401–410 of 654 posts
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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"...
I do live in Europe, and I’m old enough to have close friends and family who were alive during fascist dictatorships.
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OK, he's wrong. But is that enough to state that he "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession"?
I don't think he's said exactly that in his own words but I think on balance it's fair to say he doesn't seem welcoming about it. He clearly has right leaning and libertarian views, and seems to be not very articulate or sensitive in how he discusses them so I can see why people might read into that more than they should maybe.
You can say whatever the hell you want. Or you could spend 3 minutes actually looking at public information to see if you're wrong.
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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…
> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it. I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like somethi…
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in ” are missing the point of why anything is done. If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc. If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (ho…
I don't know why the conversation always devolves into this. How it goes is "John cares about quality, everyone else only cares about money"
Choosing to prioritize art, story, and gameplay over raw execution speed does not mean you only care about money. It means you care about having a good game. That doesn't mean you can't do both, but if you have a time restriction, it's a completely reasonable trade off to make. Especially if your users won't even notice.
I would rather devs make games for people playing them, not for web devs who have Electron baggage.
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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.
Something interesting that I think a lot of younger people don't appreciate: back in the day, unless your name was Hemingway, it was considered unmanly to touch a keyboard. Anything that involved a typewriter or anything else with a keyboard was distaff by definition, just so much secretarial work. Maybe a journalist's job, if you were feeling generous.
Sounds stupid as hell, and it was, but that's a big reason why women played an outsized part in the growth of computing. First as the 'calculators' in WWII, then as Baudot terminals started to take over, as keyboard operators.
Don't make the mistake of assuming they were all Grace Hoppers or Margaret Hamiltons or Adele Goldbergs, because that simply wasn't the case. Many of them might have been, though, in a less stereotype-driven world.
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To each their own. I found the Witness to be excruciatingly monotonous, forced and, ultimately, boring.
What did you think of the puzzles?
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Blow has actually talked about those puzzles in streams, said he regrets it because more players than not stopped playing the games at that point. It's the definition of bad design to implement some untested abstract idea without giving the player any hints.
There are no hard puzzles in Braid, at least not that are required to beat the game, so not sure what you mean. I never played the witness so I don't know about that game.
A side note, if you've played The Witness but not yet The Looker[1], you probably have been missing out. I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/
The Looker is quite possibly the greatest parody ever executed in a video game. It creates the same kind of "ahah" moment that games like The Witness do, but in a way that really pokes fun at the level of pretentiousness those games tend to indulge themselves in.
(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)
Interested 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.