Bennett Foddy says research can be creative, like game design.Credit: Gabriel Cuzzillo
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?
Philosophy as a career is a creative art that’s concerned with finding out what the truth is and trying to elucidate it. To paraphrase a theme covered in the 2025 book What Art Does by musician Brian Eno and writer and artist Bette A, the arts are concerned with emotional truths. Science, by contrast, is concerned more with factual truths.
Good research, like games design, is creative. You have feelings of inspiration, waves of epiphany, sudden moments of lucidity punctuating long periods of confusion and of being lost in the woods. All of which is characteristic of creative fields.
Another issue that comes with working independently and creatively is a struggle with procrastination. That’s something I’ve definitely experienced and I know many other academics have battled through as well.
Both academia and designing a new game are deadline-driven. Any advice on avoiding that procrastination?
Two of my most famous games, QWOP and GIRP (a 2011 rock-climbing simulation), were the products of procrastination. I made my first video games while I was procrastinating on finishing my dissertation, and then later I was procrastinating from doing my work as a postdoctoral fellow. In both cases, I kind of cranked them out as a way to avoid the work I really should have been doing.
So procrastination can be productive. Although it can be anxiety-provoking, for me, at least, it was often also a place of rumination, and a place where eventually boredom will drive you to playfulness of thinking.
John Tregoning is a lifelong fan of video games, although he’s not very good at QWOP.Credit: Sophie Tregoning
Is there anything scientists can learn from games about how our research is done?
When I design a game, I try to provoke a certain experience, a certain emotion or a certain set of reflections. Those who play the game might have the same experience as you, but many others have a totally different experience: like any art, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
