Inside Bennett Foddy's Philosophy — Designing Failure to Fight Meaninglessness

Introduction — the philosopher who designs failure

Bennett Foddy is an Australian-born, New York-based game designer, known for QWOP (2008), which turned sprinting into an uncontrollable ordeal, and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017), in which a man in a cauldron must climb a mountain with a single hammer. Both are famous for being willfully, unfairly hard. But what I want to trace here is not the games themselves, it is the person behind them.

Why Foddy now? He was originally a moral philosopher who studied drug addiction, and he is one of the rare designers who calls his game-making "literary" (Wikipedia). More usefully for a study like this, he has committed his design principles to writing, on his own blog as well as in interviews. The raw material exists in his own words. So here I read his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences strictly from what he has said in public.

Background — games made in philosophy's margins

Foddy was born in Australia in 1978 to academic parents and studied philosophy. He played bass for a time in Cut Copy, the electronic band started by his friend Dan Whitford, but when the band clashed with his studies he chose the studies, enrolling in 2003 in a doctorate at the University of Melbourne on addiction and cognitive science (Wikipedia).

Tellingly, he has said his best design work happened while procrastinating on other work (Wikipedia). He taught himself to program around 2006 and made Flash games between dissertation sessions, hiding the hobby from colleagues to protect his standing as a philosopher. QWOP, built during his Princeton postdoc (2007–2010), went suddenly viral in 2010 as social-sharing tools spread.

After serving as deputy director of Oxford's Institute for Science and Ethics, he chose game design over philosophy and now teaches at the NYU Game Center (Wikipedia). For readers meeting him for the first time: he is a scholarly indie author who studies difficulty. His output is small, but each work is dense with design thought.

Philosophy — starting from "games don't matter"

Across his statements, the first thing that surfaces is a paradoxical starting point. "As a game designer, the most fundamental problem you're up against is that games don't matter, they're fake, they're imaginary playgrounds," he says (Game Developer, 2018). That is why he hunts for ways to make winning and losing genuinely feel like they matter. In Getting Over It he trains your body to feel the climb as "accumulated progress" and then lets it slide away in an instant, precisely to fill that emptiness.

Second, he treats frustration as material, not defect. On his blog he writes that "a game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a game without friction, without disobedience. Games that are perfectly obedient are mere software" (foddy.net, 2017). Frustration, he argues, is what makes Space Invaders or Myst the classics they are.

The third pillar is "disobedience." In interview he says the player "should not be the owner of the game... the game itself deserves to have some control over the player," and that he cannot see "how playfulness can exist in an obedient piece of software" (Handmade Pixels, 2018). This is where his sharp line between a tool like Photoshop and a game as play is clearest.

Obsessions — cataloguing frustration by "flavor"

His most distinctive obsession is dissecting frustration as if it were taste. In his 2017 essay "Eleven Flavors of Frustration" he separates eleven "flavors" — "Nearly There, But Not Quite," "Start Over," "There And Back Again" and more — even locating where in the body each is felt (foddy.net, 2017). He is careful to call it "not an exhaustive recipe book or a taxonomy, it's just a curation of a few of the best flavors," but this resolution sits at the core of his design.

A second obsession is "framing expectations." Of QWOP's strange look he explains that because it is "not in any kind of visual style that a competent artist would do for a video game," that is where the initial shock of interest comes from (Handmade Pixels, 2018). The experience of difficulty depends heavily on how long a player expects a task to take — a point he returns to again and again.

The third is "designing for spectators." Ever since he watched people crowd around QWOP at Babycastles in New York, he says he began thinking about the enjoyment drawn out of the person waiting to play and watching (Handmade Pixels, 2018). Markiplier throwing his chair, a Korean player shaving his head after failing — those spectator reactions are placed at the center of his design.

Failures and how he got past them — the author who couldn't climb his own game

Of the failures he has aired in public, the most delightful is his admission that he couldn't beat his own game. In the weeks before the Steam release, trying to play through it to check for bugs, he couldn't finish. "I kept getting right to the top and falling right down... I would feel myself tensing up and I'd be too careful and I'd tighten up and I'd lose it" (Game Developer, 2018). The author himself proved, in his own hands, the psychology of the choke.

The second is a full rewrite of the narration. He reveals that his first take at the failure commentary in Getting Over It was "much more goading, much more sarcastic." But players already felt the strong emotions he wanted, so he rewrote it to be more or less totally encouraging (Game Developer, 2018). That he could watch players and throw out his own first draft is, I read, of a piece with his creed of designing for the audience.

Design dilemmas — between encouragement and taunt

The dilemma he explicitly says he wrestled with is the handling of encouragement. Even after softening the narration, he wanted to keep "a little touch of goading, a wink." His reasoning is sharp: "There's no completely non-annoying way of encouraging someone. Even refusing to point out a failure is annoying in its own way" (Game Developer, 2018). Kindness itself can be the most irritating thing, and he left that contradiction inside the design rather than resolving it.

A second is the bind between "usefulness as software" and "disobedient art." He describes strong discomfort that N++'s beautiful color schemes are exposed as a "function" the player picks from a menu: "I could just feel something about the experience draining away there. The game was not standing by its authority as an artwork" (Handmade Pixels, 2018). Yet he also concedes he wants games to be "obedient" about running at the right frame rate. Where obedience ends and disobedience begins is the tension point of his work.

He is also conscious of the clash between "authorial intent" and "player self-expression." "I studied English literature at a time when 'Death of the Author' was still considered very relevant," he notes, while still holding that a single-player game needs some agent to push back on and question the player (Handmade Pixels, 2018). He does not want the author to dominate; he wants the work itself to carry the friction.

Influences — the unfair old games

The biggest direct source he acknowledges is Jazzuo's Sexy Hiking; he states plainly that Getting Over It was "directly inspired" by it (Game Developer, 2018). Beyond that, the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games of his Australian childhood — the "unfairness" of titles like Jet Set Willy, which sent you back to the start on death — are the origin of his "sent back" aesthetic.

His debts to contemporaries are clear too. He sees the "flavor of being sent back," which save systems erased, surviving in a sweetened form in the Souls series and Spelunky (Game Developer, 2018 / foddy.net, 2017). The very concept of "disobedience," he says, was crystallized by seeing Robert Yang's Hurt Me Plenty (Handmade Pixels, 2018).

In "Eleven Flavors" he cites peers he respects as examples of specific tastes — increpare (Stephen Lavelle)'s Grave, Zach Barth's TIS-100, Jonathan Blow's The Witness, Messhof's Punishment (foddy.net, 2017). Visually he speaks warmly of the Amiga's Kickstart 2, Adam Saltsman's Flixel aesthetic, and early solo developers like Jeff Minter (Handmade Pixels, 2018).

Kizuki's reading

From here on is my interpretation, one step beyond what he has said. I read Foddy as a designer who fights not against a lack of pleasure but against a lack of meaning. Where many authors ask "how do I make this feel good," he starts from the premise that "games are fake" and asks how to fill the emptiness. Frustration, being sent back, the cruelty of the man in the cauldron sliding away — all of it can be organized as machinery for making the not-mattering matter.

And one more thing. There is, as he himself concedes, an uncanny continuity between the philosopher who studied addiction's reward circuitry and the designer who manipulates reward and punishment in play. In my view, his games turn the "reward-baiting machinery of addiction" against itself: he deliberately strips reward away and finely tunes the "flavor" of punishment — an anatomist of addiction using that knowledge to irritate and delight us. That is my reading, though, not something he has stated outright.

In closing — where to start

If you want to understand Foddy, spend a few minutes with the free browser QWOP, laugh at a body that won't obey you, and then listen to the narration of Getting Over It. His gesture of fighting "meaninglessness" lands in the hands, not just the head. If you have time, read "Eleven Flavors of Frustration" to feel how seriously he takes "taste."

A path to the site's other designer studies: the authors Foddy names as examples of specific "flavors" — Jonathan Blow of The Witness, Zach Barth of TIS-100, Stephen Lavelle (increpare) — are each covered in separate pieces of mine. Read side by side, they reveal different answers to the same question: how do you justify difficulty and unfriendliness?

Sources

Primary sources and references used in this article:

・Game Developer (Alex Wiltshire), "Designer Interview: The aesthetics of frustration in Getting Over It," Jan 5, 2018 (interview)

・Handmade Pixels (Jesper Juul), "Interview with Bennett Foddy," recorded Mar 22, 2018 (interview)

・Bennett Foddy's own blog, "Eleven Flavors of Frustration," Jan 16, 2017 (by Foddy)

・Wikipedia, "Bennett Foddy" (for biography and ludography)