"Right now games schizophrenically tear themselves apart, desiring to be both primarily games and primarily art, though no such thing is possible. This is evident even in the naming of the medium."

"An artwork must orient all of its constituent parts toward one goal: the physical expression of a metaphysical abstraction."

"One can play it as a game, spending his time looking compulsively in every area for extra treasure, or one can interact with it as art, going from place to place, advancing the action in an integrated way. One cannot do both. "

"In order to properly experience a game as art, the player must observe all of the events of the narrative while he can still easily recall them, which allows him to make the connections between them that give an artwork its intellectually satisfying nature. To be able to do this, the player must complete a game within a certain (and unspecifiable) time-window. This is because all minds, as well as all things, are finite, and so the player's capacity to remember is finite also. "

"A quick validation of this claim is as follows: first, take the law of identity (A=A) as our premise. The law of identity says that a thing is what it is."

"The preceding two paragraphs represent a whirlwind overview of Ayn Rand's theory of concepts,[no they don't] but they explain in essential terms why and how the proper enjoyment of art rests on the nature of the human mode of cognition and necessitates a ruthlessly precise structure in both matter and form, content and speed, plot and pacing. "

"In movies and plays, pacing is done automatically for the viewer. In books and games, it is not. "

"When I play a game, I try to do everything, to the point where it makes me sick. But whereas in a game like Demon's Souls this will not ruin the story, in a game like Uncharted it will."

"Checking every invisible wall in Final Fantasy XIII and testing every closed door in Mass Effect are tantamount to constantly directing one's eyes to the left and right edges of a widescreen movie to see all of the extra picture one is getting. Sure, the viewer sees more, but he is constantly taking himself out of focus, out of the requisite immersion that it takes to appreciate art. "

“During Oblivon, our new Radiant AI system – which let all the NPCs in the world think and act on their own – led to some of the best bugs. My favorite was a quest where you had to talk to a prisoner in jail. Sometimes when playtesting, we would find him locked in his cell, dead. It took us forever to figure out why. Turns out, the guards in the jail could run out of food and get hungry. They would then don down and kill the prisoner to take his food. This all happened when the player wasn’t there. I still don’t remember how we figured it out. But the solution was easy: more guard food.”

“Way back in the day when Vicarious Visions was developing the PC game Terminus, we ran into some very strange bugs. In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we could just not figure out the root cause – it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the players ship with it. Also in Terminus, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all the controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn’t work, no keyboard input, etc. It turned out that we had modeled insufficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the shop took off, the radiation from the engine’s core would kill the pilot.”

“One of our achievements hinged on the player feeding the Maw every single creature in the game. As we got close to the end of development, it seemed like we were running into all these cases where we couldn’t find the last creature or two in a level even though we visited all their locations. It soon became apparent that the Yums were disappearing somehow. We were at a loss. Finally, by chance one of us happened to be passing by one of the territorial Gastros as it defended its zone against a Yum. It grabbed the Yum in its mouth, shook it vigorously, and tossed it at a mountain. The Yum hit it and then suddenly went rocketing into the air like a Smash Bros. character. It turned out that if a creature was small enough and got shoved too far into an indention in the terrain, our physics library helpfully resolved the situation by firing the creature into the air at near-infinite velocity. I thought it’d be fine to just tell players to wait a couple days for the Yums to fall back to the ground, but the designers made us fix the bug instead.”