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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

#201

Post by henning »

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

He explicitly endorsed JD Vance in a past stream. Buying his games directly fuels authoritarianism.

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

#202

Post by phantasmish »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #155
mariusor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share why these statements are controversial? They might be misguided or misinformed, but the underlying fact is that women are not as well represented in stem. Just because the reason it's more likely to be misogyny rather than any biological inclination, doesn't make it an outrageous statement in my opinion.

Because as a statement is functions to excuse the representation in the field. It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women. It’s only once it became a prestigious field that women suddenly developed a “biological” inclination against it.

I… super hesitate to wade into this, but:

1) It was way before it became prestigious.

And

2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.

I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)

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

#203

Post by DonHopkins »

magicalist wrote: post #153
uragur27754 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This provides a good summary of the drama that he cultivates: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/aB0aOJ5cas

Clicking on a random link: > It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 Dear lord, yeah, this is why I completely tuned him out years ago. Somewhat ironically it's the Blow fans in this thread that are cherry picking his comments. He's way too online so says things like this all the time, and it's the fans that are i…

Game Helpin' Squad totally takes the piss out of Braid's self-indulgent windbaggery in this review of "Time Travel Understander":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

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

#204

Post by EvilTrout »

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…

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage.

They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago.

Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)

Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.

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

#205

Post by nilstycho »

christophilus wrote: post #97
lucraft wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He hired a level designer who also wrote a Sokoban game. (Can’t remember the name, but it was free and web-based, IIRC.) That game had some really great, unique ideas in it, and I’d be shocked if the new Blow game was bog standard.

It was Jack Lance, who wrote Enigmash. Tragically, he died in 2023 at the age of 25. Jack Lance superlatively creative. I cannot find the words to express how much the world lost. I do not know of a finer puzzle designer.

https://jacklance.github.io/games.html

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

#206

Post by bena »

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.

He made Chip's Challenge. He took a decade to make Chip's Challenge.

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

#207

Post by TGower »

pdpi wrote: post #63

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, cl…

Completable in a timely fashion is not a design goal of this game. Currently being playtested by professional puzzle game designers and they are over 200 hours in without completing it.

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

#208

Post by starburst »

Stevvo wrote: post #178
Revisional_Sin wrote: post #39

Okay, but are the puzzles fun?

Depends on your definition of fun. In both Braid and the Witness, eventually you come across a puzzle you cannot solve and have to use Google to find the answer, because the game never bothered to even hint at how it could be solved. That's pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.

That says more about you than about the game.

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

#209

Post by thrance »

d--b wrote: post #193
thrance wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that there could be biological dispositions to using a computer , the least natural thing I could think off, is well and truly absurd. Anyone still "interested" in this topic is coming from a place of unsubstantiated vice signalling, and completely uninterested in hearing any actual biologist's take on the subject, in my experience. Let's not forget that the first generation of programmers was mostly women,…

Not defending the guy, but he's possibly on the autistic spectrum, given he grinds solo on his projects for decades and stuff. He may perceive his own appetite for programming as being linked to some form of autism. Because, well, computers are not people, so it's nice to avoid people. Given that there is a proven gender discrepancy in the distribution of autistic disorders, it's not completely absurd to imagine that…

Without wanting to go too far out of my depth, I have read a few times now that a lot of the perceived growth in autism rates could be attributed to our society pushing people into adopting behaviors previously attributed to "actual" autism. Spending time on the computer as a kid (playing video games, etc.) is still mostly a boy activity, because of societal reasons, and can certainly lead to adopting these behaviors later in life in some cases (not making any value judgment here). I would be willing to bet that, had programming stayed a women-dominated position, we'd have more women than men on the spectrum today.

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

#210

Post by ferguess_k »

EvilTrout wrote: post #204
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…

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago. Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers…

I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.
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