Inside Brian Moriarty's Philosophy — A Game Author Who Says Games Aren't Art

What is Brian Moriarty's design philosophy, in one line?

"Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices." Brian Moriarty's thinking nearly fits inside that one sentence. He wrote it in his 2011 GDC lecture (his own transcript, 2011-03-14 ↗). In the same lecture he concluded that the kind of work he had been making for a quarter of a century cannot be art in that sense.

Moriarty wrote Trinity at Infocom and Loom at Lucasfilm Games. So the argument that games cannot be art came not from a critic looking in, but from a game author.

This piece reads three of his lectures and three interviews, and lines up his philosophy, his obsessions, the failures he has admitted in public, his dilemmas and his models. It is a study of the person, not a tour of his games. Translations are mine; the originals are behind each link.

Who is Brian Moriarty, and what did he make?

Moriarty, born in 1956, is an American game author. He joined the text-adventure company Infocom in 1984 and wrote Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987) (Wikipedia ↗).

His first job there was not designing games. "They hired me to engineer and maintain the 6502 interpreters for their ZIL system," he recalls (Halcyon Days interview ↗). He arrived as an engineer and became a designer afterwards.

In 1988 he moved to Lucasfilm Games and in 1990 shipped Loom, his first graphic adventure. He later led the second development phase of The Dig, and left in 1993 when that project collapsed.

Today he teaches at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States, and publishes Perlenspiel, a teaching engine he built for his own classes. Outside English he is known mainly as the author of Loom; his own words are rarely translated.

Why does he say games cannot be art?

The reason is that he defines "art" extremely narrowly. In his 2011 lecture "An Apology for Roger Ebert" he writes: "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible." Stillness and inexpressibility are the conditions.

His definition of a game is the exact opposite. "Games are purposeful. They are defined as the exercise of choice and will towards a self-maximizing goal." There is a goal, there is will, there is choice. That, he argues, is where the two stop fitting together.

From there he turns to authorship. "I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist." If the player gets to choose, the author has not settled the conclusion — that is the logic.

He is not belittling games. In the same lecture he says sublime art "is like a toy. It elicits play in the soul... it has no rules, no goal, no purpose." His conclusion is not that games are lesser than art, but that they are a different instrument.

The lecture has long been discussed as "games defenders versus a critic." Read closely, what he is defending is not the standing of games but the narrowness of the word "sublime." He did not demote his profession; he moved it to a different shelf.

What habits keep returning across his work?

One is to fix the constraints before making anything. On Loom he says: "Nearly every creative decision regarding the dramatic scope and presentation of Loom was influenced by the severe technical restrictions imposed by the available hardware" (Arcade Attack, 2017-06-26 ↗).

Loom is remembered as the adventure you cannot die in and cannot get stuck in. Coverage of his 2015 GDC postmortem describes it as pioneering the later LucasArts principle that "players should never have to deal with dead ends, accidental deaths or forced restarts" (Game Developer ↗).

But his own account runs the other way round. Loom's kindness was not invented as kindness; it surfaced as a by-product of hardware limits that left him nothing to cut but content. On the 2017 quote, that is the straighter reading to me.

Another habit is shrinking the tool. Of Perlenspiel he says: "I wanted an engine that was easy to learn and required no asset production, but powerful enough to support the creation of interesting, expressive work" (Kadenze, 2019-02-12 ↗). Inside, it is a 16x16 grid and nothing else.

A third is that the author should be able to write the code. "If you put two designers with otherwise equal talent and credentials in front of me, I will always choose the one who knows how to realize their ideas in code" (same interview). At GDC 2012 he put it as: "I decided that the fundamental activity for my students ought to be, must be... expressing game ideas in code" (Game Developer ↗).

What failures has he admitted in public?

The clearest one is that Loom never got its sequel. Asked why, he answers: "I was too burned out, and no one else cared enough to push one through" (Arcade Attack, 2017). The reason he gives is his own exhaustion, not the game's reception.

In the same interview, asked which game he would go back and work on, he picks his own rather than someone else's classic: "I would go back and fix all the stuff I could have done better in my own games."

He also talks about choosing the wrong company. Of Rocket Science Games, where he went after LucasArts: "The Rocket Science executives were out to be Hollywood moguls... the Wired cover should have warned us. I mean, Wired is the kiss of death" (quoted on Wikipedia).

And he is blunt about the technical cost of moving from text to pictures: "Far, far more difficult. The amount of code and data that need to be created to make anything happen in a graphical game is staggering" (Halcyon Days).

Where does he describe being caught in the middle?

The tension between commerce and authorship sits unresolved across decades. In 2019 he states it flatly: "The moment you stop and wonder, 'Will people like/understand/buy this?' you cease to be an artist, you become a marketing person" (Kadenze, 2019).

Yet Wishbringer, in 1985, came into being the other way around. In his own words: "Mike Dornbrook, the head of marketing, asked for an easy game to introduce new players to the genre" (Halcyon Days). It was designed with the buyer thought of first.

He never sets those two statements side by side and calls it a contradiction. But in the same 2019 interview he adds: "The games I am most proud of are the ones in which I gave myself permission to follow my instincts, and explore ideas without the slightest concern for anyone's satisfaction but my own." His standard for pride and the origin of his actual work do not always line up.

The second bind is money. His advice to anyone chasing artistic fulfilment: "Artists looking for personal fulfillment would be well advised to choose a medium that doesn't cost as much as today's computer games!" (Halcyon Days). What he wants to make and what it costs to make do not balance.

What does he name as his models?

The starting point was Scott Adams' text adventures. By the time he finished Strange Odyssey, he says, "I knew I would be writing adventures for a living." Asked what pulled him in, his answer is short: "The puzzles. And the possibilities!" (Halcyon Days).

The second is Hermann Hesse. Perlenspiel takes its name from Hesse's novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game). "Hesse's vision of game design as a noble, highly regarded intellectual discipline has long been an inspiration to me" (Kadenze, 2019).

Sound and listening run through his work too. In a 1997 lecture: "To listen is to put ourselves into a receptive attitude. A position to be re-aligned. To truly listen is to admit the possibility of upset" ("Listen!", 1997 ↗). In the same talk he explains Myst's success: "Myst succeeds for the same reason the best novels and films succeed. It invites people into a world that's somehow better than ours."

And the film critic Roger Ebert. His 2011 lecture is titled "An Apology for Roger Ebert" — a game author arguing the case for the critic who said games could never be art. The form itself tells you where he stands.

Kizuki's reading: he moved his own work off the shelf to protect a word

What follows is my own reading. I read Moriarty not as a man who shut games out of art, but as a man who hated seeing the word "sublime" sold cheap. In his definition, sublime art has no rules, no goal, no purpose. He kept removing whatever failed those conditions, and his own profession happened to end up outside. That is the order I see.

The evidence is what he did next. The year after the lecture he built Perlenspiel as a tool to hand to students, and had them express games on a 16x16 grid of beads. The next job of a man who concluded his medium could not be art was to distribute a smaller, easier tool. That is not a retreat; it is the ordinary work of someone who has finished drawing a line.

A gap remains, though. In his 1996 and 1997 lectures he argued warmly for the joy of communication that multiplayer games bring, going as far as "we are selling our customers to each other" ("The Point Is", 1996 ↗). By 2011, anything defined by will and choice cannot be sublime. He has never explained what changed in those fifteen years. That gap is the most interesting thing about him.

Where should you start with him?

The shortest way in is the 2011 transcript. It is published in full, and you can watch him build his definitions in real time. If you would rather start with a game, start with Loom — but go in knowing that the constraints came first, and its brevity stops looking like laziness.

His words turn up in unexpected places. The Witness is an environmental-observation puzzle game released by Thekla, Inc. in 2016 (review), and it hides his 2002 lecture "The Secret of Psalm 46" as an Easter egg (per Wikipedia). One author's lecture, buried inside another author's puzzle.

Read on with Ron Gilbert, from the same Lucasfilm lineage, and Jonathan Blow of The Witness. Don't waste the player's time; don't compromise the meaning; guard the limits of the word. What each of the three set out to protect is slightly different.

Sources

Primary sources used in this piece (all translations from the English originals are mine):

・Brian Moriarty, "An Apology for Roger Ebert" (GDC 2011 lecture, written up by the author, published 2011-03-14)

・Brian Moriarty, "Listen! The Potential of Shared Hallucinations" (February and April 1997)

・Brian Moriarty, "The Point Is" (February 1996)

・Halcyon Days: interview with Brian Moriarty (ed. James Hague, 1997)

・Arcade Attack interview (2017-06-26)

・Kadenze, "Storytelling in Pixels: Brian Moriarty On Crafting Inspired Game Design" (2019-02-12)

Background and fact-checking:

・Game Developer, "Loom creator Brian Moriarty seeks out the essence of good game design" (on his GDC 2012 Education Summit talk)

・Game Developer, "Brian Moriarty's classic postmortem of Loom" (on his GDC 2015 talk)

・Wikipedia, "Brian Moriarty" (career timeline; source of the Rocket Science quote)