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I started to read this and thought to myself "This sounds like Jonathan Blow" and then you mentioned the Witness and I finally tore my eyes away from the text t

I started to read this and thought to myself "This sounds like Jonathan Blow" and then you mentioned the Witness and I finally tore my eyes away from the text to the username, and lo and behold! Quick question - how do you gain this understanding of the possibility space without bottom-up exploration? Is it a matter of having good influences (and who might those be)? Or some other reason?

jblow 7y ago
I think it’s just, after you have designed enough things, you learn to think like a system and you know what a lot of the possibilities are before you play those specific corners of the system. That said, you can always be surprised, and it’s delightful when this happens, so you don’t want to get on an egotistical high horse and decide you really know the system without playing it. The actual experience of the actual system is your reality check. But, the more experience you have with that system, the more you can see where things might go (unless it’s intensely chaotic, thus unplayable).