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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

#61

Post by adito »

serial_dev wrote: post #20
tormeh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?

[flagged]

I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:

> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.

Here the post after just for a full picture

> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".

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

#62

Post by CraftingLinks »

latexr wrote: post #45
wongarsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it does. When you live in Europe and listened to your late grand parents talk about the war. In Europe, "fascist" actually has still some weight to it and it doesnt get thrown around so casually as the US, yet. Same strory with the word "communist"...

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

#63

Post by pdpi »

If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick's Parabox or Baba Is You, clock in at 250ish puzzles.

So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?

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

#64

Post by jstimpfle »

wongarsu wrote: post #46
latexr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wom…

That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is much closer to fascism. I don't like throwing that term but just to return it.

It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.

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

#65

Post by bialpio »

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…

Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.

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

#66

Post by latexr »

incrudible wrote: post #58
latexr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.

> these are not fringe opinions

Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.

> throwing around certain bad words like fascist

Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.

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

#67

Post by martin_balsam »

bananaboy wrote: post #51
martin_balsam wrote: post #30

This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1] [1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...

Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...

I went back to his website [1] and spent almost an hour of a boring zoom call playing Coin Counter [2]. [1] https://jacklance.github.io/games.html [2] https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac222593...

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

#68

Post by panstromek »

progbits wrote: post #37
phtrivier wrote: post #7

I wonder how much of the 10 years spent making "a programming language, an engine, and a game" were actually spent on each slice. Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...

It's hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era. I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.

the game was not the motivation to make the language

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

#69

Post by leloctai »

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…

If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources, successful indie games wouldn't be so disproportionately Scandinavian

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

#70

Post by latexr »

wongarsu wrote: post #46
latexr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wom…

That is a claim I neither made nor defended, I merely pointed the asker to the information they requested in the article to let them decide for themselves.

I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.

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