Inside Ken Wong's Philosophy — a whole world inside one frame

Intro — the man who says it isn't a puzzle game

Ken Wong is an Australian game designer. He was lead designer on Monument Valley (ustwo games, 2014), the game of Escher-like impossible architecture in which you guide a small princess named Ida, and he later founded the Melbourne studio Mountains, where he made Florence (2018), a short, wordless account of a relationship beginning and ending.

He is worth studying because he has spent his career right at the edge of what counts as a puzzle game. Monument Valley was introduced everywhere as a landmark of the genre. Wong himself, however, said in 2019: "People think of Monument Valley as a puzzle game. I don't think about it like that, I think of it as an adventure game that happens to have puzzles in it" (PocketGamer.biz, 2019 ↗). Having given the genre one of its most famous faces, he quietly pushes the label away.

This is not a review. It reads across what he has said in public, looking for the consistencies and the wobbles. Every quotation comes from a source I checked directly; my own reading is confined to the final section.

Background — it started with fan art

It did not begin as a career choice. At university Wong was not aiming for games at all — "Back when I was in university it wasn't exactly considered a smart career move" — and studied multimedia instead. Around 2000 he drew fan art of American McGee's Alice. McGee saw it and invited him onto his next project: "So that's how I started freelancing as a concept artist" (PocketGamer.biz, 2019 ↗).

He went on to art-direct Alice: Madness Returns at Spicy Horse, then moved to ustwo in London and became lead designer of Monument Valley. The game took ten months and a team of eight: three programmers, one artist, one QA, two producers and Wong as designer (Architizer, 2017 ↗).

After the game's success he left ustwo. In his own words: "I felt like I wanted to grow on my own and I wanted to see what they could do without me" (PocketGamer.biz, 2019 ↗). He also describes watching the Australian scene, and Melbourne in particular, and wanting to bring back what he had learned abroad.

Philosophy — making games without gamers

Line up his statements and one claim runs unchanged for over a decade: drop the assumption that games belong to core gamers. As early as 2014 he was preparing a D.I.C.E. Europe talk titled "Games without gamers," and the accompanying blurb describes ustwo setting out to make something meaningful for an audience beyond the 'gamer' (Engadget/Joystiq Hit List, 2014 ↗).

Four years later the same claim is sharper. "When our technology was really primitive, the easiest things to create were simulations of sports and of physical things and battles and sort of black-and-white conditions" — and the industry, he argues, is still clinging to that past as the true form of gaming (Engadget, 2018 ↗). Love, he adds, is "a bit of a blind spot for games."

By 2019 he inverts the picture entirely: "I have this theory that violent and action games as we know it; they're the equivalent of exploitation films." Perhaps in twenty years those are the niche, and most games are about everyday life, colour, pattern, spaces to hang out in. "I don't know if that's going to be the case, but in the meantime, I'm interested in exploring that direction" (PocketGamer.biz, 2019 ↗). The refusal to assert it is characteristic.

Obsessions — discard, enclose, deceive

First, discarding. "One thing that I think we did right was we acknowledged that … we were going to discard 70, 80, 90 percent of our work" (Kill Screen, 2015 ↗). There were versions with time manipulation, versions with a rotatable camera. Cutting them down to a fixed isometric view also constrained the palette: "We removed a lot of tools from the artist's toolbox." The principle that nothing exists merely to be pretty follows from that subtraction.

Second, enclosure. He calls self-contained structures floating in a void — dollhouses, bonsai — "little worlds," and derives a rule from them: "It became an important principle that, in Monument Valley, everything you need to solve a puzzle is contained within a screen" (Architizer, 2017 ↗). No puzzle information leaves the frame. "There's something really comforting about feeling like you can see the whole world in one image" (Kill Screen, 2015 ↗).

Third, deception. On building the illusions: "if you really understand computer graphics, you realize everything is a trick." Making one, he says, is like inventing a magic trick — you show the player one version of the truth while months of hidden construction make another version the solution (Architizer, 2017 ↗). The process matches: a playable "white box" first, tested and iterated until players solve things with "the right amount of friction," and only then an art pass.

Failures — the missing vocabulary, and the money anxiety

Asked what was hardest about making Monument Valley, he named neither technology nor deadlines but the sound and music direction: "it's a highly subjective topic and most of us lacked the vocabulary to give meaningful feedback" (Architizer, 2017 ↗). The designer who imposed such exacting visual constraints admits the team had no shared language for the ears.

Florence brought a different kind of pain. Where Monument Valley's core idea survived largely intact, Florence took a long time to find its shape. "There was a lot of anxiety throughout that journey about 'what are we doing? Are we wasting somebody else's money in making this?' But we made it through" (PocketGamer.biz, 2019 ↗). Note that the anxiety is framed around someone else's money rather than his own artistic doubt.

On how he got through it he says nothing dramatic. For Florence the relief arrived after release, in reports of players crying on public transport: "It's a very good sign that games can be as powerful as books, music and movies," and "It's also meant that we can keep doing what we're doing, which is making weird and interesting games" (ibid.).

Dilemmas — can you write what you haven't lived?

The dilemma Wong discussed publicly around Florence is one of representation. Early on the two leads were "kind of blank," and the team tried several arrangements of race and gender. On why it ended up a straight couple: "It felt like what I was most familiar with was straight relationships and I didn't really want to go into LGBT relationships without having that background myself, so that was the deciding point" (Engadget, 2018 ↗).

He did not stay wholly inside the comfort zone, though. The protagonist is a woman, and telling the story from her perspective was, he says, part of his own development: "As a man, I think it's important for me to learn more about how women experience the world." He drew on his producer Kamina, his sister Emily, previous partners and friends (ibid.). Florence is Chinese-Australian and Krish Indian-Australian because that matches the Australia he grew up in.

So what he laid out is where he personally drew the line between "don't depict" and "learn, then depict" — and he does not claim the line is universally correct. This is the passage in his public record I would handle most carefully.

Influences — a wordless book and DVD commentaries

Asked which literature shaped his creative process, he answered with a question: "Is a book still literature if it has no words?" His pick was Mœbius's Arzach. "I think I discovered the type of storytelling that feels most natural to me – visual, poetic, impressionistic" (Engadget/Joystiq Hit List, 2014 ↗). Both Monument Valley and Florence, wordless, read as extensions of that sentence.

What he took from film is telling: not the films but the making-of. He says he learned enormously from DVD behind-the-scenes features and commentaries — "Getting an audience to believe in and empathise with fictional characters is a certain kind of magic" — citing the Alien Quadrilogy and Lord of the Rings box sets (ibid.). In the same Q&A he names Gone Home, struck not by innovation or fun but by its craft: "I was in tears by the end."

Visually: architecture from Moroccan mosques to Indian temples, and the "little worlds" of dollhouses and bonsai (Architizer, 2017 ↗). He prefaces the architecture talk with "I'm definitely a layman when it comes to architecture," while naming brutalism and art deco as his tastes. One caveat: the Escher connection is universally repeated, but as far as I could verify, the claim that an Escher architectural drawing inspired the game appears in Kill Screen's own prose (Kill Screen, 2015 ↗), not as a direct quotation from Wong. Worth keeping the two apart.

Kizuki's reading — my interpretation from here on

What follows is my interpretation, not his words. I read Ken Wong as a designer who got stronger by never fully becoming a game designer. He entered the industry without aiming for it, was picked up on the strength of fan art, and in 2014 answered without embarrassment: "I rarely play games these days, other than for research" (Engadget/Joystiq Hit List, 2014 ↗). Precisely because he lacked the internal vocabulary of games, I suspect, he could judge his own work by imported standards: a whole world visible in one frame, an illusion built like a stage magician's trick, a screenshot that holds up as a picture.

Read that way, his consistency and his wobbles share a root. The Totem began as a gameplay function; when it produced a strong emotional response, "we decided to exploit" it (Architizer, 2017 ↗). The ascetic who forbids decoration picks up emotion as design material without hesitation. Five years later he restates his own game as an adventure that happens to have puzzles. I organise this not as an escape from the genre but as the consequence of having measured by a different axis all along. Perhaps, for him, puzzles were never the goal but the procedure that keeps a player in front of the frame — he has not said this, so I leave it as my own conjecture.

Closing — where to start

If you want to understand him, the plain order is Monument Valley then Florence: subtraction and the enclosed frame first, emotion expressed through touch second. Read the interviews after that and a decade of statements point the same way. Read them first, and you notice that Monument Valley's gentleness was design rather than compromise.

For companion reading, the entries on Andrew Shouldice and Alan Hazelden work well as contrast: designers who argue for short, unpunishing experiences from inside puzzle design, where Wong arrived from outside. I like to pour another cup of hot bancha and sit with that difference.

Sources

Primary sources consulted for this article (all read in full):

・Engadget (formerly Joystiq), "Hit List Q&A: Monument Valley designer Ken Wong," June 25, 2014 ↗

・Kill Screen, "Ustwo: Monument Valley's elegance is the result of 'letting go'," March 12, 2015 ↗

・Architizer, "Building Beautiful Worlds: A Conversation With Ken Wong," 2017 ↗

・Engadget, "'Florence' turns falling in love into a video game," February 14, 2018 ↗

・PocketGamer.biz, "Mountains' Ken Wong on moving on from Monument Valley to Florence," 2019 ↗