 At the end of his talk entitled video games in the human condition, a member of the audience pointed out something interesting to Jonathan Blow. The similarities between him and the late author David Foster Wallace. Curious, are you familiar with the work of David Foster Wallace at all? I have only read a little bit of his stuff, but I do plan to read more, actually. Okay, because I know tons about him, like unreasonable amounts, but I was noticing a few parallels with what you were talking about. And as you were developing the lecture, it seemed to get to be an almost eerie parallel, how you guys were exploring a lot of the same conflicts in totally different contexts. Even where you were kind of dissatisfied with exploring grand ideas in language because it's inherently linear, he kind of felt frustrated by the linear nature of novels and how it didn't really reflect the way he felt like he had to construct reality from thousands of discrete data he received every day to the nature of boredom and does it have value and how a lot of postmodern tricks in literature really serve to either entertain the reader without doing a whole lot or serve the darker purpose of telling the reader, look how smart and author I am. And a whole ton of other things. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Certainly because he was a writer, he was trying to do pretty different things. But there is always that, I feel like if you're good at the medium you're working in, you see it's limitations. I see a lot of limitations of game design and we're still figuring out what those are obviously, but at least I feel like it's early in the game. Games are going to evolve a lot more, so I can't get frustrated with the limitations of game design yet and we just haven't figured out how to do certain things. On the surface the similarities are apparent. Both are viewed as visionaries in their respective mediums. Both create somewhat impenetrable works of art and both are enigmatic, elusive and mysterious. Blu admitted his lack of familiarity with Wallace to the insightful audience member, making the even deeper commonalities in their work that much more interesting. What commonalities you ask? First, both have said that they were frustrated with their respective mediums' linearity and so devised works that broke from that mold. It seems to me that reality is fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. The difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it's very unified and I anyway am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disoriented. I mean you can take the lines and jumble them up and that's nicely fractured but nobody's going to read it, right? So there's got to be some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive it is for the readers willing to do it. The end notes were for me a useful compromise although there were a lot more when I delivered the manuscript and one of the things that the editor did for me was had me pair the end notes down to really be absolutely essential. The reason that I make games is because at some point I found myself wanting to get ideas that are pretty grand and they don't lend themselves very well to linguistic explanations because language is very serializing, right? And if you want to get it something that's extremely multi-dimensional and extremely nebulous and yet extremely important to people if you're doing it through this process where you have to un-serialize all this language and then somehow rebuild it into this thing it's a very difficult and error-prone process that doesn't exactly work. Video games, you know, like film for example is different because it gives you this higher bandwidth experience and you can do stuff visually in ways that you can't exactly do in other media and video games have, you know, because they have interactivity they allow you to explore a space and because they allow you to explore the space they allow you, because they allow a player to explore the space they allow the designer to communicate the shape of that space more implicitly than you can with language because it is found as opposed to told and that's important that's part of why the medium is respectable as its own thing and it's not just like film with interactivity or whatever, right? Blows games' braid and the witness explore the distributed set of ideas about the nature of redemption, truth and everything in between but has to be pieced together by the player Similarly, Wallace's works of fiction the broom of the system, Infinite Jest and the Pale King employ interesting devices like a disjointed narrative structure and end-notes to inject some nonlinearity into the narrative proceedings Another interesting commonality is their critique of fun and entertainment Jonathan Blow gave his speech where he lambasted game designers who use manipulative techniques to keep people playing and has even proclaimed this as actively unethical design Similarly, a core theme of Infinite Jest is this very impulse how humans are their own worst enemy when it comes to consuming entertainment so much so that we do it to the point of our own death He also wrote a famous essay called E. Unibus Plurum that argues how TV has absorbed avant-garde literary methods and turned it into entertainment, defanging it of its subversive potential Both of their works are often described as not fun even by their respective fans despite the fact that Blows games have a lot of conventionally fun mechanics and Wallace is known for his sparkling sense of humor Finally, and this is the comparison that is most interesting to me both think that we can use fiction to inquire into questions of what is true in the world What does this mean exactly? Blow has given talks where he suggests that the systems we build are actually exploring truths about our physical universe citing examples like the Mandelbrosa by using the fictional interface of games Similarly, Wallace wrote an essay called The Empty Plenum where he heralds the book Wittgenstein's Mistress a sample of interpret me fiction a genre of fiction that explores an idea using the fictional interface of literary construction The witness is an inquiry into the nature of truth seeking itself using a symbolic language of its own and the broom of the system explores ideas of the psychology of words and language both different conceptions of understanding the nature of truth subjective and objective Both Blow and Wallace have artistic ambitions with their work with their robust comprehension of the humanities but they are also both exceptional at more technical fields Wallace being seen as a prodigy in logic and math and Blow himself now inventing a new programming language through which to make games It's a fascinating comparison one which I'm not entirely sure what to do with that can just be classified as coincidence at worst and synchronicity at best but perhaps both their minds are pointing us towards something deeper about the nature of fiction, truth, entertainment and the human condition Maybe fiction can inquire into truth better than science itself Maybe non-linear narrative is the future of art Maybe fun should be viewed as both a troublesome and subversive aesthetic and maybe genius comes from a genuine understanding of both the sciences and the humanities There's stuff for me about reading that isn't like looking at a piece of art because there I choose how long I look and what I look at I'm being directed through a linear flow of time but in a piece of music or in a movie that flow is directed for me I've really got no choice but to follow it where as books it's weird I'm moving through time through this thing but I can also, I don't know whether you do it or not but if I've read a paragraph I just like a lot I go back and I read it over again so I'm trapped in time but I've got more mobility within that time It seems to me that the biggest split isn't between music and literature or music and sculpture There are forms of art that offer us escapes from ourselves and our daily lives and I think that's fine in small doses and then there are kinds of art that offer us more sort of confrontation I can't remember which American writer it was I heard him speak and he said that his job is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence gives rise to an extraordinary feeling A potent, rare and precious emotion with the potential to completely upset your life An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children forfeit career and reputation lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe If you play games think about that feeling of awe like something that's more important than anything else in the world to you You might have felt a little bit of that reading a novel or seeing a film or seeing a beautiful painting or sculpture and you might ask what kind of game would it have to be to evoke that feeling And what does that game look like?