Inside Jason Roberts's Philosophy — Turning the Space Outside the Frame into a Playground

Intro — The man who doubted the frame

This time I take up Jason Roberts, who spent roughly five years making Gorogoa (2017) — a game of hand-drawn images shuffled like a puzzle — almost single-handedly, drawing every picture and writing most of the code himself. Even the title is often unknown in Japan, yet Gorogoa won Best Mobile Game at the 2018 GDC Choice Awards and was hailed as a landmark of the puzzle genre.

I chose Roberts because he starts not from 'game design theory' but from a question one step earlier: what is a frame? Line up enough of his statements and a single spine emerges that a game review never shows. Here I read the person who holds that spine, not the game.

Background — A child who lived inside his own head

By his own account, Roberts's father was a wildlife biologist who worked as a forest ranger, and his mother a world traveler in international health education. Yet he recalls being 'a comparatively boring child, living mostly inside my own head' (Game Pilgrim, 2020) — an inward child set against his parents' outward adventures.

Drawn to computers, he studied them and worked in tech for over a decade, though 'my heart wasn't in it.' More strikingly, he says he 'considered myself incapable of finishing a creative project' and 'filled up notebooks with half-formed ideas' (Game Pilgrim, 2020). Seeing the late-2000s indie wave, he thought one person might manage it, and after four years of hand-wringing quit his job.

He released a first demo in 2012 and was nominated at IndieCade. What astonished him most that year, he says, was 'not just the attention that the game received' but 'the discovery of the large and welcoming creative community surrounding game development' (Game Pilgrim, 2020). Gorogoa shipped in 2017 via Annapurna Interactive under the name Buried Signal, with sound by Eduardo Ortiz Frau and music by Joel Corelitz.

Philosophy — The frame is not neutral

Roberts's philosophy begins with an abandoned comic. 'Composing the page was more interesting to me than sequential storytelling,' he says; 'I had to do something with it, even if it wasn't going to be a comic' (Game Developer, 2018). What gripped him was the mosaic of framed scenes itself, not the sequential tale.

From there he stares hard at the frame. 'When you work on a comic you cannot ignore the frame.' In his GDC 2018 talk he catalogues its properties: a frame is a clue; it is curation ('it isn't neutral. It cares about what it contains'); it is 'an act of affection — you see things inside a frame because they're precious'; and it is 'like a prison,' making you aware of the outside and wanting the boundary broken (Thumbsticks, 2018).

This theory of frames flows straight into a theory of story. Gorogoa, he says, is not 'puzzles inside a story' but 'a story suspended inside a puzzle,' and he treats that story as a parable (Thumbsticks, 2018). One line of his captures the crux: 'A true sense of mystery requires a half-glimpsed pattern' (Game Developer, 2018).

Obsessions — Giving everything two faces

What he calls the core of the game is a 'visual acrostic' — a poem whose first letters spell a second word vertically. 'If you look at only the expected form, reading horizontally, you're missing something essential. The answer lies on an invisible axis' (Thumbsticks, 2018). An image that is a rail line one way and part of a ladder another: that duality became his design principle.

'Everything has a dual nature. That was an essential principle of the design,' he insists — while working hard to keep the trick from showing. 'Nothing in the world should look like it's just there to be part of a puzzle; I had to work very [hard] on that' (Thumbsticks, 2018). He admits that staging museums or basement reliquaries, where varied objects can coexist, is 'a bit of a cheat.'

His other non-negotiable is hand-drawn pencil work. 'I like drawing in pencil. That was a requirement for the project that had nothing to do with game design' (GamesBeat, 2018). He doesn't hide that personal taste, not design logic, set the shape of the game.

Failures and how he got past them — Proud only of finishing

He is candid about the detours. 'You can't skip the learning process when making games'; 'inexperience added years to the project. I ended up throwing out a lot of prematurely polished work' (Thumbsticks, 2018). Then a heavy addendum: 'some lessons you can only learn by finishing something.'

But his biggest failure was not technical; it was self-image. As noted, he long believed he was 'incapable of finishing a creative project.' So what he is 'most proud of is simply finishing the game, no matter what came after (and even if it took a lot of help from others to get me over the finish line)' (Game Pilgrim, 2020). His way through was not a dramatic reversal but a fixation on the single point of completion.

He also refuses to over-romanticize the detour: 'I should have read more about design beforehand' (GamesBeat, 2018). With simpler, more regular art, he concedes, he could have fit in more puzzles and finished sooner.

Design dilemmas — The meaning had to be real

His first dilemma was whether to include puzzles at all. He considered removing them entirely, so players might stumble onto hidden connections — but kept them, for the reason already quoted: mystery needs a half-glimpsed pattern (Game Developer, 2018). On marrying story and puzzle he uses the image of 'ripping the pages out of a novel and scattering them around a city,' then asks whether 'a delightful novel and a delightful scavenger hunt' can 'work together to create something wonderful and meaningful' (Game Developer, 2018).

The deeper dilemma is the authenticity of meaning. Of the puzzle book he calls his greatest influence — Maze by Christopher Manson — he admits he never solved it as a child and stopped trying as an adult: solving it might ruin the magic, yet learning that 'its central puzzle had no solution' and was 'filled with clues designed to hint at meaning without actually containing any' would ruin it too (Game Pilgrim, 2020). So the game's story and imagery 'needed to have meaning… so that their faith in it is justified.' He forbade himself the hollowness of trick-for-its-own-sake.

He also voices the commerce-versus-authorship dilemma. He calls Gorogoa's outcome 'in between a success and a hit,' which is exactly why he should stay small: 'if it had taken 10 full-time people to make, it would not have been as successful at the same revenue level.' A studio is tempting, but 'I feel like I would be giving up my advantage' (GamesBeat, 2018). Scale for control — he understands the trade and chooses, deliberately, to stay small.

Influences — Escher, and a maze he never solved

The first influence he admits is M.C. Escher: 'Every time people ask me to list inspirations, I always forget some. But Escher, yeah, definitely' (GamesBeat, 2018). A taste for optical illusion and trompe-l'oeil composition feeds straight into his design of duality.

But the name he returns to is Christopher Manson's puzzle book Maze, in which each page is a room and you must find the shortest path and solve a riddle. He loves it as 'a book I never solved as a child,' and calls that 'unsolved magic' the source of the game's feeling (GamesBeat, 2018 / Game Pilgrim, 2020).

He also cites the 19th-century illustrator-travelers Gustave Doré and David Roberts, and an architectural way of looking at ruins and mysterious structures (GamesBeat, 2018). Together with the abandoned comic that was his literal starting point, his influences run consistently through one lineage: hiding meaning inside a picture.

Kizuki's reading

From here this is my own reading. I read Roberts as a designer who believes in the outside of the frame. His whole theory of frames exists to turn attention not inward but toward the invisible outside — the space beyond, the second axis, the hidden meaning. The inward child who 'lived inside his own head' chose the frame not to close in on himself but as a device for peering out from within.

One thing I cannot help pointing out. In 2018 he stressed that great games need a certain 'awkwardness' (GamesBeat, 2018). Yet in 2020, handed that very claim, he answered: 'What did I mean by that? I hope I didn't say that any one quality is a "necessity" for great games. If so, I renounce that statement' (Game Pilgrim, 2020). In two years he withdrew the absolute. I read this not as a reversal but as consistency: for him the 'awkward design wilderness' was never a universal law but a conditional tool, valuable only so long as the meaning is real. That withdrawal matches, cleanly, his stance toward Maze — the refusal of hollow tricks.

Closing — Where to start

To understand Roberts, no detour is needed. Gorogoa itself runs about two hours, and everything above — philosophy, obsessions, dilemmas — happens right in your hands. Shuffle the frames, pause once to ask 'why is this frame here?', and you touch the spine of his design.

For further reading, our study of Jonathan Blow (The Witness) resonates on the theme of hidden meaning and pattern. And since Roberts himself named Return of the Obra Dinn as an example of 'jagged design terrain,' our piece on its maker Lucas Pope pairs well, giving depth to the shared subject: the detour required to make meaning real.

Sources

Primary sources and references used in this article:

・GDC 2018 talk, "Gorogoa: The Design of a Cosmic Acrostic" (by Roberts) (YouTube version)

・Game Developer (Simon Parkin), "Gorogoa: how the hit indie game derived from a failed comic book," Mar 20, 2018 (report of the GDC 2018 talk, quoting Roberts)

・Thumbsticks (Daniel New), "Framing the story: Jason Roberts on the making of Gorogoa," Apr 12, 2018 (detailed report of the GDC 2018 talk, quoting Roberts)

・GamesBeat / VentureBeat (Dean Takahashi), "Jason Roberts interview: Creating Gorogoa required awkwardness and chaos," 2018 (interview)

・Game Pilgrim (Taryn Ziegler), "Developer Interview: Jason Roberts," Jan 20, 2020 (interview)