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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

#101

Post by mariusor »

pendenthistory wrote: post #91
mariusor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.

Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.

I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?

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

#102

Post by simonask »

torginus wrote: post #78
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…

Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC. As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution

I just wonder how readily people would defend this viewpoint if they belonged to any of those groups whose "feelings" are typically being "hurt".

I don't know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period.

By "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.

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

#103

Post by latexr »

jstimpfle wrote: post #64
wongarsu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

> 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

That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.

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

#104

Post by bananaboy »

martin_balsam wrote: post #67
bananaboy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I didn't know of Jack Lance before this post. I've just been playing through enigmash and it's very clever! https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...

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

#105

Post by _bohm »

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.

Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.

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

#106

Post by dgb23 »

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…

> 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.

Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.

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

#108

Post by jabbywocker »

simonask wrote: post #102
torginus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC. As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution

I just wonder how readily people would defend this viewpoint if they belonged to any of those groups whose "feelings" are typically being "hurt". I don't know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period. By…

Don’t follow him much but do you got any links discussing Blow being sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic?

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

#109

Post by dgb23 »

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?

With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.

For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.

I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.

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

#110

Post by tommy92 »

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…

Except, this complexity isn't saving time and resources. This complexity admiration culture has resulted in slower code thats harder to understand, debug and maintain too. What should be used only for small amount of time is used from get go like complex architecture and deep abstraction. Fetishizing simplicity is bad too for sure but a blip on a radar and not such a trend and far less of an issue compared to fetishizing complexity thats rampant. Not a game dev or even a gamer, I'm defending attack on simplicity not blow or muratori.
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