Game designers

"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt."

"While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins."

"One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in a campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT."

"Hello Fry, it's a ... *[stops mid-sentence, throws a D20 and a D6]* pleasure to meet you."

"One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!"

"Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game."

"The idea that a game is anything more than a game… You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard."

"In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while."

"The new D&D is too rule intensive. It's relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It's done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good."

"The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally."

"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

"Pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games."

"The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things."

"There is no intimacy; it’s not live. [he said of online games] It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better.""

"I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents."

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them ... He really enjoyed that."

"Challenge for the player is the most important thing. In the Mario games for example, the player can go back and try to finish the game without collecting a single coin. I think great video games are like favorite playgrounds, places you become attached to and go back to again and again. Wouldn't it be great to have a whole drawer full of "playgrounds" right at your fingertips?"

"A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

"I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play."

"A game that keeps a smile on the player's face is a wonderful thing. Nintendo's theme for 2006 will be "Create new fun". Spread the fun of games to everyone. To do this, we must return to the beginning, to recapture the essence that made people who enjoy games even now enjoy them in the first place."

"Any new media or industry that grows rapidly is going to be criticized. That's just because the older, more established media have been around, and a lot of adults can be very conservative. They may not have an open mind to new things that weren't around when they were growing up, and are replacing the things they grew up with... over the years I've seen this standard image of a child playing a video game in which the child is alone in a darkened room, with his face very close to the TV, with the light of the TV reflecting off his face, holding the controller and just staring at the TV. I'd really like to be able to change that image of video games into something that's a little more positive."

"Games are a trigger for adults to again become primitive, primal, as a way of thinking and remembering. An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals, that's all. When I am a child, creating, I am not creating a game. I am in the game. The game is not for children, it is for me. It is for an adult who still has a character of a child."

"I don't know what Mario will look like next; maybe he will wear metallic clothing with a red hat."

"I don't like all the attention. I think it's better to let my work do the talking."

"The PSP will not be able to display anything that you cannot do on a current system."

"What if everything that you see, is more than what you see? The person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it or accept that there is more to the world than you think. Perhaps it is really a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things."

"Necessity is the mother of invention. I love solving things like that. Because there wasn't enough memory, thinking of an economical way to make the movements look right was like solving a puzzle, and I had a lot of fun."

"So you know cats are interesting. They are kind of like girls. If they come and talk to you it's great. But if you try to talk to them it doesn't always go so well."

"It isn't about "games", for me, personally, and it never really was. It was about creating something- anything- far bigger than yourself."

"When we’re doing an action game, we make the second level first. We begin making level 1 once everything else is completed."

"If you release a game in a bad state, you will always regret it."

"I think the first is that a game needs a sense of accomplishment. And you have to have a sense that you have done something, so that you get a sense of satisfaction of completing something. When I approach the design of my games, what I have to think about is how I'm showing a situation to a player, conveying to them what they're supposed to do. In Mario you keep going to the right to reach your end goal. In Donkey Kong you keep climbing up to rescue the captured princess. The last is the immersive quality of the game being able to feel it's a world you're immersed in, that you've become a hero. That you've become brave. Even if you're actually crying."

"Controller is so intuitive, even your mom can play."

"I would say the games that we're working on now, like the new Zelda: Twilight Princess, have hardcore content. And if you look at the Revolution's controllers, there's a nunchaku-style controller expansion that's really well suited to first-person shooters."

"Originally, I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software. If we hadn't used NAND flash memory [to store data such as games and photos] and other pricey parts, we might have succeeded."

"It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out -- the Network play -- there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it."

"Doom 2 is just such a bigger, badder, better version of Doom"

"Design is Law"

"John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch."

"Suck it Down."

"Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement."

"It almost feels like a zombie at this point; it's the walking dead. It's such an abrupt end to what was E3, which had been this huge escalating arms race....Right now we're in this kind of dicey, do we have an event, what event is it, which one do we go to? I think we're in an uncomfortable transition zone when really the real E3 died a couple of years ago.""

"In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space."

"The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents."

"“Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?” “Got a problem.” “A big one?” “Female human-sized.”"

"The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.”"

"Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right."

"Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care. Unfortunately, they were mistaken."

"I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else."

"As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies."

"“Didn’t I have you executed last week?” “I very much doubt. It.”"

"“I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton? A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?” Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”"

"Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote."

"“Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. “Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable; sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!”"

"“Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly. “No, sir.” “Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know.”"

"“We have a problem, sir.” “What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems—that’s the enemy’s job!”"

"Time travel destabilizes history. History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order."

"“I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”"

"Unfortunately, it appeared that she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win."

"Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence."

"True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism."

"“They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.”"

"A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless."

"It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse."

"Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable."

"“But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked. “Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.” “But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!” Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?” “Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?” “It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.” “But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively. “Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.” “But, terrorists!” “Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered."

"The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?"

"“Will you stop calling me a child!” Rachel hunched around in her chair and stared at him. “But you are, you know. Even if you were sixty years old, you’d still be a child to me. As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you’re a child. You could fuck your way through every brothel in New Prague, and you’d still be an overgrown schoolboy.” She looked at him sadly. “What would you call a parent who never let their children grow up? That’s what we think of your government.”"

"“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.”"

"Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it."

"You got overdraft at the mythology bank."

"And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene."

"“He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe—shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction.”"

"Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess."

"Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance."

"Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun."

"New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason—they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs)."

"I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries."

"It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice."

"People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions."

"I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like."

"The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It’s all over! Except it also felt like...like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa’s ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history."

"Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity)—and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so."

"“Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It’s about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is.” A wan smile crept across her face. “Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess.”"

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

"“Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?” “Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”"

"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..."

"Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games."

"He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds."

"Annette’s communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School."

"“I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!”"

"His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power."

"She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way."

"Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death—with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights—will become the biggest civil rights issue of all."

"Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn’t work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she’s certain she’ll end up making a scene again. Amber’s tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom’s forcing this shit on her—it’s always hard to tell with Mom—things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution."

"A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)"

"Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?"

"Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy."

"“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”"

"Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?"

"Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts."

"“You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods. “What was it like then?” “What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay.”"

"“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”"

"She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality."

"“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –” “Manfred?” He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly."

"“Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “I’m not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.”"

"But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we?"

"Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?"

"The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else."

"“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.”"

"“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.’”"

"A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls."

"Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms."

"I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist."

"In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them."

"I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs."

"The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used."

"If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty."

"I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!"

"Can I remember— “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter."

"You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else."

"Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything."

"“Bad day at the office?” “It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”"

"Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right."

"You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously."

"It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?"

"“You have an evil mind!” “And this is a bad thing how, exactly?”"

"Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder."

"There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse."

"I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest."

"Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers."

"Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction."

"Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into the cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world."

"“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?” She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”"

"The number one crime in any age: offending the money."

"Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that? Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that."

"See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes."

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."

"It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it."

"The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law. Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired."

"Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away."

"Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace."

"Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave."

"You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist."

"Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising."

"Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties."

"Truly the jaws of irony are agape!"

"“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”"

"Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal."

"Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it."

"You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in."

"But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done."

"You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith."

"Perforce, the family that preys together stays together."

"I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull."

"“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience...In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will. “In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”"

"“Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example...have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person."

"Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild."

"Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid."

"I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions."

"’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,"

"Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead."

"Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)"

"This is rural England, after all; please set your watches back thirty years…"

"I may not be a hero, but I'm not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part."

"Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department."

"“Am I making myself clear?” I sit down again. “Yes, for very bureaucratic values of clear.”"

"“Fred was a waste of airspace and one of the most powerful bogon emitters in the Laundry.” “Bogons?” “Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again. Hacker folklore—”"

"I don’t hate him—he’s just a bore but that isn’t a capital offense. Usually."

"My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida’s influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the “in” herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen."

"I hate it when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life."

"Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he’s finished annoying you?"

"“Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy,” says Alan. “Any more compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our friends?”"

"Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off?"

"I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work."

"Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position."

"Some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students."

"I’m only twenty-eight: I’m too young to die and too old to drive fast."

"PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon behind the computer has something significant to say. It’s the tool of choice for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they’re in command of the job, with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that’s just scratching the surface..."

"I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way."

"“They’ve sicced a demon on me.” “Jesus, Bob.” “Yeah, well, He isn’t answering the phone.”"

"Not only is the past another country, it’s one that doesn’t issue visas."

"I’m still wearing my shoes, I realize. And I’m still wearing this fucking suit. I didn’t even take it off for the flight—I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie’s snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they’re not throttling their victims."

"In this line of work, too much paranoia can be worse than too little."

"They’re nuts. Completely insane! I don’t get this gambling thing. Didn’t these people study statistics at university? Evidently not..."

"My stomach flip-flops. No electronics? That’s heavy. In fact it’s more than heavy: to compute is to be, and all that. I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies."

"Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off."

"Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry."

"He gestures at a skeletal contraption of chromed steel and thin, black leather that only Le Corbusier could have mistaken for a chair: “Have a seat.”"

"He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince. But instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there’s much difference.)"

"I stare longingly at the bare chunk of space on the desktop. There may be a keyboard stitched into the lining of my cummerbund, but without a machine to plug it into it’s about as much use as a chocolate hacksaw."

"“It’s top of the range.” She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it’s still there: “This baby’s got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence™ middle-ware cluster‡ connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe.”"

"Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to...well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep."

"The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors."

"“Watch out for any signs—anything, however small—that suggests Billington isn’t in the driving seat, if you follow my drift. Got that?” Mo stares at him. “You think he’s possessed?” “I didn’t say that.” Alan shakes his head. “Once you start asking which captains of industry are being controlled by alien soul-sucking monsters from another dimension, why, anything might happen.”"

"It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization."

"“Why are you trying to shoot that cat?” ”Because—” I squeeze off another shot “—it’s possessed!”... Mo turns and looks at me harshly. “That looked just like a perfectly ordinary cat to me. If you’ve—” “It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!” I gabble. “The clue—he saw a laser dot and dodged—”"

"I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting—to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once it explained it to me."

"The literary James Bond is a creation of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic."

"Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes."

"There can be only one true religion. Are you feeling lucky, believer? Like the majority of ordinary British citizens, I used to be a good old-fashioned atheist, secure in my conviction that folks who believed—in angels and demons, supernatural manifestations and demiurges, snake-fondling and babbling in tongues and the world being only a few thousand years old—were all superstitious idiots. It was a conviction encouraged by every crazy news item from the Middle East, every ludicrous White House prayer breakfast on the TV. But then I was recruited by the Laundry, and learned better. I wish I could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism; it’s so much less unpleasant than the One True Religion. The truth won’t make your Baby Jesus cry because, sad to say, there ain’t no such Son of God. Moses may have taken two tablets before breakfast, but there was nobody home to listen to the prayers of the victims of the Shoah. The guardians of the Kaaba have got the world’s best tourism racket running, the Dalai Lama isn’t anybody’s reincarnation, Zeus is out to lunch, and you really don’t want me to start on the neo-pagans. However, there is a God out there—vast and ancient and infinitely powerful—and I know the name of this God. I know the path you have to walk down to be one with this God. I know his secret rituals and the correct form of prayer and his portents and signs. I have studied the ancient writings of his prophets and followers in person, not simply relying on the classified digests in the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and the background briefings for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself."

"The Laundry is the British Government’s secret agency for dealing with “magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so “magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the...things...that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job—applied computational demonologist—comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don’t survive to claim it."

"Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager."

"Unfortunately it’s also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry."

"People tend to underestimate him on first acquaintance. It’s a mistake they only make once. Whether or not they survive."

"“Here, take this. How about a toast? Confusion to the enemy!” I raise my glass. “What enemy?” He shrugs: “IT, Human Resources, the grim march of time—whoever you want, really.”"

"She’s half-past overdrawn at the bank of life."

"Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive."

"The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you."

"But who cares? That is, indeed, the big-ticket question."

"You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop—calculating machines, in other words—tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way. We’ve unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency—always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic’s great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences--or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing."

"Let’s just say that you can’t always trust the historical record and move swiftly on."

"On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me."

"It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose."

"Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on."

"I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly."

"I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist. Consequently, I’d much rather dismiss theology and religious belief as superstitious rubbish. My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism...except that I know too much. See, we did evolve more or less randomly. And the little corner of the universe we live in is 13.73 billion years old, not 5,000 years old. And there’s no omnipotent, omniscient, invisible sky daddy in the frame for the problem of pain. So far so good: I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist. Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren’t normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones...aren’t friendly. (See? I told you I’d rather be an atheist!)"

"If there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned."

"There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat. These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's-a-Rolex brigade. (This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives, are selfish, but these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me). There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you. It's petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families. Dad's a dictator, Mum's henpecked, and the kids keep quiet if they know what's good for them—all the while soaking up the lesson that mindless obedience is the one safe course of action. These kids often rescue themselves, but some of them don't. They grow up to be thugs, insecure and terrified of uncertainty, intolerant and unable to handle back-chat, willing to use violence to get what they want. Let me draw you a Venn diagram with the two circles on it, denoting set of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade the intersecting area in a different color, and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its own, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity—but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers. There is a third philosophy by which—thankfully—only a tiny minority of people live their lives. It's a bit harder to sum up, but it begins like this: in the beginning was the endless void, and the void spawned the Elder things, and we were created to be their slaves, and they're going to return to Earth in the near future, and it is only by willingly subordinating ourselves to their merest whim that we can hope to survive— Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in the deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters."

"Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up."

"Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising. This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence."

"I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements."

"Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun."

"Time is the one thing money can’t buy."

"What price an immortal soul, when booty beckons?"

"Ninety-eight percent of management work in this organization is routine. The other two percent is a tightrope walk over an erupting volcano without a safety net. Congratulations: here’s your balance pole."

"Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon."

"“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”"

"We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong."

"“What about religion?” “Religion is power, to these people. And power is religion, of course. If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? The real believers are running soup kitchens and emptying bedpans, trying to do good while the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel are doing it to keep up the payments on the McMansion and the Roller.”"

"“What if he is a true believer, have you thought about that?” “A true believer in what? The prosperity gospel? New Republican Jesus who rewards his faithful flock for their faith with the ability to make money fast? That’s self-serving cant, and you know it. Wish-fulfillment as religion.” A twitch of the cheek: Persephone unamused. “Don’t get me started on the gap between the Vatican and their flock.”"

"Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it?"

"“There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re trying to summon up the elder gods.”"

"Suppose rather than passing the plate in church, they get a radio show and pass the plate and half a million listeners donate. Isn’t that going to convince a preacher that it’s all true? Wealth comes to the faithful, that’s the message they’re going to take. An’ I never yet met a con man who wasn’t the better at the job for believing his own spiel.” “That’s not…untrue. But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it. He might have started out as a true believer, but money has a way of taking over. A church is a business, after all, and those employees or executives who are good at raising money are promoted by their fellows.”"

"Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by jet lag."

"I’m stranded in limbo, otherwise known as downtown Denver."

"There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away."

"Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced."

"Sometimes people do good things for bad reasons, and sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. He isn’t sure which this is yet, but he’s hoping for the former."

"I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)"

"We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion."

"“Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.” “But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”"

"“I was hoping you might be able to help me with a question of character.” “Character.” Angleton doesn’t seem at all put out by Lockhart’s refusal; he leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “There’s a word I don’t hear often enough these days. Especially coming from you.” “Of course not.” Lockhart is dismissive. “It’s a subjective value judgment and those don’t sit comfortably with ticky-boxes and objective performance metrics.”"

"A man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels."

"They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time."

"I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad."

"They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob."

"I do something I never do in hotel rooms, which is to pick up the TV remote for a purpose other than hammering the “off” button."

"I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience."

"“Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.” “Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”"

"It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake."

"The trouble with godheads, in Johnny’s experience, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God. Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift. And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings. So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality. Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor."

"The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue."

"Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology."

"Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates."

"I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there."

"You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default."

"Vampires can’t exist. There’d be detailed records in the archives; they couldn’t possibly evade detection by the state for any significant period. Besides which...there’d be corpses everywhere. Human blood is a poor nutrient source; it’s about 60 percent plasma by volume and only provides about 900 calories per liter, so your hypothetical blood-sucking fiend is going to have to drink about two and a half liters per day. Those calories don’t come in the form of useful stuff like glucose and fat: it’s mostly protein from circulating red blood cells. Dracula would have to exsanguinate a victim every day just to stay alive, and would suffer from chronic ketoacidosis. The total number of intentional homicides for the whole country is around 700 a year; a single vampire would cause a 50 percent spike in the murder rate. Or they’d have to take transfusion-sized donations about two thousand times a year."

"One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information."

"Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion."

"Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money."

"The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up."

"Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate."

"I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted."

"We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty."

"“But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?” “I can think of several.” I cross my legs. “Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible.”"

"Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all."

"Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity."

"(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))"

"The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage..."

"Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way."

"If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic."

"It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle."

"Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction."

"If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures."

"And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?"

"“I imagine looking after a sixteen-year-old must be a bit of a headache. ”“Oh, it’s mostly about building trust. She’s still in the ugh, parents, uncool stage, but she’s self-aware enough to know that it’s just something she’s going through. So I’m trying to give her enough space that she doesn’t feel the need to burn bridges she might want to maintain later. The best thing you can do is provide them with a support framework rather than a cage. Don’t try to micromanage and overprotect them, let them know they can come to you when they’ve got problems, and as long as they’ve got a reasonably level head, that’s what they’ll do.” He pauses. “And I try to keep a poker face whenever she introduces me to a boyfriend.”"

"The American mainstream news media have so far steered well clear of the subject because the phenomenon has been enthusiastically embraced by the talk radio fringe, leading to a death spiral of diminishing credibility."

"“I’m disappointed in you, Mo: How could you imagine that the militarization of the police might be seen as a huge potential growth market by defense contractors?” “How indeed.”"

"There is no point in prioritizing doing your job when your organization faces being defunded in less than three months’ time if you don’t do something else: you do what’s necessary in order to ensure your organization survives, then you get back to work. (This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.)"

"“The HomeSec’s focus group will take one look at this and tell you to sex it up.”... “Why do you think that’ll be a priority?” she asks. “You know perfectly well why—...For the same reason they want a balanced team rather than a competent one. It doesn’t fit the cultural agenda they’re trying to impose.”"

"“Is the weather always like this?” “It could be worse. They could be looking at relocating to Manchester, where the locals are evolving webbed fingers and gill slits.”"

"We, the structures we collectively refer to as “life,” are patterns of information—temporary reversals of the arrow of entropy within our universe—and conscious minds are the most concentrated such patterns we know of."

"There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull."

"Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking."

"“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?” Alex asks, rising. “Something like that. But there’s a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.”"

"In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die. To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings."

"This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fog bank of the uncertain future."

"Her heart pounds. Dating, with its conventions of multiple social encounters as a prelude to fucking, seems absurdly complex to her, like cooking your own food rather than having servants and poison-testers prepare it for you."

"She has only warped second-hand memories of motion pictures, none of them her own. It seems like a fantastically unproductive use of her time with Alex, staring vacantly at an elaborate visual lie."

"Y2K was a real end-of-civilization problem. And the people who could deal with it treated it as such, working flat-out on disaster management for the last year-long countdown. With the result that the end-of-the-world scenario didn’t happen…causing everyone not directly involved to conclude that it was a false alarm."

"We’re from the Ministry of Defense: our sense of humor is surgically excised at birth."

"“What happens if we don’t do this?” “I don’t know. Probably we don’t die. I mean, maybe probably. Possibly maybe probably.”"

"She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth."

"You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now."

"It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause."

"When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fracking for oil in the basement."

"Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ grinder a memo.”"

"Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece."

"Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching."

"But all these mitigating techniques have severe drawbacks, and as a result there are old ritual magicians, and there are bold ritual magicians, but there are no old, bold magicians. They don’t survive, and they tend to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principle of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable."

"The iron law of bureaucracy doesn’t help: everybody working to ensure that the organization continues to pay them a salary, rather than necessarily achieving its objectives."

"Governments are machines for producing and implementing legal frameworks."

"And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies:"

"“No, Bob,” she says tiredly, “mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there’ll be an argument, and it’ll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers.”"

"I don’t understand exactly what she thinks we need to talk about, but maybe that’s half the problem."

"I don’t get enough practice at killing people to not feel bad about it; I hope I never do, although that’s looking like a forlorn wish these days."

"I hate guns. I can use them, but I don’t like being around them; they add this terrible random-act-of-no-god-at-all angle to any fight. Bang, you’re dead, even if you weren’t the person the shooter was aiming for, even if it’s an accidental discharge."

"Listen, there’s nothing corrupt about it. At least there’s nothing provably corrupt about the way outsourcing contracts are handled. That’s because corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there? All of this happens very discreetly. Air gaps, Chinese walls, and plausible deniability are baked into the process. But the general pattern is out in the open for those with eyes to see. First, identify a department with an essential function or significant capital assets on the books. Second, define ambitious performance targets they can’t possibly meet with the resources available, hire a bunch of nonexec directors to “provide valuable insights from the private sector” to the board, and in case that’s not enough, cut the budget until they fail to perform. Third, the minister moves on and a new minister parachutes in, with lots of heroic rhetoric about radical change and accountability. Fourth, the nonexec directors leave, returning to their private sector posts with the large outsourcing company they originally came from, taking with them everything they’ve learned about how the agency is run. Fifthly and finally, the work is put out to public tender, and the usual outsourcing contractors, who now know how the agency works in intimate detail, make a – surprise! – winning bid. Finally, the usual suspects show up on the golf course a year or two later and buy trebles all around. What greases the wheels is that the capital assets managed by the agency are transferred to the new owners, thus taking them off the government’s books, thereby thinning the property portfolio the Crown can borrow against. It looks good to get all that debt off the balance sheet. Meanwhile, tax revenue continues to roll in and some of it is now siphoned off to rent back the former government assets. You might think, “That’s insanely inefficient!” and you would be right. But you’re not seeing it through the wonderful rose-tinted lenses of high finance. Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn."

"GP services (and other companies) have been lobbying Congress to privatize the US Postal Service for years now. There are any number of beneficiaries: the private parcel carrier services, the phone and cable networks and internet service providers, and the obvious corporate interests who can do without the nonprofit competition. And there are any number of politicians who can make political hay by being seen to cut government spending on a basic infrastructure service that doesn’t turn a profit and that isn’t able to defend itself politically. Nothing has officially happened yet – the inertia of the US government is astonishing – but it’s obvious that the fix is in: too many people want the post office to die."

"Well, incoming fire has right of way, as they say."

"I’ve finally done it, I’ve broken something that shouldn’t have been broken, and I’m really not sure who the monsters are anymore."

"He’s found a teapot and milk and is brewing up, because that’s what the English do when they’ve just broken out of military prison one jump ahead of murderous assassins from an alien death god cult, then survived being shot at by a main battle tank."

"It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window."

"Mhari consults her conscience and takes another step into the twilight borderland between bending the rules and breaking them."

"It’s the sort of Maxwell Smart hack that used to cost the CIA black budget half a billion to develop in the ’60s but is off-the-shelf from a Chinese toy factory these days."

"Lord Acton said power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

"What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange."

"Venous blood isn’t really blue. In lipstick terms it’s dark plum, not crimson gloss."

"“We need to deal with the Jews, you know,” Fabian confides, then pauses dramatically. This is new and unwelcome, and more than somewhat worrying. (I knew the PM held some rather extreme views, but this level of forthright anti-Semitism is unexpected.) “May I ask why?” I ask hesitantly. “I’d have thought it was obvious!” He sniffs. “All that charitable work. Loaves and fishes, good Samaritans, y’know. Sermon on the Mount stuff. Can’t be doing with it—” Beside me, Chris Womack risks interrupting his flow: “Don’t you mean Christians, sir?” “—And all those suicide bombers. Blowing people up in the name of their god, but can’t choke down a bacon roll. Can’t be doing with them: you mark my words, they’ll have to be dealt with!” Across the room, Vikram Choudhury nearly swallows his tongue. Chris persists: “But those are Mus—” “—All Jews!” the Prime Minister snaps. “They’re just the same from where I’m standing.” His expression is one of tight-lipped disapproval—then I blink, and in the time it takes before my eyelids open again, I forget his face. He sips delicately from his teacup, pinky crooked, then explains his thinking. “Christians, Muslims, Jews—they say they’re different religions, but you mark my words, they all worship the same god, and you know what that leads to if you let it fester. Monotheism is nothing but trouble—unless the one true god is me, of course.”"

"The British ruling class was never noted for its expertise in haut cuisine. Rumors that they conquered a quarter of the planet in search of a decent meal cannot be discounted."

"A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer."

"Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or second chances."

"Shopping is the true religion of Middle America, and this Walmart is the most eclectic of mega-churches, perpetually understaffed and a bit unkempt, with stock flowing off the shelves and piles of stripped packaging forming cardboard snow drifts in corners."

"I’ve never been so frightened for somebody in my life: I felt totally powerless. You can’t punch extradimensional parasites out of your boyfriend’s brain."

"The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think. At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago—although I’m still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist’s test-tube collection, I’d be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity—but in reality I’m what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Leviathan’s Representative."

"He’s had a lot of practice helping families suffering from experiences that are simultaneously mundane and far more horrifying than anything in a movie: deaths from cancer and dementia, the loss of babies and young children, that sort of thing."

"Contingency time is useless wasted time, right until you need it."

"History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator."

"His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”"

"“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. “How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning. “All of it!” Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn’t come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug— “How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete. “Only three times! It kept running out!” Brains glances at the vicar. “Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs."

"Anxiety loves company almost as much as misery."

"I’m not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to—I’m allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes."

"American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy."

"We’re enveloped by a cortege of motorcycle outriders and blacked-out SUVs so ostentatious that Her Majesty would die of embarrassment if they tried it on her back home. We are so visible I have to fight the urge to crouch down in my seat—but then I realize here in DC your importance is telegraphed by the size of the gridlock in your wake."

"I’ve known all along I’m not qualified for this—it’s not really imposter syndrome if you really are a fake."

"Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced."

"This, obviously, is a fallacious argument. That same negative evidence can used to "prove" that molemen from beneath the surface of the earth have perpetrated these murders. The fact that the molemen have left no evidence behind proves how good they are at remaining hidden. That no sewer or road building projects have ever cut across their tunnels proves that politicians and engineers and other professionals are in league with the molemen. Just as obviously, anyone who denies the molemen exist is either in league with them, or is a fool who cannot see the end coming."

"In reality, a person questioning the existence of the Satanic conspiracy is merely pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In that case, one can understand why the emperor's tailors get upset and suggest the person doing the pointing is a tool of the devil. Then the question comes down to one of whether the crowd will believe the evidence they have before them, or if they will buy into the tailors' fantasies."

"J. D. Salinger has suggested that authors should be known for their work, not themselves, and in this I concur. It’s not that I want to be a hermit, but I do want to maintain some privacy for myself and my sanity."

"Most of the writers I know come from a variety of backgrounds: history, journalism, engineering, physics. The common element here is not what you study, but the fact that you learn how to study, to do research, and to synthesize new ideas out of old. The soul of science fiction, and perhaps even all fiction, is to look at a situation and ask, “what would happen if….” Change some variables and see how that makes people react to the situation. So, getting yourself a good grounding in any field of study will supply you with a great background wealth of material to use to build your stories. Then you really just need to start writing and keep writing. Writing is a skills-based endeavor and there is no easy way to become successful at it. Writers write."

"“You won’t get away with it. Heimdall has to have seen what you did, and what you have been doing. He knows you have been masquerading as me. He will expose you.” “Ha!” I stood and looked down upon him. “Heimdall spends every hour of every day watching the programming on over five hundred television stations. Even a god cannot escape transformation into a drooling idiot when subjected to that much television.”"

"When it comes to computer games, many academics seem to be one step down from judges in their lack of engagement with the real world."

"I'd take over World of Warcraft and I'd close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries. Er, I would get to do this anonymously, wouldn't I?"

"If anyone samples this for a hardcore techno dance track I shall expect a royalty."

"But the cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't. (23 March 2008)"

"Well, here goes. I LIKE those areas of hentai which depict acts that aren't illegal or sexually deviant. I LIKE seeing pictures of tits. I LIKE to drop momentarily into a little fantasy world where everyone is beautiful and blowjobs are offered in return for fixing the sink. And why not? I'm 100% red hot hunk of man, and all men like watching boobies jiggling around, when they're not lifting weights, grunting and messing around under the bonnets of expensive cars (the men, that is, not the boobies). So there. I've said it. I like hentai. Poo on you. (20 October 2003: Hentaising )"

"It all smacks of trying to have your cake and eat it, although I’ve never understood that phrase. I don’t know what else you could do with a cake. Hold doors open, maybe. (6 March 2006)"

"Rips in the space time continuum look a lot like vaginas. (19 April 2006)"

"Piss poo dangly shit arse fuck wee....Fuck cunt willy willy wank piss mung. (26 November 2004)"

"When you think about it, when you overlook the ingrained taboos of society and think for your own fucking self for once, it doesn't make much sense that murder is illegal when we still have no idea what death IS, exactly. For all we know the human body is merely a stopping-off point where we learn wisdom and patience in preparation for the next, ultimate state of existence, beings of pure light, at one with the universe and with minds encompassing a thousand galaxies. And for all we know, you only get to do all this if you die before you turn 40. In that case, being murdered could be the greatest thing anyone ever does for you. (5 October 2004)"

"What was your favourite single player Quake level? One of the forty identical greenish-brown castles or one of the forty identical brownish-green castles? (2 December 2004)"

"And then we come to the physics engine. Oh, the physics engine, for which so much praise has been sung. What they say is all true. It is fantastic the way you can pick up boxes, the way they fall, the way they tip over, the way they smash into bits when you hit them. (On Half-Life 2, 26 November 2004)"

"I know you can argue that the player is supposed to project themselves onto Freeman, but if that's the case, why give him a name? A backstory? An iconic appearance? All the other characters have known him for years, we can't really project ourselves because Freeman has a known history and reputation. Hell, he's the fucking messiah figure for the oppressed masses. (13 July 2006)"

"Starring Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, The Slightly Mannish Woman and A Big Keanu-Reeves Shaped Piece Of Wood! (On the Matrix Reloaded, 24 June 2003)"

"Yes, I have been harvested by mainstream media for whatever time remains for television to still be called 'mainstream' before the internet destroys it once and for all. (14 February 2008)"

"Games with ragdoll death animations just make it look even more ridiculous. One moment an enemy is strafing and firing at full speed, the next his entire body just goes limp like Mr. Scotty teleported his skeleton out of his body or something. (19 July 2007)"

"So I finally sold out and bought an Ipod the other day. I haven't sold out to the point that I'd spell it with a lower case I and a capital P like the makers insist upon, though. (5 June 2007)"

"You couldn't make this any smaller without needing a sewing needle and magnifying glass to work it. I'm tempted to see if I can swallow it, and belch the White Album all the way home. (On his iPod Shuffle, 5 June 2007)"

"All I can say is this: either every single member of that army had been promised a blow job of the Gods as soon as they got their queen back, or the Greeks invented brainwashing. (On the Greeks and the Trojan War, 31 May 2004)"

"Yeah, I haven't updated in a while. What are you going to do about it, motherfucker? Oh yeah, you know your place. (17 June 2006)"

"Today marks the completion of my twenty-third year on this foetid planet. Who would have thought I'd make it this long without dying of mercury poisoning or swallowing my own tongue or something like that. (24 May 2006)"

"I haven't really commented on the whole Steve Irwin thing. Since I live in the country he arguably embodied this seems like a tragic oversight. I mean, he was Australian, I live in Australia, he wrestled crocodiles, I pick my nose a lot, it was like losing a little part of me or something. But when that stingray broke his little heart and a nation was united in grief - or at least a media was - I kept conspicuously silent. I even had some prepared witticisms I could have used, like "I bet the crocodiles are pissed off that they never got around to it first" or "The guy who went for 'stingray' in the 'animal by which Steve Irwin will one day be killed' betting pool is pretty fucking happy right now". (16 October 2006)"

"The 'wemon' is a shy creature and bathrooms offer it comfort by reminding it of its native Sweden! Try to lure it out with a few styrofoam packing peanuts and scratch it gently behind the ears. (5 October 2005)"

"I'd just like to point out that Billy Joel looks like the result of a depraved breeding experiment between Ringo Starr and the tall bloke from Everybody Loves Raymond. (7 July 2004)"

"God damn X-Entertainment. God damn it for being so god damn interesting that I'd rather sit reading their god damn articles when I should be doing some god damn work. God damn them. God damn the doctor for putting me on these god damn pills that make me god damn drowsy and fucked up all god damn morning. God damn everything. Then god damn god damning. (18 August 2004)"

"Christians are a funny lot, aren't they? It doesn't seem to matter what their God does, they'll just keep on loving him regardless. (8 November 2003)"

"I am a consumer, part of the system of capitalism. To the corporations that control our lives, I am nothing but a huge mouth wearing designer jeans, just one of billions, to be cajoled or threatened with advertising into giving my money to people who already have too much. Although I vocally consider this a despicable state of affairs, I buy their loveless food and wear their manufactured garments. I am simultaneously antagonist and component. (7 October 2003)"

"Bush wouldn't be so bad if it was just him jumping up and down on the corpse of international diplomacy, but we've got Blair as well, kneeling behind him and rhythmically planting a kiss on each buttock with each of the American President's gleeful bounds. (17 July 2003)"

"So, Americans, then. Self-appointed vigilante defenders of the world, kind of like Superman, if Superman was retarded and only fought crime when he felt like it. (3 July 2003)"

"Anyway, if anyone reading this hasn't seen the Dark Knight yet, you officially aren't allowed on the internet until you rectify that. I think I should give it a few months and maybe watch it again on DVD before giving a definitive opinion, because being a massive cynic I'm immediately suspicious of any film that appears on the surface to be absolutely fucking legendary. (19 July 2008)"

"I used to be one of the guys, you know. I used to be another faceless contributor in a wall of opinion. I miss those days. (1 August 2008)"

"Guess you'd be better off going to the Escapist for regular ZP updates, hm? And why not click on some ads while you're there. (21 August 2008)"

"Women admire naked women as the kind of body they would like to have, while men admire naked women as the kind of body they would like to have tied down and squealing on the end of their dicks. (12 January 2005)"

"I love having my conscious brain deactivated by a mindless repetitive task and the rest of it drifting off into the wonderful lands of make believe. (3 April 2007)"

"Saying that a smoker inhales over 4000 chemicals is as meaningful as saying that fun runners pass over 4000 different kinds of rock, and because that rock may contain dinosaur fossils, said fun runners are at risk of velociraptor attack. (21 March 2007)"

"Quod Erat Demonstrandum, fuckers. (25 April 2005)"

"Sex is squalid, uncomfortable, and messy. (18 April 2005)"

"Did we learn nothing from Terminator 3? Apart from the fact that Arnold Schwarzeneggar can act in the same way that octopi can figure skate. (27 March 2005)"

"Nowadays, everyone seems to be emotionally dead, like zombies in pinstripe suits. Trudging to work each day to make a living, queueing up at McDonalds for their daily fuel intake, coming home to vegetate in front of the TV for hours on end. (22 October 2004)"

"I'm always one to concentrate on a person's good qualities - I've spoken up for Jeffrey Dahmer, for fuck's sake - but here I am at a loss. I cannot perceive a single redeeming feature in Paris Hilton... (15 November 2004)"

"Asking after my wellbeing is like asking after the wellbeing of someone in Sweden because a fire broke out in Portugal. Yes alright, Americans, go and look up where those countries are, I'll wait. (In reference to the fires in Victoria, Australia, 12 February 2009)"

"Don't you think it's weird how so many awards these days look like rough crystal formations freshly carved from the rock? Oh I guess you wouldn't know because YOU DON'T WIN AWARDS (25 April 2009)"

"So if you're still playing the game or care in the slightest about having the plot spoiled, try not to accidentally trip, fall forward and highlight all of the following text. (3 June 2009)"

"On the bright side, however, it means I get to stay at home and stare at a computer screen all day as opposed to go to work and stare at a computer screen all day. (On being sick, 15 May 2003)"

"So, Brussels have come up with a little thing called a European Constitution, which will unite all of the European Union into a single superstate, governed by a single government. There may be a problem with everyone speaking different languages and hating each other, but seemingly insurmountable problems have been solved in the past. Like Mount Everest, or making a film based on the Lord of the Rings. (14 May 2003)"

"I had written a beautiful piece for today. It was a rant about how much I despise Halloween. It was witty, well-written and a shining example of a writer at the top of his form. Then I tried to save it, and my computer crashed. So I guess you won't get to read it. Out of all the people in the world, I am the only one who had the opportunity to read my brilliant Halloween article, and now the text is already fading from my cruel, cruel short-term memory, the paragraphs lost in a whirling sea of data, never to be seen again. (31 October 2002)"

"...so come along and watch me fearfully from fifty yards away like you usually do. (6 September 2009)"

"Is it just me, or are the number of comments steadily going down each week? Am I just losing my touch, or has everyone wised up and realised that commenting on internet videos is viciously futile? (4 October 2009)"

"You know how it is, you go away for a week and all the work piles up like a big heap of mail holding your front door closed. (8 November 2009)"

"I heard a story that Guinness once decided to stop advertising. Everybody knew what Guinness was. Everyone who liked and regularly drunk Guinness wouldn't find out anything new about Guinness from TV spots and they were guaranteed sales as long as St. Patrick's Day existed. But you know what happened? Their sales plummeted. Very, very quickly. So next time you complain about adverts on TV or in the cinema or even on my online videos, remember that it wouldn't be necessary if you weren't all such flighty cunts. (4 August 2010)"

"The thing is, if you complain to me about it, you are basically complaining to the pig because your sausages were undercooked. I know my name is on the front of the cover in big fat serifed letters, but I've got nothing to do with distribution and sales or anything to do with Amazon. If you are dissatisfied with their service, then complain to them. Repeatedly. With sticks. (16 September 2010 in regards to Mogworld issues on Amazon.com)"

"A 'relationship' occurs when two people run out of things to say to each other, so they shut each other up by putting their genitals in each other's mouths. A break up comes about when they run out of things to do with those, too. (11 November 2010)"

"Yahtzee was born in Warwickshire, England, on the day of the great storm of 1983. Twenty years later, when England had become too small to accommodate the five hundred kilometre-wide tumour growing out of the back of his neck, he moved to Brisbane, Australia, where a chance encounter with an enraged surfer caused the tumour to become detached. It has now gone on to star in a number of Japanese fetish videos, while Yahtzee occupies a treehouse on the edge of the city, struggling to learn how to live with corks around his hat. The enraged surfer tries to keep in touch, but Yahtzee never answers his phone. (About page)"

"Girls: Please do not offer yourself to Yahtzee. He found that this got old very fast. (Contact page)"

"Did you see that recent flick, Hollow Man? Good effects but the dialogue was crap. Kevin Bacon is a hot shot scientist who, together with his hot shot scientist mates, turns himself invisible, but then finds that he can't turn himself back. So he goes insane and decides to kill all his mates, blow up the lab and ride off into the sunset on a very confused horse. (Why it would kick arse to be invisible)"

"being invisible means you can immerse yourself in a crowd and start clasping boobs and buttocks, then leap aside and laugh as some poor chap gets a clip round the ear. Laugh quietly obviously. And changing rooms! You can sneak into changing rooms and sit right there in the middle of the place while pretty girls get wet and take all their clothes off. You could go and hide in the showers themselves, but since the water on your body wouldn't be invisible you'd have to rely on them not noticing a semi-transparent man appear in the corner. You could pretend to be a novelty glass statue, but you wouldn't be able to explain the developing glass stiffy. (Why it would kick arse to be invisible)"

"Kevin Bacon (or whatever the character's name was - I'd imagine his friends would call him that as a friendly jibe because he bears an uncanny resemblance to Kevin Bacon) (Why it would kick arse to be invisible)"

"This [article] doesn't mean that I actually want to be Lara Croft. In writing this I'm not admitting that I occasionally dress up in a tight top and khaki hotpants and prance around pointing two hairdryers at my dog. In this little article I am pointing out why, if you happen to be Lara Croft, that you should be very pleased with yourself. (Why it would kick arse to be Lara Croft)"

"Well, I know what I would do if I temporarily found that the minds of Ms. Croft and I had switched. Firstly I would dress up in all the clothes I could find in her wardrobe, place a full-length dress mirror in front of the shower, get inside, turn it on and take all the clothes off really, really slowly to the tune of "You sexy thang" by Hot Chocolate. Then I would hunt down my original body and the bewildered hot chick inside, throw it to the floor in the nearest cyber cafe and begin making mad passionate love to it approximately fifteen seconds before our minds were due to be switched back. Firstly, this would pander to my ego no end, and secondly, I would then wake up to find myself living the geek's dream - surrounded by computers and boinking Lara Croft. Score! Actually this isn't really a reason why being her would kick arse, this is more me being weird. (Why it would kick arse to be Lara Croft)"

"When she meets a powerful man she's more likely to try and blow him away than blow him off. Stop that erection right now, you sick, sick boy. Stop it! Concentrate, that's how! (Why it would kick arse to be Lara Croft)"

"[Downs Syndrome Winnie the Pooh] The minute I saw this in a catalogue I just fell about. It's so brave of Disney to introduce stuffed toys that represent serious illnesses in order to educate the little kiddies. Me, I just want this so I can make my very own 'Victorian Sanitarium' playset. Downs Syndrome Pooh will be kept perpetually in a bleak little cardboard cell, bullied by Doctor Action Man and Nurse Princess Leia, occasionally brought out to be brutally hosed down with cold water every week. I'm thinking of sending it to Hasbro. (Yahtzee's Christmas Wishlist)"

"[PDP100 Duck Popcorn Maker] Actually I don't really want this, I just wanted to show you it, as this is the most disgusting popcorn maker I have ever seen. Actually this might be good for my Victorian Sanitarium playset. He could be the weak-stomached young doctor who keeps throwing up when they bring in Downs Syndrome Pooh for more experimental brain surgery. (Yahtzee's Christmas Wishlist)"

"Apparently this is true, according to one The_Mad_Revisionist, who is incidentally the aforementioned one man who believes fervently that (a) the moon does not exist, and (b) there's a huge worldwide conspiracy covering this up. Amazing how times change; as little as a hundred years ago we used to keep loonies like this in big sanitariums where they get poked with sticks and hosed down with cold water every night. Nowadays, we just give them websites. Heh. I just realised you could make a half-decent Matrix parody out of this guy. There Is No Moon. (Meet the crazy moon man)"

"What's more, all these cars go at pretty much exactly the same speed, so you have twenty-odd machines going around and around a track patiently waiting for the one in front to make a cock up. Maybe it would be interesting if drivers made a cock up more often, slamming into walls with really impressive explosions and bits of twisted metal flying everywhere. But no, they train the gits too well. They should have every car being driven by a chimpanzee. I'd watch that. Fuck, I'd sponsor it. (Snormula 1)"

"The question that no-one ever asks in the Pokemon world is why that long-dead illustrious and ethical human being, having created the technology to store big things in very small things, decided to use this gimmick the way he did - storing potentially deadly ferocious animals with magic powers in a little thingy that you can hang off your belt. Because he wanted the power, that's why. He wanted to know the ecstasy of holding five deadly creatures round his waist. He probably got off on that sort of thing, the sick weirdo. (Why it would kick arse to be a Pokemon trainer)"

"Oh, and for the benefit of those people who think I haven't been English enough in my recent articles: Bum bollocks tosser cor blimey guvnor eccles cakes apples and pears god save the queen fish and chips I hate yanks etc. (More from the Poetry Corner)"

"Because as any nerd will tell you, our greatest weapon in the ongoing battle against those buff sporty types and the suave prettyboys are the Nerds With Girlfriends. Nothing infuriates them more. (Person Without Girlfriend)"

"Most sensitive part of the male human physique, and he places it in almost the exact geological centre of the body, right between the legs, dangling down in it's own special bag. He might as well have painted them fluorescent orange and made the hair above it grow into the words 'your foot goes here'. (Where God Went Wrong)"

"[begin list of sophomoric puns] I bet he'd find a place up the chimney of any woman. He's certainly good at filling their stockings. Trouble is, he wouldn't be much good as a lover as he can only come once a year. [end list of sophomoric puns] (Why Chicks Dig Father Christmas)"

"No book critic has ever tried to assess the Old Testament. Maybe they should. I did once. It's a crap story and it's very badly written. (Where God Went Wrong)"

"Ha, ha, ha! Never let it be said Americans are unconcerned about foreign countries. You're so nice to us you very kindly elected a complete vegetable as your president, so we can all point and laugh! (My Tribute to the U.S.)"

"You know what's so great about junk food? Fat people who eat too much die young from cholesterol poisoning! It's a problem that solves itself! (My Tribute to the U.S.)"

"I have a very patchy memory of my childhood. It's one of the things about myself I'm most proud of. (More From the Poetry Corner)"

"We've learned that you should never trust English professors who stick computer chips in their arms, breakfast cereal mascots, Stephen King, the Borg collective, vegetarians, Christians, Microsoft Word helpers and people who put five exclamation marks on the ends of their statements. (I'm Off)"

"I once saw some magician bloke turn a carton of orange juice into orange juice, beer, milk, coke and ginger ale. That makes him five times better than Jesus or something. (Why it Would Kick Arse to be Jesus)"

"The cake is vanilla; I asked for chocolate; The tears They will not stop. (Prince of Persia: Emo Warrior)"

"People followed Jesus, I think because they wanted to have sex with him. Ho yes, they so wanted some of that holy jiggy-jiggy! (cough) sorry. (Why it Would Kick Arse to be Jesus)"

"Also, you can't prove that there isn't a ghost of Bagpuss hovering right behind your head as you read this. He's right there, man! No, he disappeared right after you turned your head. I swear he's there. Look, he's back again now! (Meet the Crazy Moon Man)"

"Yes, let me tell you about my favourite Disney character. And afterwards, let's all have a magical tea party under the enchanted tree, then we can have a delightful game of pooh sticks, you fucking pansy. (The 100 Questions)"

"In answer to your first question, of course God was good in bed! He's perfect in every way! God not only knows the secret path to the clitoris, but he's also aware of a little nerve just underneath the right shoulder blade connected directly to a lady's pleasure centre! (Ask Yahtzee 3)"

"Greek mythology tells us that the Gods invented woman as a punishment after man got a hold of some stolen goods. Obviously, this was just the mythological explanation given by the primitive early men to explain the real origin of women, which was this: THEY CAME DOWN IN SPACESHIPS. Yes, all women are space aliens who have come from a far-off galaxy to enslave mankind. (Ask Yahtzee)"

"The national dress of Great Britain is, from the ground up, a pair of Roman sandals, a kilt, a gunbelt, a t-shirt bearing the likeness of Mr. T, a garland of flowers and a horned Viking helmet. (How to be British)"

"Perfectly coloured to be camouflaged totally in a 60's living room, the zebra has powerful legs and a thirst for blood! (Fight or Flight?)"

"But now I play Silent Hill too much, because it is the most awesome series in the world that proves if proof be needed that the Japanese are just so much better at this whole 'horror' thing. (Silent Hill Showdown)"

"There's nothing I enjoy more than sitting down with a big piece of marmite on toast and reading through the archives of a good webcomic. The only problem is that the good webcomics are all hidden behind pile upon pile of testicle sweat masquerading as entertainment. (The Only Good Comics on the Internet)"

"Keep in mind that this is only my opinion, but also keep in mind that I'm always right. (The Only Good Comics on the Internet)"

"Ah, spam. Where would we be without spam? I'll tell you where. We'll be living in a lush, verdant paradise, unspoilt by rejected technology, where men and women of all creeds and races can join hands and sing for the sheer joy of being alive. (The Spam Man Cometh)"

"How long does it take to shut up a baby? How long does it take to run through the possibilities? Are they hungry, sleepy or sitting around in a pile of shit? If it's the second option I'm sure we can all sympathise. But how long could the process of elimination take?..... I'm sure it's wrong to wish death on a baby, but for the first time in my life I'm actually trying to awaken some kind of latent psychic ability I could use to will the life from the little pillock. Or, fuck it, maybe I'll just walk over and wring it like a flannel. (Travel Notes)"

"The presence of The Sean has a tendency to taint a film, I find, because he is never his character; he's always just The Sean. (The Leauge of Extraordinary Gentlemen)"

"Ah, those were the days. David Bowie, Status Quo, The Beatles ... no end of artists I could say I enjoyed in order to sound clever and pretentious. (The Dark Side of Beatles Songs)"

"...you could pick any two writers of equal skill, have them read each other's work, and they would both instantly proclaim each other the champion. Unless one of them happens to be Stephen King, because he's a jerk. (God Ran Out of Faces)"

"Michael Atkinson vows to continue to 'fight' violent media. Which seems a bit like trying to turn the tide back with a water pistol. (20 January 2010)"

"I don't post on forums or comments for the same reason I don't attempt to french kiss pneumatic drills. (24 January 2010)"

"The zip on my wallet broke, sealing the money inside. How am I supposed to buy a new wallet? (29 January 2010)"

"Developers usually know their game's flaws better than anyone. Deadlines and publisher meddling are why they don't get fixed. (4 February 2010)"

"The only thing worse than being single on Valentine's day is being single on Valentine's day while living with a couple. (14 February 2010)"

"Humanity will be forever at war as long as there is no common enemy. World peace demands a new Hitler. (16 February 2010)"

"There's something oddly satisfying about coughing up a particularly big mouthful of phlegm. Could almost let you skip breakfast. (1 April 2010)"

"I feel bad when I'm the only person on the bus. It's like I'm the only person who showed up to the driver's birthday party. (28 June 2010)"

"I'm not misogynist. I resent that. I hate women, yes, but only because I hate everyone. (25 June 2010)"

"A comment on Mogworld's Amazon page has already declared it to be terrible. Proof that future time travellers are among us? (12 July 2010)"

"Last night at the bar someone asked me to say something 'hot and sexy'. All I could think of on the fly was 'Hayden Christensen'. (7 September 2010)"

""Hey, mister professional game critic, have you ever heard of this obscure game called 'Deus Ex'?" This is why I hate reading my email. (12 September 2010)"

"So I'm eating Subway this evening when a beetle flies down and burrows into my sandwich. Never a bad time to start losing weight, is there. (6 October 2010)"

"Valentines card idea: "You are my iron lung. Let me come inside you and breathe heavily." (10 October 2010)"

"The strippers in Duke3d iPhone don't get their tits out. Fuck off. That's like cutting Aeris' death out of Final Fantasy 7. (24 November 2010)"

"Rest assured, Mogworld's not being entirely released online. Just the first part. I would still like your money. That would be lovely. (16 December 2010)"

"But as any sixteen-year-old sweatily bringing a Playboy up to the counter of a newsagent's expecting everyone in the room to suddenly point and start screaming like the guy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers will tell you, titties become considerably more satisfying when you have to work for them. (26 December 2010)"

"Thinking about morality. If you had to choose, would you save one baby or five old people? What if the baby had a Hitler moustache? (31 December 2010)"

"If you honestly need the calendar to instruct you to show affection to your partner then what kind of loveless nightmare are you trapped in (14 February 2011)"

"Idea for movie: alcohol-based LXG-style crossover in which buddy heroes Jack Daniels and Jim Beam sail around the world with Captain Morgan. Jack's girlfriend is called Midori and she likes having sex on the beach. Their smartmouth talking pet is the Famous Grouse. (2 June 2011)"

"I've made a lot of box art do a lot of horrible things over the years in the name of critique. SOPA could stop my dirty foreigner ways. (18 January 2012)"

"Winning the lottery is like slipping your hand into the bra of the most beautiful woman in the world, then getting it stuck and having to saw it off at the wrist. (Chapter Eight)"

"I rolled my eyes at Rose, but she returned the look with a scowl which suggested that, if we ever got out of this alive, she would have some issues to address with myself and my polaroid camera. (Chapter Nine)"

""Those shells don't look very comfortable, miss." - Edited from the original script of the Little Mermaid (Chapter Eleven)"

"Maybe it was the quest that mattered most, not the outcome. (The Last Bit)"

"The curtains were drawn, and the only source of light - indeed, the object to which my attention was suddenly exclusively drawn - was a lit candle on the kitchen table, that had probably originally been shaped like Snoopy but was now a mass of melted rivulets, as if Snoopy had fallen victim to some kind of flesh-eating virus. (Chapter One)"

"It was as we were sailing out onto the wide chinchilla sea that I noticed how every chinchilla looked exactly like Marlboro, the chinchilla I had owned as a ten-year-old and which I had put inside a popcorn machine to see what would happen. Then the boat ran aground on the biggest chinchilla ever. (Chapter Two)"

"At this time I was hesitant to venture into the greenery, because I wasn't keen on the possibility of having spiders the size of basketballs drop onto my face from overhead branches and refuse to let go. (...) Hunger pains were moving to the 'excruciating' stage by mid-morning. After a last-ditch attempt to extract nutrients from filling my mouth with sand, I decided that, if a big spider the size of a basketball dropped onto my face and tried to eat it, I would eat it back and we could turn the whole thing into an exciting competition. (Chapter Two)"

""I'm going on a picnic," went Penfold. "And I'm taking anthrax, beer, coffee, doughnuts, estrogen, flamingoes, glue, horses, ink, jelly, Knackwurst, lemonade, murder and Nurofen." (Chapter Fifteen)"

"Games should be remembered, not remastered."

"I’d like the power to make things die with the power of my mind. Not because I have any specific use in mind for it; I just think it’d be useful to have for difficult social situations. Like, if you’re trying to sleep on a plane and a bloke three seats down is laughing really loudly at a film. Or if someone’s trying to make me say something nice about their hideous baby, it would be a good way to change the subject. But then again, that’s really just replacing one awkward social situation with another."

"...at the end of the day, nothing makes me feel more positive than something I can get really pissed off about."

"If you don't give a shit then you can only be pleasantly surprised, and I've been burnt too often by disappointment to fall for it again."

"'Medium,' 'Large' and 'King Size'? What the fuck is that? How the fuck can 'Medium' be the smallest? Do you even know what the word 'Medium' means? This is why you're all so fat, you bunch of road sign-shooting Yankee pillocks."

"My secret? Hm. Well, I think the secret is this. Don't come up with a really ambitious twelve-CD monster for your first project, because it'll be doomed very quickly. For your very first release, make something small. Put as much effort into it as you can muster, but don't feel pressured. Then, for every subsequent release, push yourself just a little bit harder to make a better product. By the time you've churned out your sixth or seventh, you'll have a pretty solid reputation."

"Ctrl+Alt+Del is the Rubbish King, sitting proudly on a throne of rotting meat."

"My main inspiration is sardonic British TV critics like Charlie Brooker, whose excellent show Screenwipe is fully on Youtube, and I recommend everyone watch it. He used to write for a PC magazine I read fanatically as a child. My own style is a mixture of him, possibly Douglas Adams, and internet writers like Seanbaby, Old Man Murray, or Something Awful. I’m such a rip-off."

"I believe in being cruel to be kind. I love gaming, I have done all my life. I want to see it lifted in the eyes of the general public above how they view it now. Pottering endlessly about with the same dreary plots and game mechanics isn't helping any of us evolve."

"Evoking fear is, in itself, an art form – and nothing in the entire history of storytelling has explored it better than video games."

"Consider how The Dark Knight got away with a rating of PG-13 in the US by skilfully not showing any blood. Does that make it any more suitable for children? Or will there be a generation of youngsters haunted by visions of white-faced sadists brandishing pencils?"

"Since I long ago decided that I hated kids and never wanted to have them, my reproductive instinct has transferred to my creativity, I've always wanted to create works that will ensure I'm remembered after I die. I don't think I've done that yet, though."

"You're never alone when you're totally self-absorbed."

"I seem to have gathered a reputation for being a jerk in real life, because frankly fans make me uncomfortable. Complete strangers come up and talk to me like they've known me their whole lives, and for that reason I can seem a bit stand-offish... No, the whole "fan" thing confuses me."

"Religion should be something you keep within the confines of your own head, and we should all recognize how pointless it is to try and make other people see the fairies that live in your brain."

"I'm not a great judge of my own work, me. I'm constantly referring to the ZP Wikiquote page to find out for myself what the funniest line that week was."

"It's easy to make games for kids, they're dumb little shits."

"With infinite choice at our fingertips, we don't have to expose ourselves for an instant to anything that challenges our views if we don't want to. So the walls of the echo chambers grow stronger and stronger, until we only hear from the echo chamber next door when the shouty extremists are shouting, and their absurd views only make us more convinced of our own righteousness."

"I see no way to secure liberalism by trying to put its core values beyond any but internal or consensual reasoning. The resulting slide into relativism leaves a disastrous parallel between 'liberalism for the liberals!' and 'cannibalism for the cannibals!'"

"Some philosophers – I am again thinking particularly of Martin Hollis – have objected that it will only be rational to hold such a belief if it was in turn rational to hold the core beliefs from which this specific item is said to follow. But this image of a rational bedrock strikes me as confused. What does it mean for a purportedly core belief to be rationally held? On the one hand, it can hardly mean that we are capable of giving good reasons for holding it. For in that case it would be a derivative rather than a core belief. But on the other hand, I cannot see – as I have already conceded – what else it can mean to describe a belief as being held in a rational way. I cannot see, in short, that Hollis’s proposal can be deployed in such a way as to set limits to the kind of holism I am trying to expound. Even in the most primitive perceptual cases, even in the face of the clearest observational evidence, it will always be reckless to assert that there are any beliefs we are certain to form, any judgements we are bound to make, simply as a consequence of inspecting the allegedly brute facts. The beliefs we form, the judgements we make, will always be mediated by the concepts available to us for describing what we have observed. But to employ a concept is always to appraise and classify our experience from a particular perspective and in a particular way. What we experience and report will accordingly be what is brought to our attention by the range of concepts we possess and the nature of the discriminations they enable us to make. We cannot hope to find any less winding a path from experience to belief, from observational evidence to any one determinate judgement."

"Success comes on God’s terms, in His time, and in His way. God only allowed me to have success after I’d been broken after I’d stopped seeking success for myself, and after I’d come to terms with the idea that my labors for God might not ever bring me a penny. It was only after I’d lost everything that God was able to get my heart right to the point where He could trust me with success."

"Make sure that you are next year's big success story. Don't fall into the pit of people who have given up on making something of themselves, and make sure you take everything out of yourself. I'm getting too old for this. And when I retire someday, I'm going to want to sit down at a computer and play your games, read your stories, and watch your videos. Don't fall in with the people who have already given up on themselves. You are tomorrow's next big thing."

"I’d made a family-friendly game about a beaver before this, when I went to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers. People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself- I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that."

"This is just my personal take, but to me the definition of survival horror is a game where fear and the sense of exhilaration coincide. So some of the games out there don’t exactly fit my definition. But I don’t have any rights to the definition of the genre so people can call them survival horror if they feel it fits. Basically, I understand that the spectrum of what survival horror is to the general public is pretty wide."

"During the time when we were making it, my personal feeling was that Resident Evil was not a game that should be made into a series. This is because horror tends to have strong patterns that are easy to get used to, meaning they're easy to get tired of. I never thought that the game would become such a huge hit."

"Anytime you travel through life, [emotional] baggage is apart of the journey. It’s not about not having baggage, it’s about learning to travel lighter and lighter."

"Tightly clenched fist don’t catch blessings."

"Hire someone looking to work, they’ll work for the next check. Hire someone who believes in the work and they’ll work for a lifetime."

"You can burn the bridge with the intent of hurting the merchant but remember in the end only the village suffers."

"No weapon is as dangerous as an idea. A weapon will kill you in that moment. A bad idea can kill you for a lifetime."

"If opportunity doesn’t call, call opportunity and keep calling until someone answers."

"Passion looks like anger to people who aren’t passionate about anything."

"I have a gift. I am a human alarm clock. I wake people up to themselves. You can hit the snooze and ignore me but eventually, you’ll have to wake up."

"The universe will never allow you to fail."

"Accountability is mankind’s greatest obstacle. All our challenges stem from that."

"The phrase “be realistic” used in any form is a micro-aggression."

"Silent wars are fought on mental battlefields."

"People will say "there's no money in music", that's not true, there's no money in music to people who aren't educated on how to make money."

"My daddy was a thug; momma was a hippie. Now you got me, product of Bayview-HP"

"How you see me? Tell me how you see me. When mirrors only reflect what you want to see. Believe me."

"When it all falls down, it’ll fall into place."

"I’m hearing stop the violence but that can’t be. As long as we don’t look at ourselves, as a society"

"Where are we going? Where are we headed? Because believe me, it isn’t always the police. There’s two sides to every story, three if the truth’s told. In the backseat, headed somewhere unknown. All alone, my innocence will soon be seized. No permanent friends, no permanent enemies just permanent interest. Its time to fight the powers that be; let em know, we can’t have peace until niggas get a piece too. We’re taught our only option’s to be deceased. Look, I’ll be what you need me to be just know. Where I’m headed could be a rocky road. Shit, this old world is crumbling fast, a new one coming slow but fsho, you better exercise control before THEY take control, ya dig? Rebel with a cause and THEY hate it…"

"Rapping bout the hood, in the hills is blasphemy, rapping from the hills to the hood is luxury."

"The only thing holding down my soul is my soles"

"Fear only goes as far as belief."

"Knowing’s a blessing, relaying it is the curse."

"Marcus Orelias, come with me or get left."

"When I wake up, I gotta cake up and if you owe me a dollar I'm taking no pay cuts."

"I pressed play then came a long way from the Mac Book / I heard Raginder on “A.D.H.D.” then scribbled him down in my black book / Thinking one day he’d collaborate with a no name, named Marcus O / with one goal, sign Violinder so then he’ll call my imprint home."

"No harm done – don’t feel harmed, you won’t be. Moving towards living stoically, fought these feelings of inadequacy when I started on this path at eighteen. No looks didn’t vex me, looked within’ and everything that happened, suited me. Tailored all life is."

"I'm from the city rich desire to live in. Glass on the floor from breaking out of this prison / prism."

"Officially I've been crowned as Hip-Hop's Historian."

"Reservation's mandatory for them to keep out vultures. Portrayed images, makes it hard to get to know us. That's one reason why other cultures don't approve of us, in an ancient world made of star crossed love."

"As influences faces growth, some will want my buzz cut. Growing bolder in my vision but I often feel stuck."

"My closing statement to the senate and the council is...youth need art this truth is, not hard to swallow. I see many artistic people wallow in sorrow off belief. They aren't good enough to be. Give us a chance let us write our own histories. In a world conforming us instead of conforming for us. Kids ain't dumb just bored of the same old junk. Formulated highlight text, define learning. Is it confined to enclosed spaces eight hours a day? If it is I know why the caged bird sings."

"I'm often called the father of Mega Man, but actually, his design was already created when I joined Capcom.My mentor [Capcom senior member Akira Kitamura], who was the designer of the original Mega Man, had a basic concept of what Mega Man was supposed to look like. So I only did half of the job in creating him."

"You know, I want to word this in a way to explain some of the issues that come with trying to make a game of this size on multiple platforms."

"Personally when I looked around [at] all the different games at the TGS floor, I said "Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished.""

"I look around Tokyo Games Show, and everyone’s making awful games; Japan is at least five years behind."

"It's very severe, but very honest. Unless Japanese people feel embarrassed from the experience of getting harsh comments, saying [new games] could have been better is not an opinion they would take seriously. When they're embarrassed and they feel obliged to change, it would make a difference."

"Back in the day Japanese games were used to winning and were used to success. We celebrated all sorts of victories. However at some point these winners became losers. Not accepting that fact has led to the tragic state of Japanese games today."

"I want to end comments that Capcom games made in Europe aren't really Capcom games ... basically saying that whether games are created in America or Japan or anywhere in the world, I will be the one overlooking it and so it will have that Capcom flavor that fans know and love."

"So I come up with some ideas for the programmer to work with, and they decide what's good and what's impossible to implement, based on schedule or programming difficulty."

"These are all concepts. I make a lot of ideas and inserts. And this is what I just created. I don't write the map by hand anymore; I use illustrator instead to do the map. It has about five layers."

"I shrink it down by myself, actually. It's up to the schedule, so... If the artists or programmers say "no", then that's the answer. So it's kind of a mix. I always try to push a can-do attitude with them, you know?"

"I always think about all the different elements of what makes something fun."

"Unlike novels or movies, video games are an interactive medium where the player's actions drive the story forward, so I had actually wanted to allow players to manipulate the evidence themeselves earlier on in the series."

"I'm pretty sure that was inspired by my experience with the original Resident Evil where I examined a book, and a coin - I think it was a coin? - popped out."

"As part of the game's promotion, we also collaborated with the , which was preparing for the official launch of the new system, and gave a presentation of AJ:AA at the ministry's head office."

"desirable or not, just about any humanoid, mammal, and even monster can have sex with another species of life a mutant dog mated with a mutant cat, while they may make a cute couple, can never give birth to a half dog, half cat child. NEVER!"

"The way I think about puzzles is a real puzzle, is something you may not ever figure out."

"I can complain about games for my whole life."

"You know, in college, I never got either degree, 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."

"A long time ago, I used to write fiction, short stories mainly. And I reached a point where I had honed my style so that it wasn't totally atrocious, and I kind of knew what I was doing when writing, and then the question was just, "What do I write about now?" And I couldn't really find anything that I felt was important enough to write about. So I just kind of gave up on writing."

"Finally, Braid was the thing where I felt that writing could enter into it. But the game design also is a different kind of writing. It's a different kind of idea communication. One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. But the problem is that writing isn't a good venue for that. Because as I said, you can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you're clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next – the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you're writing down is total bullshit. But, you cannot do that in a game – or at least it's much harder – 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. And because of that, there has to be a kernel of truth in Braid. I can't write down any old bullshit that I want. 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."

"Well, it's very personal to me, because I have that kind of personality. 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. What does that mean? What is my outlet for that? I have gone on record as talking about game design as a practice, like a scientific study, or like a spiritual practice, like yoga or tai chi. 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."

"There's another interesting thing, that I think that's interesting about game design is that game design is kind of a game by itself. I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and I've found that looking at a situation and saying "how do I make an interesting puzzle out of this?" is itself a really interesting puzzle. So there's this huge irony going on, that the companies that are making these social games [like FarmVille] that basically have no gameplay value in them are actually themselves playing a much more interesting game than the game that they're making for you to play. The game they're playing is this huge multi-dimensional optimization problem where you're trying to gather data and make the best decision and all that and the game they're making for you to play is like clicking on a cow a bunch of times and you get some gold. So that's very strangely humorous. And as I visualize that happening, somebody at one of these companies, they're doing their A/B testing, they're kind of tweaking something for Europe and tweaking something for America and tweaking something for Canada and then going over here and like "oh this A/B test is done, let's look at the graphs of the results and let's write a report on that" and stuff. It's a little bit like planting trees and rearranging a garden and minding livestock and all that. So you could say that the people making FarmVille are not only playing a game, but they're playing some kind of like ur-FarmVille that is way more interesting. And so the sad fact of what this all comes to is you've got these people—you know, FarmVille has a wide demographic, it's not just computer nerds who play it apparently, anymore—so you've got all these people who think that they're playing this cool game where they mine their cows and pigs and feeling like the boss and getting all this gold and getting richer and their farm is looking nicer. There's all these ways that they feel like they're progressing. But what's actually happening is that someone is farming them. So you know there's all these imaginary farms out there where you gain imaginary money but then there's a real farm with real money that pulls money from you over the internet and you don't ever see it because it's all behind your head while you're typing on the computer."

"I think a lot of game designers are irresponsible. When we can make something that affects so many people's lives—a AAA game these days, a hit one, is 10 million copies or more, probably. When you are making something that affects that many people, and you're not thinking about exactly what way you're affecting them—like seriously, not just like "oh, I'm giving them something fun" but like really introspecting—I feel like there's something wrong. If you think really hard about it and then you come to the conclusion "oh, what I'm doing is great, this is totally good", that's fine. But I feel like there's a lack of serious thought in the industry. People go and they spend three or four years of their life making a game, working very hard—it's very hard to make games, even when you have a hundred people helping. Because it's that much of your life, you would think it's very important to understand it and spend that time well but I think often the opposite happens psychologically—it's like "oh, I'm spending—I'm putting so much of myself into this". The thought that "it could be a bad thing when I thought that it was a good thing" is almost unbearable. "So I'm just not gonna look at that." I'm not saying that all game designers are like that. I've encountered what I perceive to be that attitude. Whereas other game designers, who make games where you just run around killing a hundred dudes or whatever, I've had totally reasonable discussions with them and they're just like "no, I've really thought about it and here's what I think". And so, it's complicated."

"So, let me say something that may—I mean, some people get a little nervous when you talk about things like meditation and I'm gonna say something even worse than that. So if you're about to embark on a long project, you might ask yourself the question, "How do I know this is the right idea?" Right, if I'm gonna spend years on this project, how do I know it's the right thing? How do I know I'm gonna stick to it and get it done? So I came up with this thing that I sort of facetiously called the Cry Test, which is just—imagine you're in a very safe place, with somebody you care a lot about—very intimate relationship with this person—you're very comfortable with them. And you start explaining to them what this project is that you wanna do. If you're not in danger of breaking out in tears, not even necessarily in sadness, not even necessarily breaking out in tears, but having some involuntary upwelling of emotion. If that's not going to happen in that kind of situation, this probably isn't a project that you're that committed to. Because to do a really long project, that drive needs to be very deep. It needs to come from your core. If it doesn't then what's gonna happen is you start working on this thing, six months later—oh, I have a really neat idea for a game, it's got a grappling hook and stuff. That sounds neat, and you start working on the grappling hook and stuff and it turns out to be harder than you thought. And not as good as you thought. And six months later you're like "Well, what if I had a jet pack instead?" And it'll just go like that. You'll drop one thing and pick up another thing and drop that thing and pick up another thing in a chain, because you're not that committed. To succeed in a long and difficult project, there has to be love in the idea. And I don't—you know, in English we toss around the word "love" all the time, like we say like "I love pizza" or something, but I don't mean that. I don't mean "I love this idea" as in "oh, it's such a great idea". I mean, "I love this idea in the way if I don't do it, I'm gonna feel like I'm not doing the purpose of my life." It has to be that strong. So the problem is that most people don't know how to find something that strong in game development. You certainly don't get taught that in school, so—at least, not any school I've ever seen—so I'd just encourage some deep introspection, just try—ask yourself what you really care about, really, because usually that answer will be very different from—usually, if you ask yourself what I care about, you'll come up with some answer, and then if you ask yourself "Really? Is that what I really care about?" Not really, it's usually some kind of politically correct answer that we tell ourselves. If you iterate on that, if you keep asking yourself what you care about, and not accepting the previous answer, you just ask again, ask again, eventually you make it to something you really care about."

"So what are the ideas? Are they anything? Not really. What they are is an exploration of the things that can happen when you’re in a simpler version of the world we live in. So you have light and shadow, and you have colors and shapes occluding other shapes, and there’s an exploration of ‘Let’s make this as simple as we can and look at it with the greatest degree of focus that we can and see what we can see, and what is that like?’ Not even necessarily in a high-minded philosophical way, but let’s experientially look with fresh eyes upon this activity of walking around in a world from day to day, before you even add in other people that send you off into a weird mental place and all that. And then some of the panels are even more primitive. The first ones are more abstract, they’re pre-spatial. So here’s the black and white spots, and you need to figure out that you need to draw a line separating them. That’s an attempt at engaging whether there’s some kind of Platonic idea of category or space that precedes what you get when you have a full 3D world-like space that you can walk around. This is a rambling answer, but the point is that those things all work together on a few levels. On one level it’s just, ‘Hey we’re getting the player into the mindset of looking with fresh eyes upon a world.’ Even if they don’t understand what’s happening, that’s fine, that’s just what we’re doing. But then also it’s metaphorical. There’s a metaphor for being a person in the real world just trying to understand ‘What is the truth about where we are? Are there investigations we can undergo in games that get us closer to the truth about the world we live in?’"

"People have this reaction, ‘Why would I be interested in a game where you just walk around and draw lines on a bunch of panels? Why is there even a world there? Why is this not just a cheap iOS game or something?’ There are very good answers to that, but you don’t want to give people those answers because you then spoil the game for them."

"I feel like we don’t yet understand what games are capable of as a medium. And there’s not enough genuine interest throughout the game industry in dealing with that, because people have figured out how to make money. And that’s great, at least people have figured out how to make money for now by employing old gameplay discoveries in a continuously refined way, and-or borrowing things from other media."

"Video games are in a weird spot now. I feel like we’ve been living through this time of anti-intellectualism across the culture—for the past few decades at least, but in video games especially. I mean crazy anti-intellectual. Part of that is because so much of the intellectualism we’ve had in video games is actually really pretentious and dumb. I feel like we’ve seen a lot of people just trying to be the person who says smart things about games, instead of doing the work to understand gaming well and discover things and then explore what those discoveries entail. And I think people have rightly reacted negatively to that sort of behavior. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people doing that work and genuinely figuring out what games can be and pushing them forward. I just hope that eventually we can get to a stage where that work’s more broadly celebrated as part of the medium, say in the way that film does."

"I'm not really in the indie scene, that's the thing. I'm off by myself. I don't hang out with game developers, either indie or AAA, except for—there's a small number of people who I consider my pure circle and most of them don't live near me so I have to go fly to visit them. And if I add up the number of people total, it's certainly under ten people that I know of that I can talk to seriously about game design, it's probably about six people in the world. So those are the people I talk to about game design, and the rest of the industry is just doing its thing. And that includes the indie thing. I don't know."

"Here's a thing I like to point out to people—I'm not really anti-piracy, I'm not really pro-piracy. I pirated stuff when I was a kid because I didn't feel like I had a choice. My mom wouldn't really buy video games for me. I actually—one time in like a Waldenbooks or something I stole a physical copy of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? from the store. And it wasn't even a good game! I was a little—I did some bad stuff when I was a kid."

"Some people wanna be indie developers because there's a community of happy people who do the kind of things that they do and they can hang out with those people and it's just not—I don't really get nourishment from that, I'm not even really—ideally, I wish I was a community person, I wish I could find my community out in the world but I never have. So I'm the kind of person who—I have small numbers of friends who I have quality time with, and that's just how I do it. And so when you speak of the "community of game developers", even in the late '90s, when I was going to—in the first few years I was going to the GDC I didn't really feel like part of that, and it's so much less of a community now than it was—back then it was people working hard to make real games for the most part, and now you go to the GDC and it's like how to catch the whales using your shitty IAP whate—are we allowed to say that?"

"Right now, if you're coming out of school—is the generalization of the age of people who happen to be coming out of school, usually—it's a very valuable time where you're kind of in your prime in terms of learning new stuff and adapting and having energy and inspiration and all this. Or at the last, you'll probably match any later time in your life, whether those impulses decline or not—very good time right now. And sort of one of the worst things you can do is go work at some company that's kinda big and bureaucratic and slow, at that age, because you're still learning and you wanna run the engine fast, you wanna learn things quickly because learning is like compound interest and the more you learn, the more you'll learn from your later experience because you can handle it better or whatever."

"As you get a game closer to done there are more graphical assets, and they get bigger and bigger and it takes longer to do things like load them or process them if you need to do some automated processing on them or recompute the lighting for the world, and it gets to a point where it becomes very sluggish to just try to get new things done and that was a real drag. And it's especially a drag when there's so many things to do and you feel like you can't do them very fast because of the computer. And part of that was programming in this programming language C++ that most engine programmers use to build things with, and I just had this very fatalistic attitude toward it like "Well... we can't do anything about that so I just have to like deal with this and get the game done". And then at some point I just changed thatI was like "Wait, is that really true? I know that that's what everybody thinks but is that really true?" And I was like "Yeah, no, it's not true". Like "I shouldn'tlike, we should finish this game in C++, but I don't have to accept that this is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I can actually change this and do a different thing", and that's what led me to work on this new programming language. But as soon as I decided to do itas soon as I said "This is actually not an unfixable problem; we can do something about this", I became much happier, immediately, because I was no longer in jail; I was no longer in C++ jail for the rest of my life. So I try to use that as an example for other things as well. WheneverI know that feeling now; I know smaller versions of it, like when it comes to the way a game is designed, like "Oh, I realize I'm having this 'I'm in jail' feeling like I don't like this part of this game's design, but I've assumed that it just has to be the case." And I just go back and look, "Does it really have to be the case? Well, I mean, I decided that because this but we could make that decision differently if we're willing to pay the cost of making the decision differently. Is that cost worth me being happier with the game because it's a better game? Well, yes." So once you learn to revisit those decisions it becomes a very good thing to do and so that C++ instance I think was the biggest one, but I've learned to do that more often from that example."

"[In games], a lot of the problems that we need to solve [are] global state manipulation problems. And so pretending that it's not, by saying "look I have a functional language and I'm going through seven layers of things so that I can avert my eyes sufficiently from the fact that I'm actually just manipulating globals at the end of the day" - that's just an obfuscation, it doesn't actually solve any problems."

"If what you're objecting to is the flavor and attitude and the nature with which Casey was expressing his criticism, then there's a little bit more of a point there, however, again, you eliminate that at your peril. It is well-known that many of the greatest contributors to society—not just in software, but in all science and technology and the arts everywhere—many of those people have been hard to work with for one reason or another. And partially it's because they care tremendously about what they are doing. They care tremendously about the form in which they are working. You might say "oh but that guy doesn't need to be crotchety and mean about that thing", but you can't take away that part of the personality and have everything else, because that part of the personality is quite likely an integral part of what made the rest of the artist or the scientist as good as they are. You can't just decide "Albert Einstein should have had a different personality but he should've still done all the cool relativity stuff and figured all that out and then I'm going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos and I'll criticize Einstein for not being a good person in some certain way that a hundred years later I decide is the right way to be, but I will take all the stuff that he contributed because it helps me eat Cheetos and that's great". That is so—it is important for us to see that kind of lazy, bloated, fat, social criticism of others as being as toxic as it actually is, and as being as unproductive and decay-inducing as it actually is. That's way more toxic than a programmer saying angry things—that kind of criticism, because that kind of criticism that's in vogue in places like Twitter right now at a large scale will destroy human society, whereas the crotchety programmer thing on a large scale built a large part of the human society that we have right now. So be very careful with that stuff, and on my part, I feel that one of the better contributions I can make is to not tolerate that kind of criticism. I just won't put up with it. If you come to this channel with that kind of thing I'll just ban you because it's stupid and I don't have time for it. There's too much of it. It's cheap, all it is is posturing so that the person making the criticism can feel better, can show other people that they are a good person, and it's gross, it's really gross. And it's destructive. We don't need it."

"I’m probably asking for trouble by doing this, because Blow’s known for skewering theorists who’ve gone looking to excavate ideas from his other game, Braid. (A game he’s said he had specific ideas about while crafting, but that no one’s yet pieced together fully.)"

"There is no help within The Witness for those struggling to meet its challenges; as he did with Braid, Blow declined to include a hint system in the new game. If he has sacrificed approachability, he has remained true to his personality: logical, stubborn, unsuffering of fools. Written profiles of Blow tend to have a certain reverence of tone. In part, that’s down to the scarcity of people like him—game designers whose artistic ingenuity is matched by a thoughtfulness in words. But it’s also because he is something of an iconoclast. Blow has been an outspoken critic of other game designers, once referring to the mindless yet irresistible quests of World of Warcraft as “unethical.” Following Braids release, he publically chastised those reviewers who had incorrectly guessed at the game’s deeper meaning, saying that they had “obviously overlooked many prominent things.”"

"Game development is very difficult. Nobody sets out to create a game that’s not fun. It’s all of the challenges and difficulties that happen throughout development that determine whether a game is a failure or a success. I think playing those thousands of games is the single best and easiest way to learn from my predecessors."

"Games have this eternal, immortal attraction. Of course I do go back to old games if I need a refresher, but I think it is important to intentionally play and observe new games, to know what’s out there. Games that are coming out now are just incredible; they’re amazing. Even for people who say that they grow out of games, once they have kids and there’s a game they can play together, they return. It’s not about quitting or graduating from playing games; it’s about finding what’s enjoyable for you at that time in your life, and playing that."

"When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry. Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them – the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome. It's like trying to turn around an army of tanks, instead of being able to move lightly on your feet or being able to listen to what's going on inside of you – because that's what's telling you what to do. It gets bogged down."

"I think the destiny of all men is to be kings, the destiny of all women is to be queens. In some fashion or another, that's the destiny that we call it family but it's supposed to be that."

"If I have one thing over other people in this industry, it's this: I've made more mistakes than anyone else. You're seeing people repeat the same mistakes we'd already made years ago."

"Showing characters is where 3-D animation comes up short. It's hard to create lifelike figures that move in a realistic, believable manner-unless you're going to go into "dummy dolls." But when you take 3-D animation and put it into a first-person perspective and create a fly-through environment-well, that is where it shines. So what we're doing is using both mediums for their respective strengths."

"If there's such a thing as an evergreen video game, I would say Dragon's Lair comes close to that."

"I never expected to see a day where people from around the world can connect via the Internet and communicate with others on smartphones. With how procedural generation technology and A.I. has greatly innovated game development, I believe the game industry will expand into games that are created to help solve problems within society."

"I don’t particularly see any reason why gender would play a major role in game development. Similar to fashion designers, creators are able to imagine what their customers want regardless of gender. I think that applies to video game development, too."

"While I was at Atari, it went from a pretty big company, to a huge company, to a complete flop."

"The hard parts were: writing code that was fast enough, writing code that was small enough to fit in the cartridge, and writing code that would fit in the RAM. Basically everything was hard."

"So what you are characterizing as conspiracy is merely an unfortunate coincidence."

"No: the answer you like the most is the one you should trust the least. Go over the evidence one more time: be sure you haven’t missed something."

"If, fourteen years ago, he had entertained secret hopes of leaving a discernible, enduring mark on the legacy of humankind, he was now fully disabused of them."

"I’m sure that’s quite witty, but I have no idea what you mean."

"“Corporal, I’m in charge here—” “Doctor, you are in charge here. But this assault rifle has a special veto power, if you get my drift.”"

"A sense of humor—bitter or otherwise—is the hallmark of a survivor."

"Only the good die young, so I’m destined to be immortal, I guess."

"“There are only three variables governing the outcome of any given situation. Power—political, economic, military, whatever. Intelligence—the information you have and how cleverly you use it. And chance.” “And that’s it?” “That’s it. Leaders get themselves too tangled up when they fail to break a situation—any situation—back down to those basics. Or when they forget the fundamental differences between the three variables.”"

"You’re the military analyst, writer, historian: you, above all people, should know that those who decline to take a hand in controlling events surrender the ability to influence them."

"The EMTs were accompanied by a smattering of suit-and-sunglass security types who were about as unobtrusive as a flock of condors in a day-care center."

"You’re very cheery. Too cheery. So I’m guessing today’s news is bad."

"Careful now: just the way you rehearsed it. Use as much truth as possible: that’s how you’ll get away with the lies."

"“So—I’m a major. New pay grade.” She laughed. “My salary has just jumped from nothing to next-to-nothing. What will I spend it all on?”"

"“And saying that doesn’t get you in trouble, does it?” His smile broadened. “Nope. Not a bit.” He straightened up, stuck out his hand. “I’m glad I was able to come and give you the inside scoop on—absolutely nothing. And on the people who have absolutely nothing to do with it.” Caine smiled. “Your failure to impart any information has been very illuminating.”"

"What gives with him? Does he take jerk pills?"

"Besides being grossly unprofessional and misinformed, just why is that a relevant inquiry?"

"If there are any competent journalists here, I’m ready for their inquiries."

"It’s bad enough that you’re plying a trade for which you haven’t the aptitude or integrity, but you could at least check your conclusion against the facts."

"“Caine has a serious flaw when it comes to working for the government.” “Which is?” “Well, he has this real bad habit of telling the truth.”"

"I find it interesting how many of you, when watching a plan go awry, are so blinded by your frustration that you are unable to learn from what you have witnessed."

"“Damn,” muttered Opal, staring after him, “guess he flunked charm school.”"

"That means we have nothing to shoot at, no efficacious response. So we do something pointless. And we feel better."

"The total lack of information is a kind of information in itself."

"You gotta remember that in war, you’re not deciding between the bad thing to and the good thing. You’re choosing between the bad and the worse. And you can’t control the shit that happens after you choose."

"Sometimes, thinking just didn’t do any good, didn’t provide any answers. Because for some questions—such as the arbitrariness of life and death during wartime—there weren’t any answers."

"“You must remind yourself—hourly—that Caine Riordan is but one human. He is an aberration among them, a flicker of conscience that his own megacorporate kin would have extinguished if he had not run far and fast. Do not let his noble deed seduce you into thinking the rest of his race are capable of something similar….” “And Riordan himself. What do I tell him?” “Hu’urs Khraam looked at Darzhee Kut closely. “Tell him that his deed was noble and we are grateful for it. And, if you think he is ready to hear it, you should also tell him that we can already measure how much his deed will change the outcome of this war.” “Really? How much?” “Not at all.”"

"The only proper course of action regarding humanity was to leave it alone, and, if possible, isolate it. Just as one would handle any other sophont that was quite irremediably and dangerously insane."

"“Stosh, you are insane.” “I am inspired. They are frequently confused.”"

"“You are a traitor to your own race, servitor.” “No. I am its true servant, because the prerequisite of success is a ruthlessly clear understanding of reality, of the facts with which we must contend. Without that, all plans begin in error, and so, they must end in disaster.”"

"Richard, we have fallen into the common trap of seeing ourselves at the center of the universe: all that goes on around us somehow has us as its subject and raison d’etre. But in reality, all the events, all the plans, all the acts we interpret as intentionally malign—or benign—to us may, in fact, have almost nothing to do with our species."

"You are to be congratulated on your talent for deception."

"Zkhee’ah Drur the Elder had once observed that while one is yet alive to complain of misfortune, the greatest of all misfortunes has not yet occurred. But this turn of affairs seemed very close to disproving that ancient axiom."

"Beings that can laugh at themselves, particularly their own foibles, stand the greatest chance of attaining wisdom."

"Nice bluff—but I was born on the planet that invented poker."

"Human social evolution is unique in that your race has achieved the maximum, even optimum, balance of violent aggression and social cohesion. Again, consider your recent past. What other race could teeter so long, and yet not topple over, the brink of nuclear self-extermination? And all in the name of ideals, which were simply the facades behind which you hid your national prejudices, racial fears, and innate savagery."

"And in the time it had taken to reflect upon the significance of the moment, the moment was past. That was, after all, the nature of moments."

"“So nothing has really changed.” “Sometimes, when your adversary is trying to precipitate dramatic change, stability is the best victory.”"

"“Did he just wink?” whispered Downing. “If not, he developed a very timely facial tic,” Caine replied."

"Where greed is great, corruption is simple."

"They are not speculating upon the mysteries behind us, only upon the possibilities before us."

"I know it’s human nature to want to draw conclusions, but I distrust straight-line projections when we only have two data points."

"Most of my professors can’t see the wider forest of meaning because they’ve become obsessed with a few mostly meaningless trees."

"“The megacorporations have a long history of mining antigovernment organizations for support. They throw a lot of money at them: sometimes directly, sometimes through plausibly deniable proxies.” Hwang screwed up his face. “And do these groups really join forces with the megacorporations? They’re far more autocratic than nation-states.” Caine shook his head. “It’s not a direct alliance. But the megas aren’t really looking for cocombatants against ‘the tyranny of nations.’ They’re just funding grassroots resistance to national authority.”"

"But then again, discipline and its trappings—ranks, protocols, traditions—did not define the difference between a soldier and a civilian. The difference was in outlook. Brilliant civilian researcher Hirano Mizuki stared into the shadowy reaches of alien underbrush and saw no reason for caution. Caine, on the other hand, saw an unguarded perimeter in unexplored terrain that might conceal unknown threats."

"Veriden cut an annoyed glance at Riordan but said nothing; he suspected that even she saw the irony in starting an argument over whether she was argumentative."

"Look: nations screw up like people do; sometimes they mean well, sometimes they’re selfish or delusional bitches on a spree, and sometimes they just plain make mistakes. But the megacorporations don’t make mistakes; if they do damage, it’s because they like the cost-to-benefit ratios, dead innocents notwithstanding. Nations are bulls in the global china shop; corporations are sharks."

"Well, so be it. Today we only have time for the truth. Battles are won by facts and physics, not self-congratulatory ideology."

"Your arrogant self-importance is complicating your perception of what is a very simple matter."

"Bigotry was not only invulnerable to the appeals of logic and deduction; it was often blind to counterproofs such as those Yaargraukh had just witnessed."

"They still grumbled, of course, but never within his earshot. Besides, grumbling was the true anthem of every military unit that had ever existed. And their current grumbling was simply aimless grousing about the food, the cramped quarters, and anything else that struck them as modestly annoying. It was, in summary, both a harmless and timeless bonding ritual."

"“If there’s a chance to talk our way out of a fight, this is the moment. Once blood is spilled, it becomes an Honor issue. Finding a way back to a parley would be difficult and highly unlikely.” “Yeah, I heard about that crap,” Karam muttered. “Scuttlebutt is that once Honor is involved, they become bushido bear-aardvarks beating their horse chests and making much ado about nothing.”"

"Well, no plan survives contact with reality and today is no exception."

"If the motivation was simple greed, then that was a promising target for development as an agent inside the enemy’s camp. Greed was not only a predictable impulse, but was an indicator of the dependability of the individual being suborned. It was overwhelmingly associated with profoundly self-centered egos and values."

"“We need no technological assistance. Hkh’Rkh capabilities and engineering is unsurpassed.” Yaargraukh managed to keep his tongue from writing out in a spasm of grim hilarity. “I have heard others say the same thing.” “And your response to them?” “That their empty rhetoric is delusional lunacy spoken as truth.”"

"Riordan stared. “Your…media…really advertised things like, uh, canned vegetables named after mythical monsters?” Paulsen shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe what our media did, on occasion.”"

"All enlightenment begins in ignorance and humility. This place has been a constant instruction in both."

"“So,” sighed Rulaine, “we’re pretty much screwed.” Yaargraukh’s black eyes stared. “I do not understand your expression—‘screwed?’ This is a carpentry metaphor?” Bannor almost smiled. “Not exactly.”"

"Idrem sensed Brenlor swinging toward the rash reactivity that the Srin often mistook for decisive action when confronted with a crisis."

"“You think she’ll make it?” “She should. Unless something else goes wrong.” Tsaami’s tone was sour. “Caine: this is a battlefield. Something else always goes wrong.” To which Riordan had no ready response. After all, Karam was right."

"“On the surface, it’s crazy, right?” “It’s crazy down beyond the surface, too,” Dora affirmed."

"“How would you answer their demand for justice and vengeance?” “I would begin by insisting that justice and vengeance are different. Vengeance is often blind to reason: all it can see is the object it hates. Conversely, justice is blind to our preferences and prejudices; all it may see are the deeds and the conditions under which they were carried out.”"

"“I do not disagree with you, Bannor Rulaine. But in my culture, when tradition is challenged by law, the law is often twisted, construed, and reconstrued until it can be made to conform with tradition. I believe your word for this is teleology: where a result is decided before the process debate or discovery is initiated.” O’Garran snorted. “Fancy word for saying, ‘they’re going to have it their way, no matter what.’”"

"“Would anyone, even low-breeds, be so ingenuous to believe such a tale?” “Remarkably, yes. Their power to believe what they wish, if not given incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, is rather astonishing.”"

"That’s one thing I’ve noticed about war, Richard: there’s always more than enough irony to go around."

"“You would have been quite pleased if Hitler had won World War II. That would have made your job easier for you.” Sukhinin, whose family was said to have suffered horribly in his nations Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, wore a smile that was more reminiscent of bared teeth. Shethkador’s reply was almost casual. “Of course we would have preferred that outcome. You would have been preacculturated to our ways.” Downing raised an eyebrow. “So Adolf Hitler is your idea of an ubermensch?” “Hitler? A superior being? Fate, no. Do not mistake our approval of the ethos of a regime for admiration of its leader. Hitler was a weak, superstitious amateur whose profound insecurities and absolute in ability to perceive himself accurately ultimately caused the downfall of his project.” “How so?” “Is it not obvious? Firstly, he surrounded himself with those like himself; fanatics who were also cranks, individuals whose personal derangements or need for rationalizing their own inferiority led them to a psychopathic projection of their own feelings onto others. The true object of their exterminations was what they most feared and loathed in themselves; weakness, insufficiency, flaccidity, cowardice. They could not admit this, of course, so they protected the roots of their self-hatred by ensuring that these traits were not the overt criteria upon which their social extirpations were based. Rather, they demonized specific groups and then attributed these treats to them, thereby amplifying the political appeal of their movement by invoking traditional prejudices and stereotypes through suitably crafted propaganda.”"

"“Virodok!” exclaimed Sukhinin, who sounded short of breath. “Do you monsters hold nothing dear beyond yourselves?” “No, we do not, and that is the source of our power: to reject the delusion that any human, anywhere, at any time, actually does anything or feels anything that they believe is not, at some level, in their own interest.”"

"“Your rabble’s one unifying cry will be that there must be retribution. Most will call this ‘justice.’ A few of the most intemperate will also be the most honest; they will call it ‘revenge.’”"

"After all, an agent on the inside of a rival organization was always worth more, operationally speaking, than a loyal servitor in one’s own."

"He is young—well, younger—and idealistic. Which is to say, foolish."

"“It seems to me that you counted on the idiom of speech to mislead the Ambassador, to invite him to presume that they were not interested in hearing your discourse.” Riordan shrugged. “Guilty as charged. But there is a big difference between lying and using language that will trick the incautious. More importantly though, if the Ktor are going to wholly ignore the rules of fair and honest communication, then I’d say we’re on pretty firm ethical ground if we simply decide to play by the letter, not the spirit, of those rules.”"

"Battles are lost because a combatant stops fighting too soon; wars are lost because a combatant does not stop fighting soon enough."

"“Caine, neither of us has a choice in this matter. The orders must be obeyed. The full truth of what you found, of what your troops know and can testify to, is too destabilizing. It’s a delicate time, Caine. You, more than anyone else, should understand that.” “I do understand. I understand that the time has come to stop managing information and concealing the truth.”"

"And here are the wages you must pay in order to climb the political ladder, you foolish sod. You’ve got to do the dirty work that others have ordered. I’ve done it out of dubious patriotism. Let’s see if you’ll do it out of blind ambition."

"No matter which images of battle and carnage came to haunt him, no matter which specific terror rose up through them, the lessons they rehearsed were always the same: There’s no such thing as certainty. Control is an illusion. Death and destruction descend the moment you forget to watch for them. That was what two years of intermittent war had taught him. And once you learned those lessons, you didn’t just remember them: you lived them, moment to moment."

"And over the many months that followed, as Caine crept through both terrestrial and alien undergrowth on missions to reclaim some of the autonomy humanity had lost, he learned and relearned the prime lesson in common to all the shocks: That all assumptions, like all plans, or never more than a second away from a catastrophic collision with reality."

"The reality, both now and historically, was that whatever the future held, change was always uneven in distribution and irregular in timing."

"“Damn it, Dad. You make me crazy.” “That’s part of my job as a parent. If I read the manual correctly.”"

"Your conjecture is reasonable but inaccurate."

"You are impetuous. But then again, you are human."

"“You mean, control my instincts?” “No, most of your species can learn to do that. The true challenge is whether you can control your predisposition to assume moral equivalencies where none exist.”"

"These matters should incite more urgent investigation than the technology you arrogated from your attackers. But like most primitive cultures, your reflex is one of stimulus and response: to focus entirely on the issues and actions of the moment."

"“Is Glamqoozht just a place name or does it mean something?” “It translates imperfectly as Council Hub.” Riordan was guardedly hopeful. “Sounds like it’s a place to get questions answered and decisions made.” Unless, of course, it was like human capitals."

"Riordan surveyed the scene again. Knowing that it could not be other than perfect made it seem less remarkable, much in the way a constructed vista in a theme park could never quite compare with a less perfect one discovered in nature. This was merely a technological achievement, and the price of its perpetual perfection was its inability to inspire a sense of grandeur."

"I guess that, living in a sanitized world, you’ve forgotten this basic lesson: if you want to stay free or stay alive, never play by your opponent’s rules. Particularly when your opponent is more powerful than you are. Do the unexpected. Turn on your pursuer. Attack the attacker."

"“I could offer considerable inducements. I can arrange for a new mate who is, in all meaningful measures, superior to the one you are currently pursuing. You look unimpressed. Ah, multiple mates, then? Within reason, I am quite certain I can procure—” Riordan was careful to keep his interruption calm. “I am not interested in other mates.” “Ah. Well. I am also able to provide you with material riches. I believe your species persists in its obsession with gold? To use your idiom, I would pay you handsomely for any successful breeding activity. Even if you do not wish to stay afterward.” Riordan forced his molars to unclench. Uinzleej moved on to his next offer. “What else—ah! Many of your species enjoy hunting. This world is full of creatures you may kill for your gratification.”"

"Stupid creatures tend to be stubborn creatures."

"Whose tutelage led you into those fishless waters?"

"“Aren’t you even going to wish me luck?” “We do not believe in luck, Caine Riordan. However, I wish enlightenment unto you. In every passing second.”"

"It was the oldest, most primal fear of humankind, inculcated by eons of brutal lessons which, titrated down into their purest form, became age’s invariable advice to youth: beware the things and places you do not know.Because out there, beyond the flickering ring of the tribal fire, on the unlit streets of concrete cities, in the unending depths of space—there lay an unquantifiable, unbounded potential for death."

"Riordan almost smiled. “You sound like another historian I know.” “Historian?” She stiffened. “I am an observer. I do not claim to convey a unified story, just the pieces for which I have data.”"

"“Whatever destiny we assign to ourselves also defines our doom. It is there, lurking, waiting, from the instantiation of sentience. It is the antipodal defect of the virtue we call ‘foresight.’”"

"“It is in the nature of social creatures to crave approval and approbation, to build a temple out of what they have told themselves they are and must be.” Oduosslun stared at Riordan. “Reject that reflex. Reject the simplistic narrative. Reject the opiating allure of presuming you know your own destiny. Rather, embrace the ineluctable truth that you are not preordained saviors in the midst of a mythic cycle, any more than we were the guardians and guarantors of civilization. Like us, you are simply another species living out the consequences of what came before.”"

"Human, do you derive some strange pleasure by using different words to reiterate the same misperceptions?"

"When such leaders act in opposition to their sworn duties, they compound injustice with disgrace."

"Worse yet, he still had to remind himself that sensations—such as tonight’s skin-cooling sea breeze—were just a blizzard of electric impulses, tricking his brain, his nerves. Which, he had begun to fear, might not just be the endgame for Dornaani civilization. It could be in humanity’s future as well. Conceivably, those seeds were latent in electricity itself. Given how it ultimately expanded each individual’s sphere of contact and control, its utility was inseparable from the allure of its power. We summon heat and light without having to create it ourselves. We communicate across continents and oceans. We operate machines that labor in our stead. We keep opponents at a safe distance with remote sensors and drones. Is that how the long, subtle slide into speciate senescence began, that the more a species distanced itself from direct action, the more unfamiliar the natural environment became?"

"Weiner-Kutkh waved airily. “I seem to have been born lucky.” “Said every cheater who’s ever lived,” Caine retorted."

"In the face of crisis, I will choose unauthorized action over disastrous inaction."

"The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern-lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books."

"“I met one (that is, a dragon) once,” Irene said. “What did you talk about?” “He complimented me on my literary taste.” Kai blinked. “Doesn’t sound like a life-threatening sort of conversation.”"

"She did find that the books displayed prominently in every chamber had been dusted, but the spines were pristine and uncreased. They had the sad, untouched air of literature paraded for display purposes but never actually used. It was profoundly depressing."

"She’d sort things out later. She’d explain things later. Right now she just had to make sure there would be a later."

"She was a Librarian, and the deepest, most fundamental part of her life involved a love of books. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to shut the rest of the world out and have nothing to worry about except the next page of whatever she was reading."

"She wasn’t actually going to lie, but there was…well, there might be an element of flexibility."

"Irene hated trusting to luck. It was no substitute for good planning and careful preparation."

"It was only a hypothesis, but it made an uncomfortable amount of sense."

"“Oh, history,” Silver said, cutting her off. “You’ll be talking about reality next, as if it were something special too.”"

"Here and there people sat at desks, carefully turning the pages of manuscripts, or unrolling scrolls and making notes. It comforted her. This is a place built to store books, by people who wanted to preserve books, and used by people who want to read those books. I am not alone."

"“I think my point holds. People want stories. You should know that more than anybody. They want their lives to have meaning. They want to be part of something greater than themselves. Even you, Miss Winters, want to be a heroic Librarian—don’t you? And if you’re going to say that people need to have the freedom to be unhappy, something that’s forced on them whether they like it or not, I would question your motivation.” She paused for a single deadly second. “Most people don’t want a brave new world. They want the story that they know.”"

"“My brother and I used to live in Rome,” she invented. “Rome.” The other woman turned up her nose a little. “Well, I suppose people have to live somewhere.”"

"There were so many possible logical holes in that statement that Irene could have used it as a tea-strainer."

"“Maybe it’s like being a parent,” she said, bringing up a Library map. “You never really see your children as adults.” “You’re exaggerating,” Kai said, with the easy confidence of someone who hadn’t tested the issue yet."

"The problem with paranoia was that if you let it rule all your decisions, then you would miss some perfectly good opportunities."

"“I have spent most of my life preferring books to people,” Irene said sharply. “Just because I like a few specific people doesn’t change anything.”"

"Blind faith is just another word for slavery."

"There were things to do, people to see, questions to ask. Books to read."

"“I dislike the fact that she treated you like a servant,” Kai commented. His voice had an undertone to it that promised reprisals. “Leave it for the moment,” Irene said wearily. “I’m not going to waste my time feeling insulted. And don’t you think we’ve got more serious problems to consider? Much more serious problems?”"

"They blew up a library. A library, Kai. They haven’t just offended me, they have attacked and insulted every single citizen of this place who used that library, who contributed to it, who even so much as might have used it someday in the future."

"The news was highly coloured, even if the print was black and white."

"She was trying to work out who these men were working for. Were they Qing Song’s minions, random gangsters, specific gangsters, or undercover police? So many enemies, so little time."

"She’d thought the situation couldn’t get much worse. She’d been wrong. The situation could always get worse."

"There were clear class divisions among the protestors: the upper-class ones stood back and gave the orders, while the lower-class ones did the actual work. Some things didn’t change, no matter how many worlds you visited."

"“What business is it of mine if they should want to kill each other? I’d say they both show excellent judgement.” “Sounds about right to me,” Evariste said harshly. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. If they want to tear each other to bits, they can get on with it, and good luck to them.”"

"First things first. Get the facts, then decide what to do next. And hope that there is a next."

"The room on the other side was elegant and gracious, even in the moonlight that slanted in through the long rectangular windows. It breathed with the scent of old books and wax polish: the dark volumes that filled the shelves promised countless secrets, and Irene itched just to reach out and touch them."

"Walking through a library—any library—as they made their way to the exterior had its usual comforting, balancing effect on Irene. It was a reassurance that such places existed and that they would continue, even if she herself was as temporary as any other human."

"Sometimes the obvious answer is the true answer."

"What is written can be erased, alas."

"And, really, Erda had put the basic problem in a nutshell. Everyone here viewed damage to their own particular interest as more significant than damage to anyone else’s. Whatever the scale of the damage."

"“There is no truth to peace,” she said. “Peace is at best a brief interlude between hostilities. The treaties which might be signed here are no more than lies. The field of battle is more honest.”"

"Irene didn’t need Vale’s deductive skills to tell her she was in trouble. But there was something liberating about this. She was surrounded by known enemies, not politics. And she didn’t have anyone to worry about—apart from herself."

"You can’t trust people in power, dearie. They’ll say whatever they want, all the witnesses will be paid to agree, and then you’re behind bars till the end of your days. Or worse."

"“I have a complicated relationship with my parents. It’s a good relationship, but…” “You hardly ever see them!” “Yes, that’s why it’s a good relationship.”"

"My dear Irene, there are two sorts of collectors. One is satisfied by simply owning the treasured item and doesn’t care whether or not the rest of the world knows. But the other sort—they absolutely have to brag about their possessions. For them, half the pleasure comes from the thought of acquaintances gnawing their guts out with envy. Even if it increases the risk of theft, they can’t help themselves."

"Be careful. Be diplomatic. Try not to blow anything up."

"They did attempt to leave the European Union last year, but apparently that was prompted by demonic interference."

"All that fear, all that paranoia, and all of it based on a lie simply to keep convenient control of this world. Maybe there were no universal standards of morality—but this was still just plain wrong."

"“I have no intention of signing up to her crusade,” Irene said. “To anyone’s crusade.”"

"Indigo was precisely the sort of person who would declare that a just revolution was worth a million deaths. As long as she wasn’t one of them, of course."

"“But don’t make the same mistakes that we have, Irene.” Her mouth quirked in a smile. “Make some new ones.”"

"“Life was much easier before I had to worry about everyone else worrying,” Irene muttered. “It’s called growing up, dear. It comes with staying alive.”"

"Catherine looked as if she was about to boil over. “We have been poisoned,” she said again. “We’re about to die! I’ll never get at those books!” “Now, that’s the right attitude,” Kai agreed, glad to see her demonstrating a proper sense of priorities."

"I don’t care about politics or the greater good or universal peace or whatever. I just want to be left in peace with books."

"“May I be frank?” Sherrington asked. Irene sighed. This was always the sign of a fast-approaching insult."

"My dear Miss Winters, You will have realized by now that I intend to bring down irretrievable ruin on you, your loved ones, your friends and associates, your workplace, and anything else that comes to mind. Please don’t feel obliged to thank me. It is my pleasure entirely."

"“Nothing lasts,” he said, his voice guttural with age and remembered pain. “Neither knowledge, nor skill, nor family, nor the bond between master and student. In another thousand years I will be gone. And in time you both will pass as well, and this place will be dust. For all that we pride ourselves on our power and our length of years, Prince Kai, ultimately dragons too are as fleeting as fireflies. There was a time when we never existed; there will also come a time when nobody will remember us. War changes to peace. But, ultimately, peace collapses into war and the cycle continues.” “I’ve told you before, sir, you will be remembered as long as my fathers kingdom lasts.” Shan Yuan spoke with affection, clearly repeating an old reassurance. “That’s not as reassuring as you might think.”"

"“Very well. Then our conversation is over.” “Aren’t you going to threaten me?” Irene asked. “Miss Winters, if you don’t already feel threatened, I’m not doing my job properly.”"

"“I honestly thought you’d be happier if you knew nothing about it for the rest of your life. Was I wrong?” Irene slumped in her chair. “No, you weren’t. Everyone’s going to say that, aren’t they? ’It was for your own good.’” “Something you’ll learn as you get older is that truth and reconciliation may be necessary for nations, but it isn’t necessarily best for individuals.”"

"It was the sort of overly complex plan dreamed up by armchair manipulators who thought they could play chess with the universe and didn’t realize that the universe ignored rulebooks."

"“Everyone’s being hypocritical,” she muttered. “Is there anyone around here who doesn’t want something from us while acting innocent? We need to find out what’s really going on before everyone does the wrong thing for the right reasons.”"

"Irene realized she was on the point of shouting. Worse, of being ungrammatical. She took a deep breath."

"I think the time for blind trust is long over. Now I need answers."

"You must surely know by now, Winters, that a leader’s authority is limited to giving her followers orders that they will actually obey."

"“You mean me entering the Library may have destroyed the universe?” Catherine asked “You don’t need to sound quite so impressed by it,” Irene chided. “It’s not something you want on your yearly performance review.”"

"We shouldn’t be playing politics. We should be focusing on what’s important."

"Don’t you realize you have a responsibility to other people to look after yourself?"

"“Are there other Librarian ghosts here?” she asked. “Ghosts? Yes, I suppose that’s the best word for it. Collections of memories, maybe. We are all the sum of our memories, after all.”"

"If my friends—my brothers and sisters—have sacrificed themselves, then it was their choice. You, on the other hand, have lied to us and kept us in the dark and used us. You’re probably going to tell me that you did it for a higher cause, that you were just protecting us. But true higher causes don’t have everyone deserting them when they find out the truth, grandmother. Genuine ethical purposes don’t have everyone walking out once they know what’s really going on. And causes that people care enough to die for…”"

"I've found that there are three types of games that pique my interest: games I want to make, games I want to have made, and games I'm good at making. [...] The ideas with the most potential (to be finished, at least) fall into all three categories and also satisfy the requirement "I have the time and resources to actually make this"."

"Feeling stuck? Push forward. Start working on the next level, the next enemy, the next whatever. Not only is it helpful for motivational purposes, but you want to get a sense for how your whole game will play out. Just like writing— you don't want to go through it sentence by sentence, making sure every sentence is perfect before you move on. Get an outline down."

"The most important thing to know about video game development and schooling is that no one, whether it's an indie studio or big company, cares about degrees. How could it, when some of its most prominent members are drop-outs or never-beens?"

"A degree is a piece of paper that says you can do something in theory— game developers want to know that you have enough passion to do real work, regardless of whether you're being graded on it. And if you're thinking of going indie, it won't matter what other people think— you'll simply need that passion to succeed or else you won't."

"The key to making a challenging game that's not frustrating is to give the player all of the tools that they need to overcome the challenge— and never make it the game's fault that they lost. [...] Roguelikes give you lots of those tools, so even though they're really tough, it's always fun."

"I think my word is "flow" for game design, because I think you want your game to flow, and I think you want your game development process to flow. To me, that means everything starting from a central idea, and then layering on top of that to have a very coherent experience. I think if you develop games that way, [it'll come across] to the players, and they'll have a similar experience that's really smooth."

"That's a type of game that I really like, is one that grows on you a lot over time, and your understanding of it feels like it's on an exponential curve. I just hope that enough people are willing to give [Spelunky] a chance, [who may] not be used to that."

"When it comes down to it, I feel like art should never be compromised for any reason— especially not to satisfy a certain group of people. [...] There was no compromise for Spelunky."

"That's how you make [a] game feel truly alive: you cut out the mundane stuff! [...] I think this pursuit of "realism" to make games feel more immersive— it's kind of a dead end."

"I like that in general: just having a little bit of unpredictability in each level. And I really like dense level design with a lot going on. I think for this level, the message that I want to convey is "Find peace through hell". And that's kind of my design philosophy in general."

"My worry is that as players we've grown too comfortable with being comfortable. We revel in being consumers of products, rather than contributors to a rapidly-evolving art form. [...] We've gone from asking "How does this game play?" to asking, "Does this game play the way I want it to play?""

"We can't know what to expect and also be surprised. We can't be free from frustration and also be challenged. We can't go unchallenged and also feel satisfied with our accomplishments. Mystery, surprise, tension, challenge, and a real sense of accomplishment always come at the cost of feeling uncomfortable. Given the opportunity, many of us would rather take the easier road, but that's usually the less rewarding one."

"The best games come out of a mutual respect between the creator and the player. The player does not demand a certain experience from the creator because they trust in the creator's expertise and because they want to be surprised. A personal creative vision cannot bloom without the freedom afforded by that trust. At the same time, creators must trust in the curiosity and abilities of their players. Continuously interrupting play to steer players with direct text messages and other obvious hints not only infantilizes them, but it also reveals the creator's insecurity in their ability to design games."

"The "joy of discovery" is one of the fundamental joys of play itself. Not just the joy of discovering secrets within the game, but also the joy of uncovering the creator's vision. It's that "Aha!" moment where it all makes sense, and behind the world the player can feel the touch of another creative mind. In order for it to be truly joyful, however, it must remain hidden from plain view— not carved as commandments into stone tablets but revealed, piece by piece, through the player's exploration of the game's rules."

"I often compare the process of finding and working with teammates to dating. In any big project, you're not just looking for a set of artistic and technical skills to fit your own, you're also looking for someone who shares your creative vision, who communicates well, and who will be as passionate and dedicated about the project as you are in the long run. [...] Ultimately, if you're planning on releasing a commercial video game, you are looking for "marriage material"— a committed, stable partner you can get along with for a long time."

"I'm obsessed with finishing as a skill. Over the years, I've realized that so many of the good things that have come my way are because I was able to finish what I started. [...] Irrespective of how big the project was, each one I finished gave something back to me, whether it was new fans, a new benchmark for what I could accomplish, or new friends [whom] I could work with and learn from."

"The more I play and create games, the less convinced I am that the difficulty of games should be thought of in terms of a linear or exponential ramp upwards where, as the player gets stronger, you need to make the opposition increase proportionally in strength. [...] While some form of escalation certainly feels good in a challenging game, [there's] something futile and perhaps nihilistic about endlessly cranking a single knob that goes from easy to hard. Rather, I believe it makes more sense to think about difficulty in terms of the game's overall pacing. Difficulty should ebb and flow, and make room for other aspects of play."

"Now that Spelunky is done, what I feel most of all is a sense that I'm part of an even bigger puzzle that includes the people [who] influenced me, the players who play Spelunky, and whomever Spelunky has influenced in turn. [...] In the end, isn't that why we create things? Not just for the power of putting something into existence, but to connect with people and be part of the conversation that is human history. To have something that speaks for us when we're not speaking and even after we're gone."

"To make a world feel really real and immersive, you have to take a step back. And you have to try not to guide the player so much — and show them everything — because that is the fun part about games— discovering things on [your] own, making [your] own mistakes. That's what gives the games meaning. When I feel like someone has their hand on my shoulder, and they're just pushing me around, I feel like I'm losing a lot of the meaning of games, which is that joy of discovery."

"One of the most fun things about games is learning. It's learning the game and getting that knowledge for yourself about this little world. The only way you can really do that is by figuring it out yourself. If the game tells me something before I get a chance to learn it myself: 1) that's really annoying, but 2) it robs [me] of that experience."

"Everything in Spelunky was designed with a similar sensibility, where we're trying to draw out the personality of each area, of each monster, from very simple actions and things that they do. And when they all come together, you get this complexity that's very interesting, and that makes every time you play in this randomized environment fun— because you start to see — over time — all the different patterns that can arise. [...] That's the emergent gameplay that comes out of it."

"I tend to think about my life in terms of games. "This is the Aquaria point of my life." "This is the Spelunky point of my life." As to what [Spelunky] actually represents — what does that time mean to me — I think: coming more into my own, as a game developer, and figuring out how it was I want to work exactly. I feel like I learned a lot with Aquaria, and I'm super proud of that game, but Spelunky was where I feel like I hit my stride."

"As game designers, we naturally gravitate towards order, because we create rules, and we create systems, and we create structure. And those are all things that belong to this idea of order. [...] And so, I think it makes complete sense that as game designers, we would embrace order, and we would be very attracted to things like "balance", things like "elegance" in game design. [But] more recently — and maybe a big part of this is my experience with Spelunky — I've started to rethink that a little bit. And I've started to think more about chaos as the defining trait of game design. Or at least that's something that really appeals to me right now— this idea that we're not creating these ordered systems, but we're creating chaos for the player to find order in."

"This is a straight-up religious problem: the idea of the player and the developer. Because I think [for] some developers, creating a game, it's a little universe— they don't want to be a part of that universe. They want the player to play and just experience the universe as created, and not be involved. And then, I think there are other developers [who] do want you to know "Hey— I designed this! My fingerprints are all over this." And then, there are players [who] I think want to play games basically as the "atheists" of that game world— where they want to just experience the world as-is, with all of its flaws and all of its ugly warts. And then, there are players who play, and because they know that there is a designer behind all of it, they want to basically pray to that deity of the universe to change it for them! [...] I think it has to do with fundamental differences in the way different designers want their game to be experienced, and also fundamental differences between different players and how they want to treat that relationship between the player of the game world and the designer."

"The business model of arcades— I don't know how it will be replicated ever again, but it created such an interesting category of games, just based on the unique features of it. And I think it's one of the few places where the business model of the arcades really forced this type of design that was— I call it "lean and explosive". [I say] "lean" because you have to push players along to the interesting parts of the game as quickly as possible. And you just don't see that in modern gaming and modern game development. [...] And I say "explosive" because they don't save anything for the end. The experiences are quite short: to play through an arcade game, it's 30 minutes to an hour, tops, for the longer arcade games. And you don't want to save anything for the end because players are renting the game a quarter at a time. And so, starting with Stage 1, you've got to put it all out on the table, while still — in the later parts of the game — giving people something to look forward to. And I think that has been very influential on Spelunky 1 and 2, and it's just a type of design I really enjoy."

"There's a certain glee [among game developers like Bennett and me] from players feeling frustrated and disappointed. And it's not because we dislike players. It's actually because we really care about players, and these are emotions that you need to feel to have a well-rounded human experience in a video game."

"That might be the core of game design to me— making connections from every part of the game to every other part of the game. [...] I think it's been really fun to be able to do Spelunky Classic, Spelunky HD, and now, Spelunky 2. And it really feels to me like seeing the evolution of a lot of our favorite childhood franchises and seeing how they've grown up, and being inspired by that."

"I've started to think of myself, personally, as a "work in progress" that will never reach completion— but in order to keep progressing, I have to release games. [...] You're releasing a game, but you yourself are not "done". And so, I think that takes some of the pressure off for me— to think about things that way. And in general— to think about art and life as this cyclic thing, because you're going to keep going and make more things, so just put out what you've got and do the best you can. It's not a final judgment of you, as a person and an artist, when you release a game."

"The best metric for scoping a project is not technical skill, but the scope of the previous games you've finished!"

"This won't be your only chance to say something through your art. It's not even your only chance to relay this exact idea— after all, finishing a game doesn't mean you [can't] remake it later (or put out a sequel)! My advice is to abandon the goal of making an objectively great game. Instead, focus on making the best game you can at the time and find joy in your personal growth."

"I want people to play around with [Spelunky 2] and not focus so much on "beating" it. I think it's a difficult concept for people to wrap their head[s] around. [...] It is a hard game, but the challenge is really just a backdrop for people to play and experiment."

"A lot of design decisions that end up having a big effect on the gameplay start as thematic decisions. [...] It's like in chess, how the knight is the only piece that jumps, and that just makes sense-- you're on a horse, and the horse can leap. Those kinds of links-- they're things that game developers think about a lot, and it's not just a bunch of abstract rules. It matters what the game is about story-wise, character-wise, et cetera."

"I think about making art, in general, as a dialogue. That's what it is, in the end— you're expressing yourself, and your audience gets their chance to express themselves. And especially with video games — it being interactive and it being software — it really is a continuing conversation— very directly now, and very literally. [...] In this moment, it is a conversation, as well as being this long-running conversation throughout history."

"No matter how built up you are [in any Spelunky game] and how powerful you are, there is always that slight chance that it could all be over. It's exciting. It's not done enough in games— especially in modern games. [...] Real life is a huge inspiration for me, in terms of how real life works. We're trying to move towards "realism" in terms of graphics and things like that, but it's stuff like instant deaths that I think are more connected to real life from an interactive standpoint, which is what games are all about."

"The instant kill is like an exclamation point on the end of a run."

"The instant death— it's like a punchline to this joke, where the joke is really just the tension of being in this dangerous situation. [...] The fact that when [a run] ends, it's instantaneous, I think is very humorous. And it's this nice release, in some sense. It's frustrating, but it's also a release— and it creates this pregnant pause afterwards, where you can really think about what happened."

"Ultimately, that's what makes the most interesting game that we can make— if it's not just what players are expecting or what players want the game to be. [...] I would like people to feel strongly about it. I think that's the most important thing for me— whether it's love it, or not like it, or have conflicting feelings about certain parts of the game. I want the game to have its own personality, and that personality is the personality of the team making it."

"Video games are an artform that's so limitless. In making a game, a big part of the process is putting these limiters on the game itself, so you can actually finish. And I think feedback is a great way to figure out what those limiters should be. It's a way to scope and rescope your game."

"Miyamoto and Tezuka, at least when they were designing the early Mario games— I've seen interviews where they describe the genre that Mario is in — and that they're working in — not as platformers but as "athletic games". [...] When I read that, that really changed the way I saw these games— and I feel like it captures the spirit of them much better than "platformer". Even the platformers that Mario has inspired afterwards don't feel as much like "athletic games" [as] the Mario series itself. And one of the iconic Mario songs by Koji Kondo is called "Athletic Theme", which plays into that."

"Mario made more sense to me, thinking about it as an "athletic game". Even little details like Charging Chuck— there are just random sports characters that are in the Mario universe. And the fact that — at the end of a Super Mario World level — there's that bar that goes up and down, and you're trying to hit it— it kind of feels like hurdles. The fact that there is a timer in the game. [...] It all comes together to make each Mario level feel almost like a race where you can also explore."

"Spiky games are often thought of as "punishing", but the difficulty — while it's an important part of the design ethos — is in service of the goal, rather than the goal itself. The real goal is to put the player in a state of focus about the game— and to really care about what they're doing at any given moment. [...] Winning or finishing the game is not the main goal of a spiky game, even if that's ultimately what [the player is] working toward."

"Unsurprisingly, not everybody likes spiky games! [They're] like bitter or spicy food— [they're] an acquired taste that you have to build up. [...] It can be hard for people who don't like spicy food to understand why spicy-food fans love it so much. If you're just starting out on your spicy-food journey, you can't taste the flavor— just the heat and the pain. Similarly, spiky games generate a lot of enthusiasm from their fans, but for people who aren't there yet, they can just seem hard."

"Not that there's anything wrong with wanting challenge for the sake of challenge, but it does make things that much more confusing when people are trying to evaluate spiky games. Again: the difficulty is only one part of the equation— it's the "heat" part of spicy food. I don't eat spicy food to feel pain, but the pain wakes me up— and it's the gateway to interesting flavors that you can't find anywhere else. The flavor is what makes spicy food good, and it gets easier and easier to withstand the heat the more you experience it."

"I focus as much on the process of making games as the games themselves, because I have the experience now to know how hard game-making is at any level. I don't just make a game because I want to make the game; I make it because it's also the right time to make it and the right people are around to help me make it. I never assume that a game is going to get made out of sheer will. A lot of the decisions that you make in the conceptual phase will either help you or haunt you, once the development starts."

"両性具有なんです。まぁもう人間を超越した存在になっちゃってますしね。俺もだけど。 They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."

"The creation of Bridget as a boy happened at the very last second; during development I was drawing him as purely a girl. It’s just that when there is a need to give a worldly backbone (to the game), in order for me to try to not forget each character, and in order to revive the character, I give them my very heart. As a result, the creation of Bridget as actually a boy instead of a girl was because I thought he could become my alter ego. Well, if there was a need for it the reverse— a girl that looks like a boy— that would be okay too, but it doesn’t look pretty game-wise. It’s also somewhat calculated (laughs)."

"While I was creating the characters in Guilty Gear, I had a spot for a cute character. I thought it would be too boring if the character was just cute, so I thought it would be interesting to make the character a guy."

"I guess I couldn’t pin the inspiration for the character on any one thing. But when we are making new characters, we are always looking for some new element to add to the character to make it interesting and fun, and while we were making Bridget, that was the element."

"Bridget is now a well known bounty hunter and has managed to greatly contribute to his home village and his parents, and is now at a stage where he's "trying to understand his true self""

"Bridget: You’re not taking Roger away from me! Bridget: I’m... I’m a boy. These girl-clothes are... It’s a long story. Bridget: Thank you very much! It’s all thanks to you! I’ve got to toughen up! Y’know, since I’m a boy and all... Heh heh... Bridget: Hey! I-I’m not a “kid,” okay?!"

"ブリジットの性別について多くお問い合わせ頂いているのですが、アーケードモードのブリジットストーリーを経て、ブリジットは自分を女性と自認するようになりました。 なので『彼』と『彼女』のどちらの代名詞が正しいかと聞かれたら、ブリジットは『彼女』にあてはまります。 前述のキャラクター説明にもあります通り、双子の弟として生まれたブリジットは、村の迷信から守るために両親が性別を隠して女の子として育てています。 しかしブリジットの両親は、迷信から守るためとはいえブリジットに生き方を強制させていると感じ、心を痛めます。 その事にブリジットは気づき、男として振る舞いつつ己の活躍で村を豊かにする、つまり迷信をくつがえすことで、彼女の両親が抱くブリジットに生き方を強いているという罪悪感から解放しようとしました。 結果として村から迷信は消え、両親も彼女も生き方に縛られる必要が無くなりました。 その後、ブリジットは男として過ごそうとして違和感を感じます。 アーケードモードのストーリーはここから始まります。ブリジットはゴールドルイスやカイとの交流を経たうえで、これまで敢えて目を背けてきた彼女自身と向き合い、彼女にとっての大きな決断をすることにしました。 彼女が勇気を出して、自分自身の気持ちに噓偽りなく選択したその道を、皆さんに見守っていただければ幸いです。"

"After the events of Bridget's story in Arcade more, she self-identifies as a woman. So, as to whether “he” or “she” would be the correct pronoun for Bridget, the answer would be “she.” As mentioned in her character profile, Bridget was born as the younger twin son and then raised as a girl by her parents to protect her from a village superstition. Despite their intentions to protect Bridget, it pained her parents to do so as they felt they were forcing her to live a certain way. Bridget, realizing this, attempted to bring wealth to the village while behaving like a man, thus overturning the village superstition, as a way to free her parents from their guilt. As a result, the superstition faded, and nothing remained to restrict how both Bridget and her parents lived. After this, Bridget tries living as a man, but it doesn’t feel right. This is where the Arcade Mode story begins. After her exchanges with Goldlewis and Ky, Bridget faces parts of herself she has tried to ignore, and makes a big decision for herself. I hope that all of you will watch over her path after her courageous choice to stay true to her own feelings."

"Rather than wanting to send a message using Bridget, what I can say is that when creating characters and deciding who gets what, I put a little bit of my own sensibilities in each of the characters. They carry those responsibilities. For example, if everyone in the world became vegetarian, you can say there would be good things about that, but from the opposite viewpoint there would be problems and demerits to the situation. When I see a discussion like that, I think both sides are valid, and my stance is that I want to cheer on both sides when I can. From that standpoint, the root of what I want to do is I find all kinds of topics and think, people with this background, I want to give them a story that has a so-called ‘happy ending,’ that has a traditional course. Rather than using Bridget to say something, my hope is that I can continue to create, even abstractly, a vision of what happiness looks like for people in all different kinds of situations."

"I guess from a design standpoint of transferring the character into Strive, yeah in Xrd there was Bedman who was on their bed, but since the character perished in that story it's just the bed remaining. And what I wanted to do was kind of take a little bit of inspiration from Annabelle and say the kind of fractured feeling of Bedman is still remaining inside the bed itself. So from a design standpoint, that's the basic backbone of the character."

"Game isn't actually about the glamour of high-stakes poker. "That was the back-drop for a much more personal, much more emotional and much more inspirational story."

"I saw some of the most famous people in today's world,""

"I was a fly on the wall, and I'm privy to all this inside information about all these different industries. ... And at the end of the night, people were tipping me and I made more money that night than I'd made the whole month.""

"I was looking for this thing that would make me feel validated, make me feel like someone, make me feel significant. And I sort of found it."

"Bloom went from working other people's games to starting her own – a leap that came with even more power and influence. "And then, ultimately, I started bankrolling the game and extending credit,""

"“I’ve always been ambitious, but I learned it needs to be something bigger than myself,” she said. “My old job, I was able to see what these guys wanted and give them transformational experiences. At the end of the day, that didn’t mean much. But I have this skill set. Now I want to create transformational experiences for women, whether it’s co-working spaces or a digital network involving blockchain.”"

"It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness. It's not even an ego thing--it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you."

"I've always been obsessed with creating stuff, I spent my spare time doodling, making music, writing... basically all the different aspects of making a game. I just didn't know at the time that I would find a way to combine all those things to bring a cohesive vision to life."

"You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you."

"There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special."

"There is no "secret" to being successful, you just need to have great dedication and perseverance and adopt a "can do" attitude."

"My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all. I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human. I try to act online like I do in real life: treat everyone with respect, and be as honest and straightforward as possible."

"I think it's a lot easier to stay driven when you're doing your own project, knowing that there are no limits to how far you can go."

"I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle."

"It’s very important to me that I make good on my promises."

"Making art, making video games, is my way of sharing who I am with the world. My goal, deep down, is that I want to connect with the rest of humanity, and maybe have them connect with me in some way."

"My whole goal as a game creator is to create these moments where I want people to feel something, like actually feel this connection to something deeper than you would normally feel like in a video game. I want to go deeper, and connect with people in a real way that’s memorable, that they’ll take with them for the rest of their life. I think music is integral to that."

"I’m just making music, I’m not even thinking about what it’s for, and it gives me ideas for the game. It will make me think of a particular scenario or environment, and then I really envision it through the music and put that into the game. That’s my favourite way to develop, actually."

"Music is somehow pure, you don’t think of it in terms of symbols. It just exists, it’s like magic. It feels like a way you can almost directly interface with the transcendental or divine."

"If you’re creating music from the heart, you're basically tapping into this supernatural power."

"It all goes back to human nature and what we're meant to do as humans."

"What really makes me feel good, makes me feel like my life has been totally worthwhile, is the fact that Stardew Valley has brought such joy and happiness to people. People describe it as a therapeutic game. Because I know that this little game brings so much positivity to the world... that really feels good."

"It feels like my life has been worthwhile because of Stardew Valley, even if I were to die tomorrow. It feels good to see it manifest in new ways, and see people appreciate it."

"I want to create a collection of games during my career, so that when I’m on my deathbed I can look back and see that I created all these wonderful things that brought people joy."

"I invented the thing in about two seconds. It just came to me. I spent the next two hours cutting up cornflake packets and making the squares, filling them in with colours. My husband and I formed a company the next day. Continuo went into shops on September 1st; six weeks later it was the UK's bestselling game. By Christmas, we'd sold 205,000 sets in the UK — today, it's in over fifty countries; it's now sold six million sets, which ain't bad. That includes its offspring. It's not quite so popular at the moment; it just seems to have slid downstairs at the moment. Don't worry, it'll come back; in fact so much so that I've just licensed two games to South Korea — and those two are Continuo and Duo"

"Go away and find yourself a games agent; they know which companies want what, and they’ll present them for you"

"If you can’t put an idea over in twenty seconds, then you’re dead"

"you’re “…able to reason with the intuitive mind of a child, yet retain acquired knowledge and high I.Q"

"Back in 1973, a large lump of the school in which I taught detached itself and landed on my head. This put me into early retirement - and nearly killed me. Then, suddenly, on April I , 1982, apropos of nothing in particular, Continuo flashed into my mind. Such a simple concept. All players, regardless of age, could play together - or even play solo. My husband Alan and I formed a company, and five months later Continuo went on sale in the U.K., soon becoming Britain's top-selling game. Now, Continuo and its siblings have sold over six million sets around the world. A string of other successful games followed. Whilst I invented the games, Alan playtested them. The partnership worked very well as I proofread his bridge writing"