Braid (8) (quotes)

其實我文章都跳著看，因為太多了。剛剛總算把
What We All Missed About Braid
看完，實在有太多東西想 quotes 了... XD
只能說作者很多想法跟我很接近...
打完了，也有興趣想知道 Blow 在想什麼，這篇一定要看。
唔，已經不是引用，是文摘了 XD 而且為了避免摘太多，
有些地方有點斷章取義... 所以應該當成畫線才對 @@

You could make a very focused exploration game,
that was about player creativity and exploration.
But then it wouldn't have these very meticulous
scientific kinds of puzzles in it, that Braid has.

[...]

but I was a double-major in Computer Science and
English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to
school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically,
the entire bachelor's degree in English is all
about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which
was my other major, was exactly the opposite of
that. You had to know what you were doing, and you
had to know what you were talking about.

[...]

I feel that a lot of people are a little bit too
quick to take concrete bits of evidence that they
find and that they recognize, and to use those to
create a definitive explanation of everything and
to bend all other facts to fit that explanation.
Whereas, why didn't you take those facts that you
found and bend those facts to fit other facts to
make another explanation?

[...]

One of my main interests in writing stories was in
finding truth, like fundamental truths of the
universe, or finding important things.

[...]

because in a game, you have to create a simulated
universe that works according to some rules.
Especially the way Braid is constructed. It has to
be intact as a place that has laws, and consistency.

[...]

I can't make any puzzle that I want that has any
arbitrary answer, because it won't work in the
context of the rest of the game.

[...]

People say, "Braid is about a ***," or whatever.
I've had *** in my past, but I wouldn't go so far
as to spend three years making a game about a ***
and forcing everybody to play it. It means more to
me than that. A lot more.

[...]

The part of the game that is deepest buried in the
puzzles was a process of exploration for me.

[...]

and then my design process was, how do I put this
into puzzle-form, to illustrate these ideas as
clearly and as minimally as I can? So that was a
sharing-cool-ideas kind of thing.

[...]

For me, the meaning of the fiction is very, very
closely related to what you're doing from minute
to minute in the game. And I think that somebody
out there will understand that.

[...]

It's important enough to me that I spent three and
a half years of my life trying to express it.

[...]

Traveling through space is traveling through time
in World 4. And the reason is, it brings to light
again some of these existential questions that
really bother some people who are up on the latest
physics and things

[...]

And a lot of people didn't want to think in the
scientific way, and thereby excluded themselves
from the most relevant discussions of the meaning
of our world that are possible right now.

[...]

So philosophy for all of time has concerned itself
with existential issues.

[...]

some people are paying attention, and some people
are not. And Braid is trying to occupy that middle
space, where it's paying attention, and also not
paying attention.

[...]

That was my early idea of how to explore a
fundamental law of quantum mechanics that appears
to be true, which is that there is no arrow of
time at the quantum mechanical level.

[...]

and we don't know why there didn't evolve a
mechanism that can remember what happens tomorrow
as well as what happens yesterday. [According to]
the fundamental law of the universe, there doesn't
appear to be any reason why that's impossible.
But if you think about what that means, it starts
to threaten our very existence. Because everything
that we think about, everything that we do every
day, is predicated on this idea that we can choose
things. And that the future isn't written yet.

[...]

There's a way in which anyone who's postulating
about free will, who doesn't know quantum
mechanics, is just talking out their ass. Because
they don't have the facts, [and] we have a lot
more facts now.

[...]

The reason [Braid] is an exploration of time and
space is because there are things that seem to be
facts about time and space, that threaten our very
existence.

[...]

Or having someone who we're infatuated with, or
who we're in love with, or who we're pursuing,
with a kind of feeling of urgency that maybe gets
confused with the kind of feeling of urgency we
might have if we're trying to understand the world
and what the world's about. And maybe those two
things become mixed, and it becomes hard to separate
the human existence from the scientific existence.
That's why both of those things are in Braid.

[...]

You have to understand a lot of things, like
whether it's physics or chemistry or even computer
science, anything like that. There's a lot of
stuff you have to know, and a lot of things you
have to study. And you have to be determined to
get to that borderline of current knowledge, in
order to go past that. There is that personality
that has a burning desire to know, to pursue what
is the truth of the universe that we live in.
And so one of the juxtapositions in Braid is that
pursuit of the emotional, of the human level –
whatever we are driven to pursue as interacting,
emotional beings, and what certain people are
driven to pursue as physical, mental, scientific
beings that inhabit this universe that we're in.
And how do we resolve those two very different
kinds of existence? How do we make sense of them?

所以 Braid 其實是在說一種追尋（exploration），
對各種事物的追尋，哈哈。

… One belief that a lot of people have is, "Oh,
I'm just born, and there's somebody out there,
there's the one who's meant for me. And I'm going
to meet them in my life, and then we're going to
be happy forever." But you could start being
scientific, and start debunking that. If the one
for you is a random person and they're born
anywhere in the world, then you're never going to
meet them, right? Or they're going to die of
scurvy or something. (Laughs)

[...]

This is the sphere of thought that the game came
out of, which is, how do we resolve the fact that
we exist, and what appear to be the higher-level
properties of the world – emotionally and
physically – with these facts that seem to say we
can't really exist, or that it's a great mystery
how we exist, and that if we do exist, it doesn't
mean what we think it means?

[...]

The same sort of thing that drives somebody to
study physics for 30 years, so they can discover a
new particle. Just so they can know something more
about the world. I have that same personality, but
I didn't end up in physics. I ended up in game design.

果然多少都有點偏執狂的味道在吧 XD 不幸的是我多少也有..?
[...]

And that's part of what I'm doing when I design a
game, is that I'm exploring the universe in a
certain way. I'm trying to understand true things
about it, or to uncover things about it, in ways
again that are less bullshitty than just writing
words on a paper. Because somehow, and I could be
totally fooling myself about this, but I believe
that somehow, there is something more meaningful
about creating a system. Because the universe is a
system, of some kind. And writing is not a system.