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If I'm a content creator, and I get recognition for my work, that's going to motivate me to spend even more time on my next production and make it even better.

I think I can make an entirely new game experience, and if I can't do it, some other game designer will.

If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it.

Most designers work up to a peak. They do some great stuff, and then it's just junk.

Ninety percent of games lose money; 10 percent make a lot of money. And there's a consistency around the competitive advantages you create, so if you can actually learn how to do the art, the design, and the programming, you would be consistently very profitable.

It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.

The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

Received wisdom is that if you spend time up front getting the design right, you avoid costs later. But the longer you spend getting the design right, the more your upfront costs are, and the longer it takes for the software to start earning.

If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next.

This is the entertainment industry, so game designers have to have a creative mind and also have to be able to stand up against the marketing people at their company - otherwise they cannot be creative. There are not that many people who fit that description.