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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

#531

Post by jodrellblank »

tialaramex wrote: post #311
debugnik wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating whether one should feel guilty for supporting an author, and whether the author's speech outside a work matters to understand its intended meaning. The latter is the actual Death of the author , the former is usually called Death of the author by people who want to separate themselves from the authors they know they can be judged for supporting.

I think my point was distinct from naming this idea (Death of the Author). It wasn't about guilt it was about consequences and those are distinct things. Also, AIUI Death of the Author is not about whether their beliefs mattered to understand the intended meaning, but instead whether "intended meaning" is even a thing anyway. No need to understand it if it doesn't exist. I prefer in other contexts not to try to guess…

> "you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die."

You might be; from the UK's Crown Prosecution Service guidance website[1]: "Involuntary Manslaughter. Where an unlawful killing is done without an intention to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm, the suspect is to be charged with manslaughter not murder.". From Wikipedia[2]: "In English law, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder."

[1] https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/homicide-murder-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter#England_and_Wales

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

#532

Post by jayd16 »

mvkel wrote: post #523
jayd16 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve: Underlords, Artifact, Half-life: Alyx, CS 2 Square Enix: so so many but at least a few FF14 expansions, FF15, Nier: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, Octopath Traveler, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Bethesda: The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield Epic: Robo Recall, Fornite. Epic cancelled Paragon and Unreal Tournament and Fortnite is a live service game where the…

These are separate internal teams, not one team shipping all these games. Your square list, for example, crosses 8 different studios. My original question was poorly worded; I meant how many games -per studio- are being shipped by these big cos?

There's plenty of examples there of multiple games per studio. Hard to get public into per "team". Teams are mutable within a studio and devs roll off and onto other teams.

Arguably teams are tied to and only ever ship a single game so I'm not really sure what you're arguing at this point.

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

#533

Post by groundzeros2015 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #75
dwroberts wrote: post #9

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

I agree, a trailer should focus on emotional reaction, not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles,10 years of dev). Besides, the voices and writing are generic and maybe even AI generated. The witness had a really good promotion canpaign beautiful and intriguing.

Blow falls into a classic engineering mistake of marketing the challenge or effort to make something (audio logs everywhere) and not the end experience.

Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.

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

#534

Post by nurettin »

eudamoniac wrote: post #499

My seemingly unpopular opinion based on this thread: The Witness is the greatest puzzle game of all time. My spouse agrees. You either get it or you don't.

Let's dilute the thread. I did half the game and stopped playing. Not really got stuck, just got exhausted. It is a chore, I get what it is doing, the progression and addition of new mechanics while preserving the old ones yeah great whoopdi do.

But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don't make you feel like you are remotely debugging a crash on saturday night while everyone else is having fun. You either get that or not.

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

#535

Post by eudamoniac »

nurettin wrote: post #534
eudamoniac wrote: post #499

My seemingly unpopular opinion based on this thread: The Witness is the greatest puzzle game of all time. My spouse agrees. You either get it or you don't.

Let's dilute the thread. I did half the game and stopped playing. Not really got stuck, just got exhausted. It is a chore, I get what it is doing, the progression and addition of new mechanics while preserving the old ones yeah great whoopdi do. But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don…

Portal is trivial and Talos Principle is good but a bit contrived. I have never played a puzzle game that I considered a chore. The puzzles are the game. You don't need a story or a point in them. I also play chess and there is certainly no immersion or physics in that.

The Witness also has the sublime revelation in it that makes it more memorable than most games. I don't even remember the god's name in TP, but I can envision clearly every Witness locale.

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

#536

Post by nurettin »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #487

He also spent some of that time yelling at viewers, talking about how much smarter than everyone he is and talking about his language that he'll never release.

I didn't see him brag that much, but he says things like don't start with being a web dev, JavaScript kills your prospects of becoming a better programmer, etc. He probably thinks that formal education and books that teach people how a computer works and how to code in different paradigms don't exist, that everyone is a wannabe who only learns on hand at a job like he did.

His job recommendation: "there are so many things you can do, go to SpaceX!". Better life advice would be to learn your fundamentals (computer architecture, fp, algos) and be knowledgeable about the direction the industry is going instead of finding some niche and pouting at everything else.

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

#537

Post by eudamoniac »

mariusor wrote: post #31
pendenthistory wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Even if Trump were quite literally a Nazi, he is the elected President. Democracy is important. I don't know how one can simultaneously believe in democracy and believe that everyone who voted for the winning candidate is objectively incorrect. If most voters want to gas the Jews, that is just the will of the people, and that's terrible, but you need to pick in that scenario between a democracy and some other form of government that surpresses the will of the people.

I am of the opinion that Trump is nowhere near bad enough to choose the latter option; we should preserve democracy I think and allow that the majority of voters are not wrong or "too far" right. Yet a whole lot of people seem to be of the opposite opinion.

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

#538

Post by grog454 »

latexr wrote: post #66
incrudible wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.

> these are not fringe opinions Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally. > throwing around certain bad words like fascist Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying…

> Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.

It may well have been morally OK to most people (see: moral relativism), and since you're implying it wouldn't have been OK to you, it's worth pointing out that you probably wouldn't have done anything about it in the relevant time periods.

If you're an American you don't even need to try that hard to make moral relativism visceral: was the displacement (and far worse) of Native American tribes "OK"? I'd say no, but it isn't morally urgent enough to me or the 99%+ of Americans who are unwilling to pack their bags and return the entirety of two continents to the native descendants.

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

#539

Post by zozzle »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #212
ragazzina wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a relatively benign conservative Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?

You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have. I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

> but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.

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

#540

Post by nurettin »

eudamoniac wrote: post #535
nurettin wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's dilute the thread. I did half the game and stopped playing. Not really got stuck, just got exhausted. It is a chore, I get what it is doing, the progression and addition of new mechanics while preserving the old ones yeah great whoopdi do. But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don…

Portal is trivial and Talos Principle is good but a bit contrived. I have never played a puzzle game that I considered a chore. The puzzles are the game. You don't need a story or a point in them. I also play chess and there is certainly no immersion or physics in that. The Witness also has the sublime revelation in it that makes it more memorable than most games. I don't even remember the god's name in TP, but I can…

> You don't need a story or a point in them.

Well, that was pretentious.

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