuit of this arbitrary goal. Like this goal is not like, there's no external reason you would want to make this number go up. In, in any clicker …”

“Like not everybody thinks this, but I'm the kind of person that, that I'm like, Kind of game designer that actually thinks there's real value in, in having high level competitive community in a game, even if most people are playing it casually.”

“That's my argument, is that they're more like paintings than they are like orgasm machines.”

“I think you want to be a game designer, even if you're making board games, I actually think if you want to be a game designer, you should know the fundamentals of how to code. You should be just, you know, comfortable literate with thinking algorithmically.”

“We're not a, like, a professional training school, like, we're not a handmaid into the industry where it's like an on-ramp to getting a job, like, yes, we want our students to be successful and have jobs and have careers, but that's a bad use of the academy, t…”

“It's pop culture. It's entertainment. It's hit driven. It's never going to be a, it's never going to be a reliable career for anybody.”

“It's certainly easier to make a living making indie games than it is to make a living being a Pop musician, I would say, comparatively, right?”

“Like, it's not, I don't think we're looking at, like, whatever, you know, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike, and Hearthstone, and Overwatch, maybe Starcraft, I don't know. Like, I don't think those, I don't think we're gonna be stuck with those for the nex…”

“The way that they generate meaning, or beauty, or interest, or all the qualities that, that we want out of them is not just their ability to simulate something but the space between that simulation and the real thing.”

“In the way that painting is about looking, right? It's the art form that is about looking. Games are the art form about thinking and doing, right? About our ability to have a goal and pursue that goal and accomplish it to solve problems to, you know, about cau…”

“When people are super passionate about a thing, and there's a lot of attention, and a lot of energy, and then you look, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of there, to me, that's an indication that there's an opportunity. That means that people, people want so…”

“In order to get good at any difficult competitive game, you actually need to have the kind of mindset of self-improvement and stepping back and thinking for the first time often like, oh, well, huh, what am I doing wrong? How do I learn? And why is it not work…”

“Esports are more like, The way games have traditionally been made, which is less the sort of individual author and more like this folk practice of many people working together, like a community of people kind of carving out a set of a set of habits and convent…”

“I think to be a successful game designer, you need inspiration, you need hard work, and you need taste. And of all of those, I think taste is maybe the most important and the hardest to kind of like pin down, but it really is that judgment of knowing, of havin…”

“There is no, Private taste. Taste is always, like, about connection between people. Yeah. A shared language or some conversation that we're having about values and things.”

“I don't know how to get smart, but I think that's the closest proxy we have, right? You know so we try to, like, incorporate that in, into the curriculum, that there's, that they're bumping up against things that they might not have encountered on their own. Y…”

“I think Fortnite in its overall structure has a lot of poker tournament in it, in the sense that it's there's a combination of luck and skill. And it's exactly the structure of, like, starting with a hundred people and ending up with one big winner, and it cou…”

“Video games are awesome, but we should not be aspiring to be as successful as a successful movie, right? We should be looking at the history of, like, look at chess. Look at Go. Look at poker. Look at basketball. And that's what games can do, right? They can b…”

“This border between video games and other kinds of games, I think is, we overemphasize it because it's, A bit, I think it's parochial. I think in, in, you know, we see computer games and these other games as being so distinct and separate. But I actually think…”

“I see my theory about this is that you really can't invent a sport. You can invent games, and sometimes games can evolve into sports.”

“It's particularly hard to predict entertainment. Because part of the job of art and entertainment is to be unpredictable.”

“I think they are kind of an underappreciated little micro genre in, in games.”

“And so Shadow of the Colossus is that, like, it's engaging you as, like, in a primal sense of, like, the desire to understand the system, and master it, and overcome these great things, and defeat them, and move forward, and accomplish these, the series of tas…”

“Eventually, you know, it had been played, like, by a million or more people”