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Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

arstechnica.com

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Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#41

Post by krapp »

piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity.

Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework.

People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?

Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#43

Post by HellDunkel »

piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

Not sure about the „minimal resources“. Didn‘t he come up with his own programming language for thia one? Maybe should have invested more in art.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#44

Post by manuisin »

krapp wrote: post #41
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games…

This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#45

Post by latexr »

wongarsu wrote: post #38
swiftcoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1] [1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...

Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he…

> though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall

Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#46

Post by wongarsu »

latexr wrote: post #36
jstimpfle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games. Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked > But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's…

> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims? The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he k…

This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.

1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#47

Post by lucraft »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #27
sxzygz wrote: post #2

In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe... [2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...

> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?

The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#48

Post by rkomorn »

embedding-shape wrote: post #24
serial_dev wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is. If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this real…

I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.

It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#49

Post by incrudible »

krapp wrote: post #41
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games…

This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#50

Post by olejorgenb »

krapp wrote: post #41
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games…

> Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?

Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.

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