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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

#361

Post by Levitz »

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…

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

I've gotta disagree. By "political correctness" people generally mean to not saying or doing anything that could be perceived as offensive. Especially against collectives perceived to be vulnerable.

For example, in the tiny paragraph above I've absolutely respected my fellow humans, but it can be considered offensive because you can suppose I might be looking to justify prejudiced attitudes.

For an even more evident example, political correctness has to do with the political climate and identity (as you mention: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else, as well as referring to "those groups"). That is very much detached from treating fellow humans respectfully.

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

#362

Post by klik99 »

empath75 wrote: post #288
calmbonsai wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.

He was focused on creating a very particular feeling of epiphany as an artistic statement, and I think he succeeded at that. Is the game not especially fun? Is it perhaps overlong? Probably? But I can think of very few, if any, games that provided the very particular feeling that The Witness provided in those moments that I felt it -- the feeling of the world opening up with new possibilities and interpretations.

Yes, I agree with this - as an expression of learning by wordless doing it was a really profound experience. The ending video of real life was great, reminded me of when I played a lot of Katamari and started seeing the whole world as things to roll up. I share the sentiment in these comments about Blow himself, but The Witness is a great game - though I get why people don’t like it: it’s a slow burn and requires a tolerance for pretentiousness. I don’t feel it was too long, it was as long as it needed to be, it’s just a big game

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

#363

Post by klik99 »

kibwen wrote: post #147
klausa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?

It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).

The actual story wasn’t anything special, but I thought how it told the story through mechanics was really well done. It wasn’t the first to do that but did it a larger scope than anything else at the time.

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

#364

Post by alerter »

jackling wrote: post #302
azemetre wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself. I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic? What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procras…

Yea I largely agree with you on that point. I think when discussing Jon, Casey (and to add another, Mike Acton), there's actually a series of advice that they give that get lumped into a whole, and people don't really see the parts of what they're saying and instead focus on the part that sounds most critical to their work. I do agree that if you take from their "teachings" that every dev needs to optimize every thin…

Yes, this is well put. I was heavily influenced by Casey back in 2014 and the advice I give juniors now is always that first point about "getting the clowns out of the car". There's a lot of crossover with the "grug brained developer" here too, which is much more aligned with the web/enterprise world.

I find it very hard to convince people though. It runs counter to a lot of other practices in the industry, and the resulting code seems less sophisticated than an abstraction pile.

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

#365

Post by 8964689797595 »

mariusor wrote: post #154
jstimpfle wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's _obviously_ reductionist and biased, not losing any more words on that.

I'm trying to offer a good faith argumentation. Why aren't you giving me the same courtesy?

[flagged]

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

tommica wrote: post #360
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, its completely ridiculous to rag on other programmers practices so much while you can't even finish your own project Its like everything these guys rant about you could add on the tagline "...yet the world keeps spinning and we all keep shipping things"

Not really. Let's reverse the situation on you - why should we take your opinion seriously, we have no idea how much you have shipped, if anything at all, so by your logic, your ragging on the other programmers practices is ridiculous. I've shipped a few things over the years, but doubt I have strong takes in programming, besides 'the "properness" of a variables name is dependent on the amount of lines between it's d…

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by ex-aws-dude »

tommica wrote: post #360
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, its completely ridiculous to rag on other programmers practices so much while you can't even finish your own project Its like everything these guys rant about you could add on the tagline "...yet the world keeps spinning and we all keep shipping things"

Not really. Let's reverse the situation on you - why should we take your opinion seriously, we have no idea how much you have shipped, if anything at all, so by your logic, your ragging on the other programmers practices is ridiculous. I've shipped a few things over the years, but doubt I have strong takes in programming, besides 'the "properness" of a variables name is dependent on the amount of lines between it's d…

I'm not making any claims about programming practices

If someone comes out saying "you guys are all doing this wrong" and yet they can't finish their own project then why would I take their advice seriously?

If you suggest a way of doing software development and you can't even show it working out to completion, what does that say about your proposed methods?

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

#368

Post by ajkjk »

csantini wrote: post #17
__alexs wrote: post #6

The Witness was a slog, maybe he's learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.

Curious, it's probably my favorite video-game experience ever.

i loved the base game, but god i wish (maybe this exists) there's a mod that would replace the godawful voiceovers in the cassette tapes with something good.

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

#369

Post by sesm »

dymk wrote: post #297
Jensson wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs? Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?

It's unlikely that the Rust and Zig devs are looking at one guy's gamedev focused vlog compared to feedback from tens of thousands of engineers writing tens of thousands of public projects in Rust and Zig. Have they heard of Jai? Yeah probably. But it's barely a drop in the bucket as far as the PL design community goes.

So, everybody with a toy Github repo gets a sit in a Rust/Zig design committee?

Not sure about Rust, but Zig seems to explicitly follow Cathedral-style development model.

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

valiant55 wrote: post #114
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

One example is linked in the article where he expressed women are biologically less interested in tech.

[deleted]
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