Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t follow him much but do you got any links discussing Blow being sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic?
The second paragraph of the linked article?
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Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
121–130 of 654 posts
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I've never witnessed from him. I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper…
I think you identify the cycle of radicalization correctly but only on a specific side. There are people in this thread comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is the US finest president but those of my family who weren't slaves for the Germans were slaughtered. The fact that people throw comparisons that are false on some massive scale around and it's completely normalized is an example why losing touch with…
I'm not sure what you're claiming in here. Is it that deporting immigrants, and taking rights from women is as bad as trying to get billionaires to pay more taxes and reducing systemic societal biases?
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#123Earlier 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…
He also had a 88 for a long time in his twitch channel name
I would be very surprised if this connotation was intentional of him. His name was "Naysayer88" for a long time, and I had wondered as well where that 88 came from -- maybe it was a rhyme on "Naysayer", which (ignoring the number) is an apt description of his ways and approaches. At some point he changed the name. I assumed the reason was he had gotten aware of the connotation.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash . I'd fail code reviews for a lot of what was done, and there are cracks in the façade where a player will hurt themselves as a result - e.g. there's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too f…
The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.
I think for games like Blue Prince, specifically, it’s not a false dichotomy.
Those are made in tiny teams. You can either spend more time tinkering with the gameplay mechanics and experimenting with the game parts; or you can put on your software engineer hat and make the code better (or, spend even more time to learn how to make the code better in the first place!).
This gets less true with scale of a team, and with 5000 people behemoths you probably should care _a lot_ more about the code; but ROI on improving the code in (relatively! Calling Blue Prince “small” is ridiculous.) small games is very dubious.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#125Interested to play this but I think the trailer does it a huge disservice. Just a barrage of voice clips and no real structure to it. I think it would help the game a lot if they replace that trailer ASAP
Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#126Earlier 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
One example is linked in the article where he expressed women are biologically less interested in tech.
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Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#127I 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
You have a very incorrect view of both of them if you think this is the kind of thing they are arguing against.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#128Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You are calling the majority of the US "far right". You're calling people fascist for voting republican. You are the extremist.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?
The writing of Braid wasn't fantastic imo. But the game really spoke for itself.