I wasn't born, I was engineered in a /r9k/ laboratory.


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“You’d have these conversations where you’d be sitting in a design review and somebody’d say ‘that’s not realistic.’ And you’re like, ‘okay, what does that have – like, explain to me why that’s interesting.’ Because in the real world, I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy, I have never thought to myself that realism is fun. I go play games to have fun. And so we had to come up with some notion of what fun was. We knew it was an ad hoc definition, and it was the degrees to which the game recognizes and responded to the players’ choices and actions, right? In behavioral science, you would say ‘we were explicitly talking about what were reinforces and what the reinforcement schedules were.’ Right? At that point in time, that was a useful way of making design decisions. The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it, to me, it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I’m getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. To me, I was trying to convey to the user a sense of yes, you were making choices. Yes, you were progressing, which means the game had to acknowledge that back view. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you kill a bunch of marines, the marines have to run away from you. Right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you’ve made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact.” - Gabe Newell