Inside Arvi Teikari's Philosophy — Wanting to Surprise You, He Lets You Play the Rules Themselves

Introduction

This time I take up Arvi Teikari, the Finnish solo developer known by the handle Hempuli. His best-known work is Baba Is You — a puzzle game in which word-blocks like "ROCK IS PUSH" and "BABA IS YOU" sit on the board, and pushing those words around rewrites the rules of the game itself. On this site we have referenced it repeatedly, in our lineage of meta-puzzles and our piece on learning curves.

But what I want to study here is not the work; it is the person who made it. How did he arrive at the idea of "letting players play the rules"? How did he think about difficulty? I read three of his interviews side by side and, using only words he actually spoke, trace his design thinking. Quotations are kept short, with links to the originals. My own conjecture is confined to the final section.

Background — A solo developer born from game jams

Since Teikari is, in Japan at least, still known as little more than "the person who made Baba Is You," let me introduce him briefly. As a child he became interested in games through Super Mario World on his cousin's Super Nintendo; a schoolmate introduced him to Game Maker in primary school, and he has long since used Clickteam's tools (Multimedia Fusion 2) as a solo developer (Indie Game Website, 2019).

Baba Is You was born at the 2017 Nordic Game Jam (a 48-hour game-making event). The prototype won Excellence in Design, the Nuovo Award and Best Student Game at the IGF (Independent Games Festival), and the full version launched on Nintendo Switch and PC in March 2019 (PC Gamer, 2018). Before that, from around 2008, he had been making a great many small experimental games — and this habit of "exploring a twist on a classic system in a short experiment" remains, as we will see, at his core.

Philosophy — "I want to surprise and amaze"

The phrase that recurs most across his statements is "to surprise." "A large motivator for me is the desire to surprise and/or amaze the player" (Indie Game Website, 2019). He says he wants to offer others the kind of unexpected experiences he himself enjoyed as a child. The point that difficulty is not the goal in itself will pay off again and again later.

A second pillar is "self-expression." "The greatest motivator is just general desire for self-expression," and "I also enjoy painting and drawing, and for me, all of these are largely means to showcase to other people whatever concepts bob in my head" (ibid.). For him, a game is, before it is a logic puzzle, a medium for getting the images in his head out into the world.

And a third — to me the most important — is the decision that "meaning arises only from rules." He had initially planned to give objects intrinsic qualities (so that ice would melt by default), but abandoned it. "I ditched this once I realized how much more interesting it would be if the only meaning in the levels came from the interactable rules within them" (ibid.). Objects carry no meaning; only the sentences placed on the board define the world. This austerity is the skeleton of Baba Is You.

Obsessions — Reverse-engineering from interactions, cutting dull alternatives

His level design follows a clear procedure. He first looks at the words and systems and hunts for "interesting or amusing interactions" between them. When he finds one, he reverse-engineers a level that cannot be solved without it. "I reverse-engineered a level that required the use of that interaction" (Game Developer, 2019). System first, puzzle second. We can read this as the design-procedure translation of the "want to surprise" philosophy above.

Another obsession is the relentless culling of uninteresting alternative solutions. "A very large part of the game's testing process has been eliminating alternative solutions that aren't interesting enough," and "my aim when designing the levels was that every level would at least try to incorporate some new interaction or feature of the game system" (Red Bull, 2019). Yet he does not hate alternatives wholesale: those that convey the same lesson differently, or give early players a fresh discovery, he says are worth keeping (ibid.).

Relatedly, at a certain point he stopped placing red herrings for their own sake. "They make the levels needlessly more difficult and don't usually create very interesting problem-solving situations" (Indie Game Website, 2019). Rather than adding difficulty, he plants an interesting move — his obsession points consistently at the purity of "surprise."

Failures and how he got past them — Underrating his own work, rebuilding for the unexpected

Surprisingly, the first to underrate the work was its author. "To be honest, I initially felt quite lukewarm about the game, and I only understood its amusingness once other people checked it out and told me that they liked the idea" (Indie Game Website, 2019). Even at the jam he was unsure of the idea — "I wasn't very convinced of this idea... but decided to prototype it anyway" (Red Bull, 2019). His way past it was to keep his hands moving without certainty.

Technically, a large oversight surfaced mid-development. He had built the rule system on the assumption that "there'd always be only one word on a given space," then suddenly realized players could stack words. "Reworking the rule system to properly take these stacked words into account turned out to be one of the larger undertakings over the game's development." Still he adds: "It felt very important to take the possibility of the player doing something utterly surprising into account" (Game Developer, 2019). He turns a failure into an investment in player freedom.

He also revised the difficulty structure after the fact. Although he designed the game so players could move on to polished alternative areas, he recognized the risk that completionists would get stuck trying to clear one area fully. "I was aware of that risk," he says; after release he promoted some levels from normal to "Extra," or moved them to later areas. Even so he candidly admits "the structure could definitely still be improved" (ibid.).

Dilemmas — Difficulty versus kindness, and the weight of "the next one"

A theme on which he publicly voices a struggle is balancing difficulty and accessibility. "I wouldn't say that difficulty is a crucial part of the game," he says; the aim was for the "trick" a level asks for to feel "satisfying or devious." But "the game definitely turned out to be way more difficult than I expected" (Red Bull, 2019). Turn-based puzzles lack the continuous variables that let you dial difficulty down — a technical constraint he says makes kindness hard to implement (ibid.).

Even so, he is open to hints and accessibility features. "As Celeste and various other games have shown, increasing accessibility doesn't really 'hurt' a game for people who don't want to use those features, but will make the experience much more enjoyable, or possible in the first place, for others" (ibid.). He stands on the side of widening the entrance rather than boasting of the difficulty — a stance that resonates with our piece on the ethics of Undo.

Another dilemma is the pressure that success itself produces. "I'd like to avoid developing the feeling that whatever I do next would need to surpass Baba Is You," and he fears that "feeling an obligation to be more 'serious' with my game development could hurt the enjoyment I get from it" (Indie Game Website, 2019). He is deliberately trying to keep making things the same way as before.

Influences — A lineage of block-pushing puzzles, and crayon physics

On influences, Teikari is unusually specific. The single title he calls "probably the singular title that has most affected Baba Is You's design" is Snakebird by Noumenon Games (Red Bull, 2019). He adds increpare's Stephen's Sausage Roll, Draknek's A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build, Qrostar's Jelly no Puzzle, Corey Martin's Pipe Push Paradise and smestorp's Corrypt. He acknowledges that the turn-based block-pushing archetype Baba follows is a continuation of this lineage (ibid.).

The very origin has a clear source too. The jam theme "Not There" made him think of "Not X" in logic — reversing a concept X by negation — and, layered with memories of those puzzle games, gave rise to his first mental image: a block of ice kept from melting by the sentence "Ice Is Not Melt" (ibid.). For the artwork he cites Petri Purho's Crayon Physics Deluxe, and for his attitude toward puzzle design, Number None's Braid (ibid.).

What is striking is that he disagrees with Jonathan Blow's view that indie games have stagnated, failing the promise they showed ten years ago. "I don't think I really agree. There are way more games being made and released now than 10 years ago" (Indie Game Website, 2019). Read alongside our piece on Blow, the contrast stands out: two puzzle-minded authors, two very different ways of seeing the world.

Kizuki's reading

From here on is my own reading, as Kizuki — not his words, but what I take from lining them up. I read Teikari as "not a logician but a mischievous self-expresser." The world tends to talk about Baba Is You as a game of cold formal logic, yet the center of gravity in his words sits consistently not on logic but on "surprise" and "self-expression." Even the decision to give objects no intrinsic meaning, letting rules alone define the world, reads to me less as a pursuit of systematic rigor than as a prankster's motive: "because that way is more unexpected and fun." His confession that he rated his own work lukewarm and only learned its value through others' laughter shows a person who finds a work's meaning not in his head but in others' reactions. Standing on the side of kindness rather than boasting of difficulty, and consciously refusing the pressure to "surpass it next time" — bind these together and the core of his creativity is not ambition but a carefulness about never letting go of fun. In that, I see the quiet wisdom of someone who intends to keep making things for a long time.

Closing — Where to start

If you want to understand Teikari, the best start is to play Baba Is You yourself, even just the opening. The feel of the world reassembling each time you move a single word delivers, by the shortest path, what he means by "wanting to surprise." Then, reading the three interviews in this piece, you should see that those light, playful mechanisms came from a careful author who kept his hands moving without certainty.

As a path to related designers, the influences he cites himself — increpare (Stephen Lavelle) and Draknek (Alan Hazelden) — make a natural next step. If you want to enjoy a contrast of worldviews, read this alongside our piece on Jonathan Blow. Using the same word "puzzle," one places "truth" at the center, the other "surprise."

Sources

Primary sources quoted and referenced in this article (all interviews containing the designer's own words):

・John Harris, "Designing Baba is You's delightfully innovative rule-writing system," Game Developer, May 2019 — gamedeveloper.com

・"Baba Is You Developer Arvi Teikari Talks Indie Innovation, Influences and Puzzle Design," The Indie Game Website, July 2019 — indiegamewebsite.com

・Jamie Stevenson, "Baba Is You creator on difficulty, Nintendo Switch and breaking the rules," Red Bull Games, May 2019 — redbull.com

・"Night in the Woods tops IGF Awards, student game Baba Is You wins big," PC Gamer (for verifying the IGF awards) — pcgamer.com