Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games

Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read, and learn, and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike.

Separately is probably how I work best with everyone, to be honest. I'm an introvert who likes people: I want to collaborate on the whole, but do my part individually.

I think that in life, as in game design, you have to find the fun. There is joy out there waiting to be discovered, but it might not be where you expected. You can’t decide what something’s going to be before you embark on it, and you shouldn’t stick with a bad idea just because you’re fond of it. Take action as quickly and repeatedly as possible, take advantage of what you already know, and take liberties with tradition. But most importantly, take the time to appreciate the possibilities, and make sure all of your decisions are interesting ones.

Games were not just a diversion, I realized. Games could make you feel. If great literature could would its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color?

No subject is universally boring; everything contains a core of fascination somewhere, and the primary job of a game designer is not to make something fun, but to find the fun.

The dichotomy between someone else’s talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other.

A racing game doesn’t need a fictional driver with a predetermined back story; it needs that unique combination of emotional and psychological hooks that make you believe, however fleetingly, that you yourself are the driver.

But it’s not the countless callbacks and references that make the nuclear Gandhi story so funny to me. It’s the fact that none of it is true. The overflow error never happened at all.

I feel the same way about awards. I once received a star on the “Walk of Game” in San Francisco, with press photos and speeches and everything, and six years later the whole thing was demolished and turned into a Target.

The truth is I never really give up on anything. The ideas just sit in stasis, sometimes for decades, until I can figure out the right way to make them work.

Someday, if we’re lucky, an entirely new industry will steal from us. They’ll transform our work into something so unimaginably different, we’ll feel like Errol Flynn confronted with his future pixelated form.

Business and creativity were both necessary components, but they ought to keep their distance.

they had no particular use for the originals, and eventually began selling them as scrap paper to wrap fish and other market goods in.

Insignificant decisions take just as much brain power as interesting ones, but without any of the satisfaction.

the ability of players to exert free will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a narrative—is what sets games apart from other media,

Though the educational overlap is entirely logical, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the label “educational software.” I’ve always preferred the word “learning,” myself. Education is somebody else telling you what to think, while learning is opening yourself to new possibilities, and grasping a concept because you understand it on a personal level. To chastise us for our lack of historical accuracy is fair in the educational sense, but misses the point entirely when it comes to learning. Are Aesop’s fables meaningless because real mice can’t talk? What we encourage is knowledge-seeking in itself, and ownership of one’s beliefs. We want you to understand that choices have consequences, that a country’s fate can turn on a single act of diplomacy, and that historical figures were not black-and-white paragons of good and evil—not because we’ve told you, but because you’ve faced those complex dilemmas for yourself.

All I could do was keep asking myself, “Would I want to play this game?” As long as the answer was yes, the idea stayed in.

In the right context, a game is not just a vehicle for fun, but an exercise in self-determination and confidence.