William Pugh, co-designer of the acclaimed narrative game The Stanley Parable, has logged a staggering 1,603 hours in Valve’s Dota 2—making the competitive multiplayer MOBA the single most-played title in his Steam library. The revelation came during this weekend’s feature, in which the founder of Crows Crows Crows guided us through the games on his PC, offering a candid and unfiltered account of a relationship with Dota 2 that is as much about frustration as it is about obsession. While Pugh is currently juggling his studio’s next big game and a producer role on the upcoming PS5 exclusive Peak, he took a break from all that to answer the important questions about his desktop, his habits, and the game that, in his own words, is “not a game made of love.”
The interview forms part of Gamer24h’s regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries, a recurring column that digs into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”
The feature opens with Pugh already deep into a current obsession: Dota 2. “I’m playing a lot of it. It’s my third job. I’m a recovering Dota 2 addict. I’m mostly off now,” he says. He contrasts his MOBA habit with his experience of other hero shooters, noting that he “never quite got” with Overwatch and that “none of the other hero shooters kind of work for me.” But Deadlock, Valve’s new take on the genre, is a different story entirely.
A MOBA That Stripped Away the Crap
Pugh is clearly a fan of what Valve has done with Deadlock, describing it as “like Dota, but with a load of the pointless crap that’s just accumulated in the MOBA genre taken out.” He points to the removal of mana and creep stacking as examples of the useless rubbish that has been sliced away. “A lot of the useless rubbish, they’ve done a good job of slicing that out. The characters are fun,” he says. He is cautious about the future, however, warning that “maybe they won’t completely screw it up when they get to monetisation on it.” But right now, he says, “it’s kind of pure. There’s only one skin per hero. Everybody feels like they’re working at it and discovering it. It’s really fun to play in a duo lane with a friend.”
The contrast with Dota 2 is stark. Pugh’s 1,603 hours in Dota 2 dwarf any other title in his library, and he is quick to admit that the volume of time invested does not reflect enjoyment. “There’s no other game that even comes close to this volume of time. But if you ask me, ‘Did you have a good time playing Dota 2?’ The answer is ‘no’. The answer is ‘fuck that fucking game’,” he says. He paints a vivid picture of the pain of the game, describing teammates who were feeding, carries who weren’t carrying, and players making “stupid” item picks.
It’s not a game made of love. It’s a game fuelled by hate and a desire to conquer. It’s like chess. I played chess as a child, and there are sweaty people who play chess. But at least you’re not playing chess with people and then when you make a mistake, they get on voice and they’re like, “Yo, this is exactly how you’re fucking up. Stop fucking up and wasting an hour of my life.”
William Pugh
For Pugh, the appeal of Dota 2 is precisely what makes it so punishing: its complexity demands 100% of your brain power. “It’s like you get handed a five-dimensional Rubik’s cube, and you’re sat solving that for an hour,” he explains. “So that is the good thing about it. If you want to be truly distracted, your brain can’t be elsewhere if you’re playing Dota 2.” Yet he is unapologetic about his feelings, concluding that “if they’re good at the game, fuck them. They’ve got no lives, and they should just get off it.”
The Game That Levelled Him Up
Despite the vitriol, Pugh acknowledges that Dota 2 was a formative experience. “I’ve been playing it since 2008. It’s what got me properly into mapping, which is what got me properly into working on The Stanley Parable. It’s just one of my great faves. It’s probably my game of all time.” He credits the game’s community-based structure for teaching him about collaboration, describing how he was part of a community server that did trial runs for maps—work-in-progress creations that people could play before they were finished. “That community-based stuff was incredible,” he says.
His trajectory from there is well documented. Pugh grew up on a diet of shareware Mac titles, but his earliest PC gaming memory is engaging in annelid antics in Worms 4: Mayhem—his first encounter with online multiplayer. “I remember playing that for the first time with random matchmaking,” he says. “I think it was a 1v1 or whatever, and you’re face-to-face with a complete stranger … I remember that being a kind of door opening for me.” That door led him into the Source engine mapping community, which in turn introduced him to fellow modder Davey Wreden, with whom he would write and design The Stanley Parable.
Following The Stanley Parable’s success, Pugh founded Crows Crows Crows, which specialises in comic adventures such as The Wolf Among Us, the VR game The Genius, and the stealth sequel The Wolf Among Us 2. He is currently working on his next big game with the studio, as well as acting as producer on the upcoming PS5 exclusive Peak, which he describes as a “historical folk horror game.”
Peak, Friendslop, and the TF2 Obsession
Pugh is equally candid about his views on the walking-simulator genre. He recalls seeing the Big Walk announce trailer roughly two years ago, then watching Peak arrive “a suspicious amount of time later.” His first thought, he admits, was that “this is fucking Big Walk at home, but shipped a year faster.” He worries that Peak “seemed to ape” Big Walk in every regard, spawning what he dismissively calls “friendslop.” But then he played it. “But fuck! What a game! That’s got to be game of the year for real. It’s really special. They took their time with it.”
Meanwhile, his second-highest-played game—1,583 hours in Team Fortress 2—reflects a different kind of attachment. Pugh won a Mann Co. Supply Crate Key that turns people gold, and he tends to play Engineer and Spy. “I have 1583 hours in there. I was an idler for the first round of hats. I used the idle program. I admit it. I’ve served my time, and I’m sorry to all the people who played normally and got hats the normal way,” he says. He has played it since 2008, and it is what got him properly into mapping. “It’s just one of my great faves. It’s probably my game of all time.” When asked what game he will never uninstall, his answer is simple: “Probably TF2. I’m just a Valve fanboy.”
Looking Ahead
As Pugh steps back from Dota 2, he is clear-eyed about what the industry needs. He appreciates Valve’s work on Deadlock, but he believes what the world really needs is Team Fortress 3. “I’ll die on that hill,” he says. Beyond the games themselves, Pugh is a staunch advocate for open-source software, praising Blender as “10 out of 10” and arguing that its community-led, grassroots approach is winning the war against subscription-based tools. “If you want to make changes to it, you can. It’s a community-led, grassroots approach,” he says. “All these big companies just want to lock you in and up what you pay, but so long as open-source software keeps fucking getting better, the premise of these subscription-based software models gets weaker.”
As for the state of his own machine, Pugh is refreshingly honest. “Not [tidy],” he admits. “I’ve never been a tidy guy, so my desktop is never tidy … I’m a big ‘New Folder 3’ kind of guy.” He has kept everything he has owned on a PC since 2005 on physical hard drives, and one day, he jokes, it will all be “used to convict me of all my internet crimes.” For now, though, he remains a man who has spent more than 1,600 hours in a game he hates—and who, in the process, helped create some of the most beloved games of the past decade.
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