GoKawiilBennett Foddy says research can be creative, like game design.Credit: Gabriel Cuzzillo
About the interviewer I am a vaccine-immunology researcher and, since childhood, an enthusiastic (but mostly talentless) amateur gamer. I have an enduring love for the text-based adventure games I played in the 1980s, as well as for classics from the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Doom, Half Life and Grand Theft Auto III. I still manage to find time to play and, for the record, I’ve completed Elden Ring — a game that in difficulty and scope is a convenient analogy for the struggles found in academic careers. So I jumped at the opportunity to talk to games designer Bennett Foddy. How exactly do the challenges of navigating a university expenses system compare with controlling a virtual sprinter? These might seem to be abstract comparisons, but for Foddy, such difficulties and frustration are a quintessential part of both academia and games playing.
Bennett Foddy was an academic philosopher when he wrote the game QWOP, in which players control an athlete using only the Q, W, O and P keys on their keyboards. The game became an Internet meme and helped Foddy’s website to reach 300 million hits. Eventually, Foddy left academia to become an independent games designer. He tells John Tregoning about the overlaps between game design, philosophy and academic careers.
Describe your career journey so far. How, why and when did you pivot from academia to games design?
BF: I got my PhD in philosophy from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2007. After that I did a postdoc for three years at Princeton University in New Jersey, then a second postdoc at the University of Oxford, UK.
I wrote my breakthrough game, QWOP, in 2008 while I was at Princeton. After that, I began a gradual pivot away from academia. Like many academics, including so many of my friends, the thought of leaving was at first totally unthinkable. It’s not as though my philosophy career was going badly; I had secured prestigious postdocs and enough publications.
In Bennett Foddy’s game QWOP, the player must control the legs of a sprinter using just four computer keys.Credit: Bennett Foddy via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
A key transition point for me was a gaming conference in 2011. Unlike at a philosophy conference, where nobody would have known who I was, people were excited about my work. It was a bit of a shock to the system and in that moment, I realized it would make sense to think about whether I could switch tracks.
In 2013, I moved away from philosophy, taking an opportunity to teach at the New York University (NYU) games department. Then, in 2021, being a little bit fed up with COVID-19 remote teaching, I moved to being a full-time independent games designer. I released Baby Steps last year.
What are the overlaps between a research career and one in games design?
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