Gabe Newell Quotes

The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren't sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters.

In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers; they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate.

One of the reasons the games business has become more popular and more broadly appealing is that it's gone from this very solitary experience to this very social experience.

Perhaps 'Borderlands' can be a lesson for all of us - that when making a videogame, we should not be afraid to identify gamers as the audience.

The social element has really transformed the gaming experience.

Whenever I write the scenarios for my games, I don't necessarily envision them being liked or being wonderful for everyone.

A good game impresses you with what you're doing. I think that's a fundamental difference that I as a game designer need to recede in the background.

I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.

The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

With a movie, it's probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration. But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player.

Ninety percent of video game AI really is pretty damn bad. I think that's actually why it's so much fun to shoot things. Because the AI is so bad and the characters are so annoying.

It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.

The most important thing in games isn't the designer's narrative, but the story the player creates through his experiences.

When I create a game, I try to focus more on the emotions that the player experiences during the game play.

A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.

There's a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don't want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character.

Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another.

Game developers know that people have more fun when they're in large groups. They feel more fired up when the challenges are more epic.

The idea of the 'lone gamer' is really not true anymore. Up to 65 percent of gaming now is social, played either online or in the same room with people we know in real life.

The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.

One of the things we joke about in the FPS development is it's so hard to get the player to actually bother to look at all the cool stuff you've been doing. You spend a lot of time making really cool things, and usually the player isn't looking where you want them to.

It's not as if I've never been awkward myself. I'm a big gamer, so I've had access to that type of personality. I used to go to these LAN parties; that was before high-speed Internet. The only way you could get lag-free gaming was to haul these huge computers to people's houses.

There are people who have formed guilds in 'World of Warcraft' who may have played together for years before actually meeting, but because of the adventures they had together, they formed really deep-rooted friendships.

It's nearly impossible to enforce actual consequences in video games at the moment, but at a table, sitting face-to-face across a tabletop game, or even playing at a LAN party, sportsmanship matters.

A lot of times, when we travel, a lot of people on the road have the Switch going. We will all connect on the Switch and play the games against each other. It's obviously the healthier alternative than partying, but it's great.