Quotes by Game Designers - Page 2

How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?
Neal Stephenson
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.
Neal Stephenson
think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
Neal Stephenson
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
Jane McGonigal
Today, I look forward and I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.
Jane McGonigal
No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Jane McGonigal
Nesse’s research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it’s stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism—and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It’s to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can’t realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy...
Jane McGonigal
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
Neal Stephenson
That's the claim. The Arl and the Prince, both killed at West Hill." she glanced at Maric, crooking one corner of her mouth in grim amusement. "Apparently your body was not distinguishable from those of regular Fereldan men and thus couldn't be found, according to the usurper.""Well that's just rude.
David Gaider
They say "doubt everything," but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don't doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That's the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you'll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself - and you'll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn't give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you'll find that a lot of what we believe is untrue...but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you'll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can.Questioning is a lifelong process. That's precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie?Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.
Tom Jubert / Jonas Kyratzes
If you want to know what you are attracting, look around you!
B. Dave Walters
You are perfect, right now, as you are. You are perfect, but incomplete. You are exactly who you had to be, to create the life you have right now, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you or your life. But, if you want to be, do, or have, something different, you will need to change.
B. Dave Walters
The secret is...good and evil are a myth. There is only the selfish, selfless, and those in between.
Belart Wright
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.
Neal Stephenson
And yet all the gold is in England, it is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows by some occult power of attraction to the Tower of London.” “Flows,” Caroline repeated. “Flows, like a current.” Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for money, as if no distinction need be observed between them.
Neal Stephenson
How does a poor country defeat rich ones?” “Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it.” “Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?” “But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel.” “Currency!” “Indeed.
Neal Stephenson
Loghain shook his head in disbelief. "Maker's breath, man, aren't you suppose to have some dignity? Somewhere?""Me? Dignity?""Being the supposed future King and such.""I think Rowan took my dignity."She snorted derisively, folding her arms. "There was nothing else worth having.
David Gaider
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.
Neal Stephenson
Joe was so tired that he had slept through first hour Spanish, second hour history, and most of third hour English. The English teacher, Mrs. Lane, hadn't taken a liking to that. She decided to send Joe to the principal to discuss why he was so sleepy, which Joe hadn't taken a liking to.
Belart Wright
And the person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is, if you ask me, the one who deserves it least. And that’s my opinion, expressed as politely as possible.
David Gaider
Honor is the only thing that separates us from animals.
Peter Tieryas
Youre gonna grow up and marry some ice cream! Haha!
Jeff Kinney
Raistlin opened his eyes, looking at her without recognition. And in them, she saw deep, undying sorrow--the look of one who has been permitted to enter a realm of deadly, perilous beauty, and who now finds himself, once more, cast down into the grey, rain-swept world.
Tracy Hickman
The nice thing about being an adolescent is being able to make mature decisions when you need them and being able to just flow alone with life when you don't.
Michael A. Stackpole
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.
Naomi Alderman
Regret is like a mental parasite that alters your behavior.
Peter Tieryas
This is the purpose of life, is it not? To create life is the greatest act a living creature can commit.
Michael A. Stackpole
So I've started wearing sweatpants to bed because I really don't need Santa seeing me in my underwear.
Jeff Kinney
Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?
Yoon Ha Lee
Gamers can feel when developers are passionate about their games. They can smell it like a dog smells fear. Don't be afraid to hold onto your unique vision: just be aware that it may not turn out exactly how you envisioned.
Scott Rogers
Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.
Neal Stephenson
It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?
Austin Grossman
Even I recognize that I'm not being a proper role model right now. But I need you to understand. As your mother, it's my duty to protect you from the evil intentions of whoever did this...and I'll become a demon if I have to. That's all there is to it.
Ryukishi07
Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.
Neal Stephenson
Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father's house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won't find in any astronomer's catalogue.
Yoon Ha Lee
You can't look dignified when you're having fun.
Aaron Allston
For me, writing isn't about money and fame. It's about passion, an art form that I want to share with the world, expand the horizons to new worlds, new experiences, and new adventures.
Jason W. Blair
So where'd you park the car, Max?''I don't know. I couldn't see over the wheel.''That's okay. I think I can smell it.
Steve Purcell
Slavery is impossible without the consent of the slave. Fear imprisons the mind, Faith. You either accept this prison by following the rules made by others. Or you break free, by making your own.
Christofer Emgard
Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
Neal Stephenson
The United States of America is logically the least magical place in the world. Planned by committee, not even a country, just a legal umbrella for fifty associated provinces, an elaborate polling system for creating other larger and more permanent committees. No mysteries; no demons; one God at the most. Sure, it had its own folklore and tall tales, but it wasn’t the same. Its rulers weren’t descended from men and women who spoke with birds and rode dragons. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were hayseeds, folksy also-rans compared to the madness in the ancient royal blood going back to the Druids, to Byzantium, to Mithraic cults.
Austin Grossman
And what do I know about humans? Only this: My name is Doloria Maria de la Cruz, and I'm not just the end of childhood. I'm the end of humanity. And if you come from the skies- I'm coming for you.
Margaret Stohl
Right." Doctor Cherryman's face lit up. Here was a way for him to grapple with the problem that the reality of vampires had presented to him. "Let's say vampires exist. What does that mean?""That they're bloodsucking murderers here to kill us all?" Lucy and the Doctor gaped at Quin's bald-faced assessment."Tell me I'm wrong," Quin said.
Matt Forbeck
I’ve realized is that every time you get something cool for your birthday or for Christmas, within a week it’s being used against you. (We'll be taking this away until your English grade improves)
Jeff Kinney
Nicolas walked toward him. Ignoring the presence of the others nearby, he took Julien's chin in his hand and kissed him tenderly on the lips. Julien seemed chagrined at first, and then accepted the gesture. It was sweet, and had the air of a couple that had been together for a great long time.Maric glanced away, embarrased by the intimacy, not to mention the fact that he hadn't quite realized the nature of the two warriors' relationship ealier. Not just comrades, then, and far more than close friend. The older Grey Wardens seemed unsurprised.
David Gaider
Lesson one: expect to get screwed over for the convenience of others on a regular basis.
Jonathan L. Howard
All this bunch of so-called 'adults' was doing was making enemies of one another when what they really needed to be concentrating on was how to get out alive.
Jonathan L. Howard
Now you're an adult, Katya!" he'd said, picking her up under the armpits like he'd been doing since she'd been born.
Jonathan L. Howard
A deed done to others, but for yourself is not a worthy one at all. Instead, place another before you; in this way, you can be sure your moral compass always points North.
Jason W. Blair
If you are feeling stressed out, stop and take 10 deep breaths...it really does help! Then focus your mind on one thing and one thing only; things are only overwhelming when you look at them all at once.
B. Dave Walters
The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.
Neal Stephenson
If you can't communicate, then you don't have a relationship!
B. Dave Walters
Horst, you are a good man. You have always been so, and your soul is an untrammelled thing indeed.’ Horst winced and interrupted. ‘Ah. Well. Maybe not. There was that business with a lacrosse team…’ Now it was Cabal’s turn to wince. ‘Did anyone suffer?’ ‘Oh, no. Nothing like that.’ ‘Was everyone happy?’ ‘I flatter myself a little to think, yes. Everyone was very nice afterwards, anyway.’ ‘Then shut up. In a world as grimy and sin-ridden as ours, you’re a paragon precisely because your intentions are always good.’ ‘Johannes, I killed a man.’ ‘Pffft.
Jonathan L. Howard
I don’t think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It’s because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives.
Neal Stephenson
We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.
Neal Stephenson
It's all about perspective. The sinking of the Titanic was a miracle to the lobsters in the ship's kitchen. (Oct 4, 2011)
Wynne McLaughlin
The day after we returned from Iorn Fist I woke up and I want either one of them anymore. Somewhere in between a girl I thought was long dead and a woman that was too blood thirsty for me to particularly like. But I thought about all that had happened the day before and decided that I liked being alive. So I wanted to than you for not letting me die.
Michael A. Stackpole
A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass.
Neal Stephenson
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
Neal Stephenson
Do you smoke, Herr Cabal?""Only to be antisocial," replied Cabal, making no move.
Jonathan L. Howard