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.
It's the gaming version of Galaxy Quest: a parody that is not only great when it stands by itself, but is satirical in a way that shows they are genuinely big fans of the source material.
(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.)
> Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever
This is so fascinating to me, because when I really get a piece of creative art, like I thought I did with both Braid and The Witness, I usually feel like I get some insight and empathy with the person who created it. Yet every time I read or hear from Jonathan Blow ... I do not feel that. So, I guess I've been challenged by art again, hooray!
I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a "narrative".
I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!
That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
They say The Looker is made for two kinds of people: if you loved The Witness, you'll love The Looker, and if you hated The Witness, you'll love The Looker.
It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles.
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
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
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.
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.
I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;)
But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.
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.
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
When I saw the trailer in my YouTube feed I immediately thought it was an ad for those trash mobile games. Watching it didn’t really change my opinion either. I don’t actually want that to come across in a disparaging way - but it was just the vibes it gave off.
I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics.
He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]
Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?
>Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing
He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.
I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
I enjoyed the Witness for a while but I bounced off it pretty hard in the Mountain. It wasn’t until I watched a let’s play on YouTube that I learned there was a film room, a hidden cave complex under the mountain, a time trial, and other optional secrets. I can absolutely understand a certain type of gamer liking this but for me Talos Principle (both 1 and 2) is peak puzzle genre.
That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.
I found them quite boring since they are all repetitions on the same theme - just drawing lines on a square. It could have been a mobile game. The world doesn't feel connected to the puzzles, and the exploration aspect of it could have been a completely separate game. It feels like two games glued together, which is IMO not a good design.
It's also not a game that's very demanding from a technical performance perspective, and really has very limited numbers of active entities / animations, so why should I care about his opinions on game architecture or anything else?
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.
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
The Puzzle Boy / Kwirk series of games is Sokoban-based, but has 3 different mechanics on top of that: turnstiles, pits (that can be filled by blocks), and blocks larger than 1x1. One of the things I love about it is that, each mechanic is interesting on its own, and each combination of mechanics results in levels with very different feels. Lots of puzzles with a bunch of mechanics try to throw tons of them into each level, and each level ends up feeling very samey. But judicious use of combinations can lead to a lot of interesting variety.
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together.
> I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.
Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
We don’t know that, AFAICT (after reading the Ars article and the Bluesky post). Some of the puzzles are probably reused, and other new ones using the same mechanics may have been written. I’m not sure why you’d so confidently state “Blow didn’t design these puzzles at all”… do you have something against him personally?
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:
> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.
Here the post after just for a full picture
> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
I left a link to the exact post I'm referring to with the whole thread available for context.
And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump.
I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.
Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.
I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.
It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
> I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)
It's unfortunate that The Good Scott Adams occasionally gets mixed up with The Evil Scott Adams. It's so ironic that they share a name.
Many people know who the The Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blacks are a hate group"), misogyny, conspiracy theories, anti-health-care-for-poor-people ideology, and Trump boot licking, and he obsessively infuses his MAGA religion into everything he says and does. Enough said.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Good Scott Adams, a pioneer of the Adventure game genre, who is devotedly Christian, but in the kind, uplifting, well meaning, Jimmy Carter kind of way. He's a really nice guy, who did lots of quality groundbreaking work!
He didn't infuse his original games in the 70's and 80's with ham fisted Christian themes or any kind of bigotry. And he did a Bible based game in 2013, but it was clearly labeled as such, not trying to sneak religion in through the back door.
Somebody asked him about his faith, and he sincerely talked about his religion, but didn't evangelize or anything like that, he just talked about himself when asked.
To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?
I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”
Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?
I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?
Thanks for taking the time today!
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | next [–]
You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking!
To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started.
To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator.
I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]
I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize.
In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes.
Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)
It doesn't, but historically a lot of the reasons people consume art is due to fashion, and art is a way to put you in in and out groups.
So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.
I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.
For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues...
For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
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 intentions when I can instead look at the effects and it seems to me our law and practice agree.
Notice for example that while proving attempted murder requires that you wanted the victim to die, murder does not. The fact that they are dead satisfies this aspect of the crime, you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die.
I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games.
Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked
> But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.
What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
I think we're all perfectly capable of following links and drawing our own conclusions. They are links to secondary sources mostly because Blow is notoriously unwilling to step outside of his Twitter bubble, and no one wants to link to that anymore.
I will not entertain the idea drudging through a toxic well-poisoning community that outright calls itself "SubredditDrama" for bad faith information about a person.
Frankly, if that's all one has to offer, I cannot take anyone's negative opinion on this guy seriously.
What is the good faith way to link to "(It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)"? The link exists in the post but you object to that link as a bad faith way to link. So what is a good faith way to link to this tweet?
The subredditdrama post in question does in fact contain a link to the full tweet, which you objected to as bad faith. So I'm asking what is a good faith way to link to this tweet.
I don't think "Drama" implies which side of said drama is in the right. That drama surrounds a bunch of Blow's public statements is maybe the one thing everyone can agree on
That community has no oversight for what gets posted. It's a free-for-all for anyone to gather (read: cherrypick) low quality information and present it in an overtly sensationalist way and intentionally misrepresent what they quote.
They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.
I opened it for you. It's basically the same problem with Notch or JK Rowling and it's backed up by credible sources. He said women don't like programming because of biology; he said the USA made COVID-19 in a lab and he opposed the vaccinations for it; he said Donald Trump is the best president of his life; he supports the new Facebook rule where you're allowed to post misinformation.
There's clearly something about making a successful game (or book) that just makes you completely lose touch with reality after that.
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 thinks they should play a role
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.
The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations.
This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.
Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not like girls aren't encouraged to pursue programming or science. Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby. A big part of that is probably competitiveness, but also I believe there are more loners among men. Again, this is not scientific, just personal observations, also ideas I've picked up that I can agree with. I'm not even saying that it must be mostly for biological reasons (though I assume it is), just that there is a deeper reason for fewer girls to exist in tech than just "there is patriarchy and power structures and misogynist gatekeeping and shit".
Never forget that the social neglect is not exactly healthy, and programming isn't actually that prestigious and externally rewarding, except for maybe the compensation that you can currently earn in some places.
Adding that for example in math or other sciences, we are much closer to gender parity.
Given the success of women in sports such as ultra marathoning, medicine etc I don't think it is that conclusive that women are not willing to put the hours into difficult and isolating activities.
There are a great number of studies of the social aspects of gender differences in work but I don't have a single authoritative source for you.
> Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby.
It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.
For all I know, being a male programmer myself, with a significant proportion of females in all my programmer circles so far, I can attest the exact opposite. Every one of those circles has been welcoming and inclusive.
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.
Thekla currently has 10 core permanent employees. 5 of them are women, including their studio manager, creative and art Director, a programmer, and 2 additional artists.
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.
When you say, "not well support by evidence," you're either wrong, anti-science, or lying. Numerous studies absolutely show very large average differences in interests based on sex. And those carry over into occupation preferences. Just one more recent study:
Plus: Jon never said it's the "primary" factor, as you claim. He said it's a large factor, that doesn't apply at the individual level, but on average. Which is entirely factual and supported by copious amounts of research.
Just because people like you want to be offended by science, doesn't make it wrong, or controversial.
Well, no, you're the one that is "wrong, anti-science, or lying".
The very first sentence of the article you linked to says, "Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood."
So claiming that its for biological reasons is bullshit. You have no idea whether it is or not. And neither does Blow.
AFAIK there are differences established on many psychological axes that are more basic than "occupational choice", such as competitiveness, neuroticism, interest in things vs human relations, and others. I don't understand these deeply but you can research for yourself, so there is certainly no shortage of possible explanations based on those.
LOL. You're going to dismiss the study because of the justification for doing the study. Here, let me help you understand:
"not fully understood" -> "so we studied it" -> "here's what we found"
Besides that obvious point, the sentence you quoted says "not yet fully understood," not "we have no idea." Those aren't the same thing. We actually have substantial evidence pointing in a clear direction.
- The most egalitarian countries show the largest gaps, not the smallest.
- Women exposed to elevated androgens in utero become more things-oriented despite being raised normally as girls.
- Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles.
- A 1.28 standard deviation gap in every culture that emerges in infancy and grows as societies get freer is not what socialization looks like.
You're treating "not fully understood" as "both hypotheses are equally supported."
They aren't.
The evidence overwhelmingly favors a substantial biological component. Just because you don't like the implications of that, doesn't make it false.
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)
The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.
Related, I think math went through a similar transition.
It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.
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.
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.
I'm thinking he changed the name when too many people had gotten aware of the connotation.
You have to twist logic pretty fucking hard to find a reason for him to put 88 in his username. He's a guy who thinks he's way more clever than he is and gets upset when it gets pointed out to him.
> though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall
Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
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"...
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.
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 to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.
The therm "fascist" is definitely being thrown around like it was nothing, for the most unnewsworthy opinions or statements. There are definitely people who call anyone fascist who would dare to claim that there might be differences between the sexes on average for example. Doing so probably has a fascist element itself (not accepting different opinions). It's also unreasonable, and let me say _ridiculous_, to even doubt that there are certain differences. To be clear, it's of course not right to make any prescriptions what any specific member of a sex should or could do -- but that's a completely different thing.
"There are differences between men and women" isn't a fascist-coded statement because of the statement itself - it's obviously a true statement no matter what you believe. It's fascist-coded. This statement is almost exclusively said by fascists, for reasons that have not much to do with the statement itself.
Why is that? IMO it's because fascist slogans always tend to drift away from their actual meaning, towards things that are socially acceptable to say.
Back in Hitler's time, Hitler didn't give speeches about "Let's kill all the Jews" - he'd rather give speeches about "Let's clean up Germany" even though he clearly wanted to kill all the Jews. When Hitler says "Let's clean up Germany" and the crowd goes wild, you know they're going wild because they're wild about the idea of killing the Jews, not because they're wild about the idea of mopping the floor. At least I assume you would know that now, with the benefit of hindsight. You'd have to be living under a rock not to.
And that's not a euphemism for "Let's kill all the Jews" specifically. It's a general euphemism for all the bad things he wanted to do with all the people. It's not like there's one euphemism for "Let's kill the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's gas the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's kill the gays". It's more like all the euphemisms point to all of the underlying true thoughts, all at once. One loose region of semantic space points to another loose region of semantic space.
You can see how Hitler could have started out saying what he actually meant, but to avoid scrutiny he'd drift towards more innocuous words, but anyone who's been following his whole campaign would know what was meant. It's a bit like Cockney rhyming slang - the pointer drifts until it has no surface-level relation to the pointee, but just because it's not surface-level obvious, doesn't mean it's unknowable (as people who pretend not to recognize the statements often claim).
And if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm following politics, and my friend says "I support cleaning up Germany" I'm going to do a double-take. I'm going to suspect he's not talking about mopping the floor and picking up litter. Though, if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm ignoring politics, I might reasonably assume that he is talking about those things and get quite confused why my other friend thinks he's a fascist.
In modern fascist dialogue, "men and women have differences" is a pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women belong in the kitchen", which itself is pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women should do what men tell them". You can see how this came about because saying "women should do what men tell them" would be unpopular, then fascists justified it with logic like "well women are biologically submissive and men are biologically dominant" and it over time it got watered down to stuff like "men are biologically different from women"
> Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.
From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was, but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. Consider yourself lucky.
> Fascism has a very clear definition.
First of all, that isn't true. Secondly, even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché. That doesn't work in the long run, you'll just get ignored. As a result, you can pat yourself on the back for calling out fascism while all the behaviors and actions that you believe to be fascist are mainstreamed and affecting people's lives. If I was you, I'd be more worried about criticizing those behaviors and actions on their merits (or lack thereof), rather than trying to tie them to some textbook definition fascism and dismissing them wholesale.
> You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché.
Of course I’m not, I barely use the word. Pay attention to the person you’re replying to. What you’re doing is putting me in a box of other people you’ve seen online and making a bunch of wrong assumptions. You’re not engaging with the arguments, you’re fighting against a straw man in your imagination.
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK.
That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotten the death penalty.
Christianity forbade enslaving Christians, so we just killed our criminals for the past thousand years, but before Christianity we practiced slavery as punishment of crime everywhere as people thought that was better than killing them.
That is complete nonsense. Where did you get that from? You really think most slaves were criminals? What culture did that ever happen (apart from modern USA).
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you.
I sincerely doubt a vegan would agree that eating meat is OK, but as a society, we agree that eating meat is OK. It might not be OK tomorrow, it might not be OK by some moral standard, but that's besides my point.
> That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?
It means fighting for abolition then was a much tougher fight than the fight you have today.
> Of course I’m not, I barely use the word.
I may have misinterpreted your position to the effect of "look in the textbook, Trump is a fascist by definition". Indeed, I have seen "other people online" argue to that effect, and they weren't made of straw. If that's not the case, I apologize, but the point stands even if you're not the kind of person it should be aimed at.
> From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was, but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. Consider yourself lucky.
...do you not also consider yourself lucky about this? Weird phrasing.
What's the point comparing the sympathy to that of Mussolini or Hitler but qualifying it as not a minority position? Those two had even greater domestic support.
It seems that the "covid trutherism" or "spreading covid misinformation" claim is unjustified. Here's Blow's original tweet:
> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?
Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.
2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.
3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.
4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.
Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.
Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.
Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.
Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.
More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
I think you are taking a very charitable view here - the tweet immediately before the one you quote is clearly talking about the US vaccine mandate (not China).
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 into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
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.
I am not missing their point at all, you are missing mine.
>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.
The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.
I am not an expert on Notch's slide into craziness, but I'd argue that the episode you mention it might not be the start. His start was as a "anti-SJW" game developer which got him hated and vilified by his former fans.
I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.
> he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong
Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".
I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.
I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.
I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances.
I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually.
Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever.
I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.
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 reality is not only a problem of the right
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?
Remember that for these types of people, deporting illegal immigrants is fascist.
Any enforcement of immigration law or protecting the border is fascist.
The idea of the United States being a sovereign nation is fascist.
By extension, anyone who believes these things is a fascist or a nazi. And that gives them the moral rationale to be ok with wanting them imprisoned or k*lled.
> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.
He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.
That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is much closer to fascism. I don't like throwing that term but just to return it.
It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.
> there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that
That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.
It might be the _logically_ correct interpretation that these are separate things. Now let's talk about rhetorics. Why are two unrelated, heavy accusations combined in a single sentence? Then consider that the added accusation (misogynist) doesn't hold water even on a logical level (let alone the bad faith involved here), it is a crass misreading of the evidence that was brought up for it.
Not scrutinizing Blow's words. One must be extremely careful when calling anyone fascist or similar labels. The burden of proof is on the accuser, not on the accused. It's obviously right to demand precision from the accuser, and to interpret whatever the accused said in good faith.
That is a claim I neither made nor defended, I merely pointed the asker to the information they requested in the article to let them decide for themselves.
I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.
> He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion) (...)
I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.
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 take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.
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.
That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is.
John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.
I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
Soulja Boy never made any videos about Garry's Mod
This is kind of a joke and I know he was mostly poking fun at Braid but this does speak to how mainstream indie games got in that first wave that hit XBLA.
To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out.
Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.
I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.
Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.
But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?
Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.
Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.
But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
> Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.
E.g. Casey and Blow often criticise the Visual Studio debugger. It's slow, has quite limited functionality. And it progressively gets worse over time (e.g. it can no longer update watched values at the same speed as you step through the program).
Do they both have to write a debugger to demonstrate how bad it is?
You don't have to write some software to criticise how bad it is. E.g. I cannot but make fun of Discord for implementing "we will intentionally kill our app if it consumes 4GB of memory and are very good at prioritising fixing memory issues seeing a whopping 5% improvement for p95 of users": https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1pej7l7/restart...
Doesn't mean I have to write Discord to criticise it. All I need is an understanding of rather basic performance and of general engineering practices.
Part of the purpose of the series of Handmade Hero is to build a game from the ground up with no dependencies. So I don't think he's bringing in stdlib
So he could use that, but goal is to be someone who doesn't necessarily need to do that.
He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.
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 definition and usage.' Doubt anyone will take my considerations seriously.
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?
I had a larger rant written, but this is the only part that had any value:
Yes, one can argue that lack of produces results does not give big plusses towards their work processes, but it does not necessarily negate the value of the concepts that they preach.
The value of a thing is not only defined by who is spouting it, one must evaluate the argument on it's own merits, not by evaluating of the people yelling about it.
There are plenty of concepts in this world that I cannot make work, that does not mean that the concepts are bad. It only means that the failure reflects on me and my in-capabilities.
And this might be something that you are not noticing: You are making claims about programming practices indirectly by stating that THEIR practices are not worth considering due to lack of shipping anything.
It's not really the same. Casey is suggesting people that don't spend 10 years crafting everything from scratch are somehow "lesser than." The user you're replying to is pointing out that Casey has set a completely arbitrary rule for game quality that conveniently leaves out his inability to ship something, and that's funny.
We're not saying games taking longer than a few years are failures, we're saying good games can encompass both approaches. But Casey, and his followers, are doing purity tests to feel good about themselves.
And this is assuming the games they ship are even good or noticeable to the user. I don't much care for Braid or The Witness, and I don't want my favorite dev studios to suddenly write everything from scratch every time. I would have a lot less fun things to play.
If you mean Computer, Enhance!'s Performance Aware Programming series, it's ongoing, but the pace is slower than about 1.5years ago. Given how good it is, and how fastidious and comprehensive Casey is, I imagine it doesn't really pay for itself, even with an impressive subscriber count.
another POV is, business IT projects fail at a higher rate than video games do! the people who post about "shipping" are projecting: "at least my garbage is delivered frequently, which is key to being employed, not key to creating meaning."
If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.
I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.
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.
He wrote this whole game in it. Apart from that, a couple dozen or hundreds of beta-testers. Not sure whether the language ever gets released, maybe he's too worried about having to maintain it and not being able to change it anymore.
What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything.
Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.
I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making.
That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)
> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
Probably a nuanced point in what's the purpose for espousing the virtues of performance if you don't have the output to show it is worth it?
If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago?
Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?
More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
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 procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them?
What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
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 thing, and never use any other language than system languages, that advice is myopic for most devs. However, I don't really see them arguing for that, at least not entirely.
From following their teaching for a while, they mostly preech about the following things which I agree with, even when talking about higher-level languages, technologies.
- Get the clowns out of the car: Don't make things needlessly expensive. Write simple procedural code that maps cleanly to what the hardware is doing. This is essentially stating OOP, large message passing, and other paradigms that abstract the problem away from the simple computations that are happening on your computer is actually adding complexity that isn't needed. This isn't about tuning your program to get the highest amount of performance, but rather, just write basic code, that is easy to follow and debug, that acts as a data-pipeline as much as possible. Using simple constructs to do the things you want, e.g. an if-statement versus inheritence for dynamic dispatch.
- Understand your problem domain, including the hardware, so you can reason about it. Don't abstract away the hardware your code is actually running on too much where you lose vital information on how to make it work well. I've seen this many times in my professional career, where devs don't know what hardware the code will be running on, and this inevitably makes their code slower, less responsive to the user and often drives up cost. There are many times in my early career (backend engineering), that just simplifying the code, designing the code so it works well for the hardware we expect, greatly lowered cost. The hardware is the platform and it shouldn't be ignored. Similarly, limitations that are imposed by your solution should be documented and understood. If you don't expect a TPS greater than some value, write that down, check for it, profile and make sure you know what your specturm of hardware can handle, and how much software utilization of that hardware you're getting.
- Focus on writing code, and don't get bogged down my fad methodologies (TDD, OPP, etc). Writing simple code, understanding the problem more deeply as you write, and not placing artifical constraints on yourself.
Now each of these points can be debated, but their harder to argue against IMO then the strawmany idea of them proposing that you must optimize as much as possible. And they argue that you will actually be more productive this way, and produce better software.
FWIW, you may have some datapoints showing that they do propose what I called a strawmany version of their ideas, but I have seen them advocating for the above points more so than anything else.
---
I do want to add, for Jon Blow, I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past, and had no problem with their output in terms of gameplay or performance. From his talk about civilization ending relating to game dev, he's more concern that if no one tries to develop without an engine, we as a civilization will lose that ability.
Aha! I think I know my contention with this advice now. Who can actually disagree with this? Like I'm saying yes to everything, no one I know would say no to this. Never had a coworker say aloud: "I want to write code to make things worse."
These are the platitudes of our industry that no one disagrees with. Like you said, this is what Blow + Muratori teachings can be distilled into. But there is something worse it also assumes, coming from such people.
Both Blow + Muratori have extremely privilege dev careers that a good ~80% us will never achieve: they have autonomy. The rest of us are merely serfs in someone's fiefdom. Blow has his fief, Muratori his. They can control their fiefs but not the majority of us devs. We don't have autonomy in the direction of the company, we don't control the budgets, we don't even control who we interview or hire.
Assuming that this onus of organizational standards has to be placed on someone with no authority to dictate it isn't just. Also as someone who has consumed content from these two for about a good 8ish years as their videos pop into my feed: I've never see them advocate for workers to be empowered to make their environments better. They mostly just trash on devs that have no authority.
With that mindset I need to seriously decouple myself from these people. Plenty of other devs advocate for the same things in our craft while also advocating for better rights as workers.
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.
> I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past
He's also said quite openly that if you're only starting, it's fine if you reach for a ready-made engine. It's that you should try and understand how things and systems work as you progress.
Fact of the matter is that code quality is a pretty small part of whether a game is good or not. It can be notable when it's good and it can sink a game when it's really bad, but there's a huge gap in the middle where it doesn't really matter that much (especially to the player).
Some people actually have mouths to feed. Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years; that doesn't make their products "garbage".
> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years
Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something?
Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
After all both in question live off money they've made and/or are making from their (arguably) uncompromised quality work.
That is to say their uncompromised quality work has directly resulted in them being able to not release anything for close to 10 years, and practice their ideals in software they ship even if the "shipping" takes 10 years to do.
It would be more fair to say, that most people don't have the craftmanship and skill (and not the luxury) to be able to produce high quality work and software that enables them the so called "luxury".
Just to be clear, your comments are implying everyone who doesn't write everything from scratch is shipping garbage.
Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is, I would say The Witness is a very compromised game. Maybe if less focus went into the technical aspect, it could've been better.
Someone can't honestly write this unless they aren't a fan of games to begin with. Are you saying the Clair Obscur devs don't care about their craft because they used Unreal Engine?
There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch.
Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.
Jon can be really interesting to listen to, especially when he's talking about Jai. But he can also be such a fucking tool that I can never listen for long.
I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.
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 think an important distinction has to be made between personal values and opinions, and politics, both in the confines of this discussion and generally in society.
I think the lack of this distinction has led to much, and very painful and bitter online discussion, whereas people in a tribalist political mindset try to pigeonhole others based on a throwaway statement into either a friendly or enemy camp.
I broadly agree with the value that competence is more important in politeness or vibes, especially in people who build critical infrastructure - in fact it is a very very welcome property of these people that they care about things on a level that seems unreasonable to me.
This is true basically of everything critically important in life. One example is security. Everyone enjoys the privilege of using a web browser to visit any website and not have their PC compromised thanks to a variety of measures created by people who care intensely about these things.
If the crash testing on my car was done by people who sought out some amicable middle ground so as to not upset engineers who have to redo the frame of the car after a test gone horribly wrong, and accounting, who gets the bill for it, I would be sweating bullets every time I had to drive anywhere.
Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism - the idea that people must be sorted into totally disjunct groups who are the bitter enemies of each other - thankfully doesn't translate into practice. Two people might root for sports teams that are eternal rivals, one person's favorite food might be hated by the other, they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.
That's why there's a blanket ban on discussing politics in every place where people are expected to maintain amicable civility towards each other - family dinners, the workplace, gatherings with friends and acquaintances etc., with everyone usually getting antsy whenever 'politics' is brought up.
No it's not. Politics is the negotiation between two or more people who want conflicting outcomes.
> they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.
The Republicans are led by white supremacists and they hate me for being transgender. Please stop carrying water for them. Politics matters and shouldn't be dismissed as "sports" or "tribalism"
> competence is more important in politeness or vibes,
I've been a professional programmer for about fifteen years. You could stand to be more polite.
I am not from the US. I don't have a horse in this race. Please do not imply I am somehow 'carrying water' for the Republicans, whatever might that mean. I do not have any negative feelings toward you for who you are, and I assume you're a competent individual, although I would prefer if we were having a technical debate instead of whatever this is.
I apologize if I come across as impolite, but I assure you that has not been my intention. Please understand that that there is no hidden meaning behind my posts.
In fact I enjoy the fact that Blow can talk shop about things he disagrees with (such as enterprise software with call stacks 50 levels deep).
> Please do not imply I am somehow 'carrying water' for the Republicans, whatever might that mean.
The implication was pretty clear to me, in that by reducing politics down to being things reasonable people can always disagree over, you're giving actual bad actors in the space too much credit.
How is it not? Respect and how youre trying to influence someone to behave is exerting power. Telling someone how they should exert their power is political.
That's not what people are talking about when they're speaking of Jon Blow's politics. Most likely they are referring to his weird takes on COVID or his MAGA tweets.
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 "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.
>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.
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 in here demanding a smoking gun comment that somehow proves he's awful rather than telling him "sometimes it's ok to stfu" to comments like this that enable and echo chamber him.
And I say this as a fan of Braid and The Witness (at least of the first couple of layers of puzzles...as you go deeper, just like with Braid, you find more and more self-indulgent windbaggery that should have been on the cutting room floor).
Wow, what a nauseating subreddit. They are notorious for poisoning the well, bad faith cherrypicking to misrepresent positions, and blowing their positions completely out of proportion, all for the sole effort of smearing whoever or whatever they make a topic about.
And everything in that post are bad faith links to secondary reactionary sources.
I don't really know much about Jonathan Blow or Jai or really follow it but it's astonishing to me that anyone could possibly take anything from that toxic subreddit with any sort of seriousness.
The Reddit link didn’t load for some reason and the other day be didn’t include anything racist, homophobic or transphobic. What it did cover is definitely a simplistic view ignoring the cultural nuances that might lower women’s participation in stem, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as sexist.
He gets political.. Just as an example, he claimed that it was obvious that COVID was a lab leak in 2021. This is not obvious at all if you read Michael Worobey's rigorous work instead of rely on Blow's arrogant intuitions.
I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
Most of us are grossly unqualified to provide opinions on any domain save some hyper specialized domain we invest years of effort into. I always think about that when reading comments on the Internet :)
If only the tech gurus of the internet stayed in their lanes, or if people knew better than to take their beliefs from clueless entrepreneurs who got lucky once, the world would be a much better place. Alas, tis not the one we live in.
The lab leak theory was always credible. Here in Canada there was a big scandal with Chinese scientists who worked for one of our labs who secretly transferred specimens from Winnipeg to Wuhan in 2019 and the subsequent police investigation went public in 2020.
Its not credible: two viral lineages emerged from the market ~1 week apart before the world knew what covid was; they differ by 2 nucleotides; mutation rates are 1e-6 per base per passage; doubling time is about half a week. A group of sick animals better explains the phylogenetics w/ these constraints. Everything points against lab leak: location, timing, and genetics.
I don’t know any of the context but how could hurting people’s feelings ever be relevant in the context of technical implementation of the game if that’s what we’re taking about?
That particular tweet only says that he preferred Trump to Kamala which IMO is a reasonable opinion. It does not say that he likes Trump. Given the choice between a douche and a turd sandwich you pick one. Maybe post some other tweet?
He's a Trump fan. Is he stupid enough to believe Trump's illogical promises, or does he see through them and is OK with all the unconstitutional and immoral crap he's done? Either way he's political.
Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That's probably a good thing. I doubt he's as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He's said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.
I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
He is definitely "online". I saw him tweet about Hasan's dog which - you have to know about streaming political figures and the latest happenings at least a little bit. Maybe not addicted but he knows what is up and still has the views he has.
I wonder how people are able to stay functional while being online. I'm in 2 states. (1) Very productive and joyful. (2) Extreme dysfunctional and commenting on HN and Reddit.
If you haven't seen much of his posts or opinions in the past five years maybe, but he's gone pretty far off the deep end recently (see: calling all men under the age of 40 supercucks). He's always been sort of a holier-than-thou asshole and that's driven him to increasingly dumb arguments.
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 more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?
Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
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 fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
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.
Of course programs will be worse when non-programmers are in charge of programming. That doesn't mean they shouldn't but lots of indie game attempts fail because the programmer (educated or not) doesn't have a clue about when to refactor and make sure the design of the system matches the intention of the game. You can only tinker until a certain point, after that you're just creating new bugs by fixing other bugs.
ID software once was a small team and they built complex games by writing tight code which was modular and very clear. Lots of their '3d era' contemporaries failed because their engines were sloppy, complicated, buggy and slow.
A lot of core game logic is presumably Tonda's work. He's a director, not a software engineer. He came into this, many years ago, wondering if the "easy" tools to make a video game meant he could just make the video game he was imagining, and of course the answer is "Yes, but..."
Blue Prince is (an extrapolation of) that first game, but it looks and sounds like competent people worked on it, not like something slapped together by a non-engineer in a week. However while you can hire experts to make "You know, like cool jazz for a mysterious underground area" or "Art that looks thematically like it was sketched, but also feels solid enough that you could lean on it" it's very difficult for software engineers to "just" fix the software to get rid of bugs because what's a bug? Only the puzzle designer knows for sure what they intended.
[[Spoilers! Do not read if you are still playing or might play]]
Is it a bug that "Swimming Trunks" don't let you swim? No! That's a Dad Joke. They're Trunks. Large locked wooden boxes. They're in the swimming pool, and if your pool has water in it, that means they're swimming.
When I picked a time from my near future in Shelter, it didn't work, that's a bug right? Nope. The Shelter cares about game time, not real world time. Make sure you know the date in game.
OK but is it a bug that being in Clock Tower at the Sacred Hour doesn't have any effect? Um, maybe? It seems as though the software doesn't believe clocks repeat, so only the first time will actually work. Or, maybe the second does too? It's hard to say. Try again?
I need food but somehow I keep digging up keys and money. That's a bug right? Nope, probably means you have made a Contraption which changed your dig probabilities.
OK, so that's also why my Door facings are weird even though I put my Compass-based Contraption in a Cloak Room? That one's probably a bug.
Still, "If you draft it quite late" ought to mean my Music Room has the key right? Well, maybe, what did you think "Quite late" meant?
"I thought after a few hours would do it". Huh. Well, maybe. "OK, what about Rank 7?". Rank Nine would be better, but it might be enough, depends. "I still get no key, are you sure this isn't a bug?". The most likely problem is that you've done Music Room. If so the most likely key to wrongly believe you did instead is Vault, although Station is also possible. Check the other locations.
It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.
That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
I think the question is whether Cyberpunk 2077 would ever have been made under the constraints that Blow and Muratori talk about. Like, Order of the Sinking Star looks pretty impressive, but from what I can tell it's basically just a bunch of Sokoban-style games operating on a fixed grid. You don't need anywhere near as complex an engine for that as you do for a game like Cyberpunk 2077.
My impression is that the Blow/Muratori style works well if you're the only person working on a game, or part of a very limited team, which is fair enough, but it naturally limits the scope of what you can achieve.
Having a 3D engine does not a AAA make. The Witness is a beautiful looking game, but the amount of state and interactions it has to deal with is orders of magnitude less than GTA: San Andreas. It is closer to the complexity a Myst remake would have.
It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
>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.
This "not caring", from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.
I hate C++. It’s possibly my least favorite language. Slow compilation, awful mess of ideas scattered around, syntax soup, footguns galore. Typescript has become one of my favorite languages. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good and pragmatic. JS, on the other hand? No thanks. Static typing is something I never want to do without again.
> 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.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).
Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...
I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade ago.
> 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 something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
I feel like a lot of people go after Jai because of what Jon Blow says about XYZ political issue. Jai seems perfectly reasonable for at least the narrow task of making games in an indie studio. The macro capabilities might be terrifying in a large enterprise, but if you're handrolling all your own code and don't have to worry about a software supply chain, who cares?
I go after Jai because I think the problems it is purported to solve are better and more readily solved with existing frameworks, libraries and engines, and I think the programming language itself is entirely too low a level for these things.
You don't need to design a specific language to implement structs of arrays, you can just... do that.
This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.
Except, this complexity isn't saving time and resources. This complexity admiration culture has resulted in slower code thats harder to understand, debug and maintain too. What should be used only for small amount of time is used from get go like complex architecture and deep abstraction. Fetishizing simplicity is bad too for sure but a blip on a radar and not such a trend and far less of an issue compared to fetishizing complexity thats rampant.
Not a game dev or even a gamer, I'm defending attack on simplicity not blow or muratori.
Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.
- Lower compilation times for debug builds.
- Better debug messages.
- A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in.
- Standard input API for cross OS development.
- AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax.
- A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed.
- The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.
>This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process.
I didn't say anything about hating working on the code, but every example of game code I've seen has been a mess, even in games that are considered well designed. So I have to disagree - the process and finished work often are separable. What are ports if not an example of that?
I found the voice acting in the trailer very annoying, hope this can be turned off in the final game. Or maybe I'm just too used to the "voice" over this game is him ranting about software development, from watching his streams :D
That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.
Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?
I'm always a bit baffled by this project. While it's cool that he can create hundreds of hours of content for his puzzle game, does anyone actually want to play a single puzzle game for this long? Would it not be better to make a few different, shorter, higher quality experiences?
I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be "largest puzzle game ever". I'm excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though.
One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
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, clock in at 250ish puzzles.
So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?
It's not trying to be Portal. It's a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here's a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks/rule alterations to spice things up.
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
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.
I am equal parts daunted and excited about the size of it. On one hand, of course it's a lot of time (he's said it might the average person 500 hours to complete), and I'm liable to binge. On the other, I imagine there will be some incredible depth to it, and maybe a "little and often" strategy might not be too bad (if possible). Despite adoring The Witness and Braid, I'm still not sure if I'll get this one. Would my life be richer from finishing this or a few hundred films? My money is on the latter.
Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).
Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince?
[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]]
Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End.
Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.
I cheated the Gallery. The art is by one of Tonda's big inspirations, and whereas Tonda thinks he's great I think he's terrible and should knock it off. After maybe an hour I got one answer myself, looked up the rest, continued playing. I consider two of them reasonable puzzles, one is a bit crap and the final one is the worst thing in Blue Prince which overall is an excellent game.
The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.
The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.
† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?
Soooo we're just gonna bounce over his noxious politics, the smoldering trainwreck that is every collaboration he's ever been a part of, or his grotesque Twitter account. Cool.
It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.
I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.
Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html
Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.
I hate this kind of headline. No, Jonathan Blow did not spend the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles. A team of developers made 1,400 puzzles and Blow directed them.
This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White".
I'm really intersted in giving this game a shot since I'm a big fan of puzzle games
personally I've never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he's comming from which is what opinions are for
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” 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 (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.
However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.
We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games.
Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language.
I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.
It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].
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?
Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
Jai, odin and zig's creators are all part of the handmade network, a community of programmers. You are vastly underestimating blow's reach/influence.
Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".
Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.
I've never heard of Odin or seen any projects written in it, seen a company hire for it, or seen it discussed at a PL conference. There's no stable compiler for it, and no spec. Yeah, I'm just one person, so maybe I'm just in my own bubble, but these are hobby projects with a very small communities.
> 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.
Oh, yes, the Rust team does "market research" and interviews people to see how they use the language, where the pain points are, etc. They have talks at Rustconf about how they gather information on how the language is used. Never seen them mention Jai.
I've watched enough hours of his streams to know that this is NOT a reductive take. Blow is one of the most arrogant developers and game designers, and believes that nearly everyone else is an idiot.
He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).
C++ & Linux are world-changing tools, but C++ & Linux really do suck in ways that become more offensive with taste. Rust makes very different tradeoffs than ones gamedevs want.
Regardless, if arrogance drives people to make new tools then we should be grateful for that arrogance.
I think you're projecting a lot of your own complexes and insecurities.
He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that's how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).
If/when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don't cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.
Eh, I can write that comment because it's fairly easy to see this side of JBlow if you've been following his work for a while. He is so naturally abrasive about other people's work, loves shitting on things he didn't make himself, loves being the smartest guy in the room, and also is a covid is a hoax, anti-vaxxer, Trump supporter etc.
I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, and that's OK. I realised a long time ago that ego/arrogance isn't a great quality and it's far better to have a strong network of friends and supporters, and that doesn't happen if you're an arrogant prick.
And yes, he built the language (which is totally un-needed) because the "idiots" who made all the existing languages, didn't make one as good as in JBlows brain. Despite the fact that there are 1000s of games which are far better than anything JB has made written in C#, C++, Java, Rust, etc. Did Larian need to write a new programming language to make Baldurs Gate 3?
Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with. A game that is just a modern spin on Sokoban and where he paid a bunch of other game devs to use their puzzles! You could write this shit in three.js and it wouldnt look or feel any differently.
+1 to all of this. I can no longer deal seriously with Blow's ideas, programming language, or games because he can't present any idea without being highly condescending and critical of just about everyone else. I'm glad I've never had to work for or with him, because he's the type of coworker or boss that constantly makes everyone's lives miserable.
My main criticism of Blow is that he's consistently highly condescending to other games, game developers, and programmers. Many of whom have been shipping so many amazing and creative things while he's spent a decade making a Sokoban game.
> If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable
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.
I would put The Witness somewhere very high on the list of most impressive games of all time. This is despite it being the only first person game to ever give me motion sickness (a common experience -- the crosshair and adjustable FOV that were added via an update helped a little but not completely), me not generally having the patience for this type of puzzle game, and not even playing it all the way to the end.
There's a pivotal moment where (assuming you find it at all, which isn't a given) your entire perception of the game world flips around, and walking back through environments you've already explored you're now perceiving them in a completely new way. The closest thing from fiction I can think of is the big reveal in Fight Club, in that it puts the entire plot in new light, except in The Witness the flip is basically unrelated to any of the "content" of the game. Very very impressively done.
It's weird that people seem to really have latched on to some off-the-cuff remarks Blow made on stream about not being an atheist (even though he also called out the false dichotomy between naive atheism and literal interpretation of Christianity). Blow has been open about his experiences with meditation practice and its influence on his game design, and I think it shows. I'm not personally a huge fan of the type of games he makes, but the thing he seems to be aiming for in his use of the medium are interesting enough that I'm definitely going to pay attention.
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.
I wish I could have played it, but it made me so violently sick. Only a few games ever have, but none that badly. The other one was Blue Prince which was a tragedy.
Witness for me is one of the best puzzle games ever. If you are into that genre it is very hard to dislike it by any measure. But of course, puzzles might not be your cup of tea.
The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.
The Witness would have been better if it was half as long definitely, but the problem was not that it was long, it was that it didn't have enough interesting content to fill the time. The puzzles are not mechanically interesting enough to enjoy repeating to the level the game forces you to and the variations are explored so slowly it's just tedious.
I think Blow achieved what he wanted, which I guess makes it a good game in a sense but also it wasn't an experience I enjoyed or can easily recommend to others.
For all that is holy, please don't read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.
Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
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.
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.
There is one puzzle piece that you can't reach early in the game; to get it you have to bring a later piece back to the puzzle, put it in its place, then jump on the platform that is drawn on the puzzle piece.
But most people just give up in frustration trying to reach the piece because the game hasn't given you enough information to know you need come back for it later.
Braid also has the stars which are so well hidden that I can’t imagine anyone finding them without a walkthrough (though some people obviously did in order to make the walkthroughs).
The Witness is different, it really does teach you everything you need to 100% it. I cheated on the ship puzzle but it’s totally possible to figure out.
Interesting read. As an indie puzzle dev (shameless plug: https://thinky.gg), I find the biggest leap happens when a system’s rules are rich enough that solving becomes about understanding the space and recombining elements, not memorizing solutions. Games with extensible grids and turn mechanics reward that kind of play and creation much better than static collections of challenges
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.
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.
It's the gaming version of Galaxy Quest: a parody that is not only great when it stands by itself, but is satirical in a way that shows they are genuinely big fans of the source material.
(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.)
> Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever
This is so fascinating to me, because when I really get a piece of creative art, like I thought I did with both Braid and The Witness, I usually feel like I get some insight and empathy with the person who created it. Yet every time I read or hear from Jonathan Blow ... I do not feel that. So, I guess I've been challenged by art again, hooray!
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.
> I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles.
"All other titles" would be just Braid, no?
I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a "narrative".
I enjoyed the Witness to a degree.
* spoiler *
I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!
That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
Interesting. Being in that world was deeply captivating for me. Every time I've played that game I've experienced a jolt of creative drive.
Sounds like you'll really enjoy the Looker then
They say The Looker is made for two kinds of people: if you loved The Witness, you'll love The Looker, and if you hated The Witness, you'll love The Looker.
It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles.
> I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that.
If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed.
That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...
I'll give The Looker a shot. I usually pick-up "some puzzle thing" around Christmas time.
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
> I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun
All the more reason to try the Looker!
I ragequit the Looker when it spawned an apple in the snake game inside my snake.
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.
Huh, featuring "Escape Artist" by Zoe Keating, I wonderful choice. I forgot about that.
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.
I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;)
But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.
The writing of Braid wasn't fantastic imo. But the game really spoke for itself.
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.
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
I guess the idea is that Blow has a built-in audience and is appealing to them. "1400 puzzles from the maker of Braid/Witness? Wow!"
Agree, surprisingly weak trailer considering how good the game is likely to be.
I think there’s way less people willing to work with him in 2025 than when the witness was in development
When I saw the trailer in my YouTube feed I immediately thought it was an ad for those trash mobile games. Watching it didn’t really change my opinion either. I don’t actually want that to come across in a disparaging way - but it was just the vibes it gave off.
In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...
I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics.
He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]
Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...
>Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing
He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.
I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
The core idea of the witness wasn't novel either. The novelty was how far they went with it.
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together
Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
To each their own. I found the Witness to be excruciatingly monotonous, forced and, ultimately, boring.
I enjoyed the Witness for a while but I bounced off it pretty hard in the Mountain. It wasn’t until I watched a let’s play on YouTube that I learned there was a film room, a hidden cave complex under the mountain, a time trial, and other optional secrets. I can absolutely understand a certain type of gamer liking this but for me Talos Principle (both 1 and 2) is peak puzzle genre.
That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.
What did you think of the puzzles?
I found them quite boring since they are all repetitions on the same theme - just drawing lines on a square. It could have been a mobile game. The world doesn't feel connected to the puzzles, and the exploration aspect of it could have been a completely separate game. It feels like two games glued together, which is IMO not a good design.
It's also not a game that's very demanding from a technical performance perspective, and really has very limited numbers of active entities / animations, so why should I care about his opinions on game architecture or anything else?
Monotonous. More of the same. I mean, I can appreciate the creativity behind squeezing every drop from the concept, but I saw no fun in solving them.
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
Oh, man. Yes, that’s the one. I had no idea he’d died. :/
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
The Puzzle Boy / Kwirk series of games is Sokoban-based, but has 3 different mechanics on top of that: turnstiles, pits (that can be filled by blocks), and blocks larger than 1x1. One of the things I love about it is that, each mechanic is interesting on its own, and each combination of mechanics results in levels with very different feels. Lots of puzzles with a bunch of mechanics try to throw tons of them into each level, and each level ends up feeling very samey. But judicious use of combinations can lead to a lot of interesting variety.
Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together.
> I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.
Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
He quite literally has designed puzzles live on stream, yet you conclude he hasn't.
We don’t know that, AFAICT (after reading the Ars article and the Bluesky post). Some of the puzzles are probably reused, and other new ones using the same mechanics may have been written. I’m not sure why you’d so confidently state “Blow didn’t design these puzzles at all”… do you have something against him personally?
Because he occasionally dabbled in COVID trutherism, whatever that means… These bsky people are insufferable.
https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qyfe7b7...
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:
> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.
Here the post after just for a full picture
> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
I left a link to the exact post I'm referring to with the whole thread available for context.
And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump.
I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.
>because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable.
Yes, but we're here to talk about Jonathan Blow and his new game.
You can argue his politics are relevant. Your opinion on Bluesky, not so much.
I think you're projecting your own biases here.
They "can't help" make the conversation about Trump because they have a public image to maintain.
If your image and following are on BSky, then it's not an echo chamber to address the crowd in kind with its nature. That's just good branding.
Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.
I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.
It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
> I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)
It's unfortunate that The Good Scott Adams occasionally gets mixed up with The Evil Scott Adams. It's so ironic that they share a name.
Many people know who the The Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blacks are a hate group"), misogyny, conspiracy theories, anti-health-care-for-poor-people ideology, and Trump boot licking, and he obsessively infuses his MAGA religion into everything he says and does. Enough said.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Good Scott Adams, a pioneer of the Adventure game genre, who is devotedly Christian, but in the kind, uplifting, well meaning, Jimmy Carter kind of way. He's a really nice guy, who did lots of quality groundbreaking work!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)
He didn't infuse his original games in the 70's and 80's with ham fisted Christian themes or any kind of bigotry. And he did a Bible based game in 2013, but it was clearly labeled as such, not trying to sneak religion in through the back door.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scott_Adams_Adventure_...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130408091921/http://www.msadam...
He showed up to do an AMA on Hacker News:
https://madned.substack.com/p/the-further-text-adventures-of...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015
Somebody asked him about his faith, and he sincerely talked about his religion, but didn't evangelize or anything like that, he just talked about himself when asked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330732
cenazoic on Nov 24, 2021 | prev | next [–]
To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?
I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”
Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?
I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?
Thanks for taking the time today!
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | next [–]
You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking!
To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started.
To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator.
I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]
I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize. In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes.
Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)
It doesn't, but historically a lot of the reasons people consume art is due to fashion, and art is a way to put you in in and out groups.
So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.
I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.
For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
Death of the Author.
One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues...
For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
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 intentions when I can instead look at the effects and it seems to me our law and practice agree.
Notice for example that while proving attempted murder requires that you wanted the victim to die, murder does not. The fact that they are dead satisfies this aspect of the crime, you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die.
I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games.
Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked
> But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.
What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1]
[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
Do you think it is acceptable to link to a submission to a place called "SubredditDrama" filled with bad faith links to secondary reactionary sources?
Am I supposed to take this seriously?
I think we're all perfectly capable of following links and drawing our own conclusions. They are links to secondary sources mostly because Blow is notoriously unwilling to step outside of his Twitter bubble, and no one wants to link to that anymore.
I will not entertain the idea drudging through a toxic well-poisoning community that outright calls itself "SubredditDrama" for bad faith information about a person.
Frankly, if that's all one has to offer, I cannot take anyone's negative opinion on this guy seriously.
What is the good faith way to link to "(It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)"? The link exists in the post but you object to that link as a bad faith way to link. So what is a good faith way to link to this tweet?
One that links to the primary source and fully in-context as an absolute starting point.
Even your pseudoquote here gives me nothing to work with.
"It" doesn't help? Seriously? What am I supposed to make with this vague out of context snippet?
The subredditdrama post in question does in fact contain a link to the full tweet, which you objected to as bad faith. So I'm asking what is a good faith way to link to this tweet.
It could have been linked here directly instead of presented through the lens of a toxic smear community.
Presenting it through a community called "SubredditDrama" is poisoning the well[1]. I am not going to entertain that smear tactic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
I don't think "Drama" implies which side of said drama is in the right. That drama surrounds a bunch of Blow's public statements is maybe the one thing everyone can agree on
That community has no oversight for what gets posted. It's a free-for-all for anyone to gather (read: cherrypick) low quality information and present it in an overtly sensationalist way and intentionally misrepresent what they quote.
They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.
I opened it for you. It's basically the same problem with Notch or JK Rowling and it's backed up by credible sources. He said women don't like programming because of biology; he said the USA made COVID-19 in a lab and he opposed the vaccinations for it; he said Donald Trump is the best president of his life; he supports the new Facebook rule where you're allowed to post misinformation.
There's clearly something about making a successful game (or book) that just makes you completely lose touch with reality after that.
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 thinks they should play a role
Old tweet screenshots are the best I can do:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNEUIAEJgP3.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNAVAAAT8JP.jpg
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.
The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations.
This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.
Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not like girls aren't encouraged to pursue programming or science. Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby. A big part of that is probably competitiveness, but also I believe there are more loners among men. Again, this is not scientific, just personal observations, also ideas I've picked up that I can agree with. I'm not even saying that it must be mostly for biological reasons (though I assume it is), just that there is a deeper reason for fewer girls to exist in tech than just "there is patriarchy and power structures and misogynist gatekeeping and shit".
Never forget that the social neglect is not exactly healthy, and programming isn't actually that prestigious and externally rewarding, except for maybe the compensation that you can currently earn in some places.
Adding that for example in math or other sciences, we are much closer to gender parity.
Given the success of women in sports such as ultra marathoning, medicine etc I don't think it is that conclusive that women are not willing to put the hours into difficult and isolating activities.
There are a great number of studies of the social aspects of gender differences in work but I don't have a single authoritative source for you.
> Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby.
It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.
They are encouraged in surface level, performative ways. The actual communities are incredibly off-putting.
edit: speaking industry-wide. of course there are "not all men" type spaces in local communities.
For all I know, being a male programmer myself, with a significant proportion of females in all my programmer circles so far, I can attest the exact opposite. Every one of those circles has been welcoming and inclusive.
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.
Thekla currently has 10 core permanent employees. 5 of them are women, including their studio manager, creative and art Director, a programmer, and 2 additional artists.
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.
When you say, "not well support by evidence," you're either wrong, anti-science, or lying. Numerous studies absolutely show very large average differences in interests based on sex. And those carry over into occupation preferences. Just one more recent study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
Plus: Jon never said it's the "primary" factor, as you claim. He said it's a large factor, that doesn't apply at the individual level, but on average. Which is entirely factual and supported by copious amounts of research.
Just because people like you want to be offended by science, doesn't make it wrong, or controversial.
Well, no, you're the one that is "wrong, anti-science, or lying".
The very first sentence of the article you linked to says, "Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood."
So claiming that its for biological reasons is bullshit. You have no idea whether it is or not. And neither does Blow.
AFAIK there are differences established on many psychological axes that are more basic than "occupational choice", such as competitiveness, neuroticism, interest in things vs human relations, and others. I don't understand these deeply but you can research for yourself, so there is certainly no shortage of possible explanations based on those.
LOL. You're going to dismiss the study because of the justification for doing the study. Here, let me help you understand:
"not fully understood" -> "so we studied it" -> "here's what we found"
Besides that obvious point, the sentence you quoted says "not yet fully understood," not "we have no idea." Those aren't the same thing. We actually have substantial evidence pointing in a clear direction.
- The most egalitarian countries show the largest gaps, not the smallest. - Women exposed to elevated androgens in utero become more things-oriented despite being raised normally as girls. - Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles. - A 1.28 standard deviation gap in every culture that emerges in infancy and grows as societies get freer is not what socialization looks like.
You're treating "not fully understood" as "both hypotheses are equally supported."
They aren't.
The evidence overwhelmingly favors a substantial biological component. Just because you don't like the implications of that, doesn't make it false.
Seethe harder.
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)
As others have pointed out, prestigious is too strong of a word, what I actually meant was "a job a man could be seen as doing".
The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.
Related, I think math went through a similar transition.
It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.
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.
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.
I agree that the number choice was probably unintentional but you'd have to really strain to make 'naysayer' and '88' rhyme so thats probably not it.
Why give him the benefit of the doubt? He also fervently defends giving sieg heils in public
I'm thinking he changed the name when too many people had gotten aware of the connotation.
You have to twist logic pretty fucking hard to find a reason for him to put 88 in his username. He's a guy who thinks he's way more clever than he is and gets upset when it gets pointed out to him.
88 means a lot of other things, so I wouldn't think right away that he chose that suffix because of 1488 specifically.
But we live in a world where the least charitable interpretation of anything comes first, so shrug
> though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall
Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
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.
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 to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.
The therm "fascist" is definitely being thrown around like it was nothing, for the most unnewsworthy opinions or statements. There are definitely people who call anyone fascist who would dare to claim that there might be differences between the sexes on average for example. Doing so probably has a fascist element itself (not accepting different opinions). It's also unreasonable, and let me say _ridiculous_, to even doubt that there are certain differences. To be clear, it's of course not right to make any prescriptions what any specific member of a sex should or could do -- but that's a completely different thing.
"There are differences between men and women" isn't a fascist-coded statement because of the statement itself - it's obviously a true statement no matter what you believe. It's fascist-coded. This statement is almost exclusively said by fascists, for reasons that have not much to do with the statement itself.
Why is that? IMO it's because fascist slogans always tend to drift away from their actual meaning, towards things that are socially acceptable to say.
Back in Hitler's time, Hitler didn't give speeches about "Let's kill all the Jews" - he'd rather give speeches about "Let's clean up Germany" even though he clearly wanted to kill all the Jews. When Hitler says "Let's clean up Germany" and the crowd goes wild, you know they're going wild because they're wild about the idea of killing the Jews, not because they're wild about the idea of mopping the floor. At least I assume you would know that now, with the benefit of hindsight. You'd have to be living under a rock not to. And that's not a euphemism for "Let's kill all the Jews" specifically. It's a general euphemism for all the bad things he wanted to do with all the people. It's not like there's one euphemism for "Let's kill the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's gas the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's kill the gays". It's more like all the euphemisms point to all of the underlying true thoughts, all at once. One loose region of semantic space points to another loose region of semantic space.
You can see how Hitler could have started out saying what he actually meant, but to avoid scrutiny he'd drift towards more innocuous words, but anyone who's been following his whole campaign would know what was meant. It's a bit like Cockney rhyming slang - the pointer drifts until it has no surface-level relation to the pointee, but just because it's not surface-level obvious, doesn't mean it's unknowable (as people who pretend not to recognize the statements often claim).
And if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm following politics, and my friend says "I support cleaning up Germany" I'm going to do a double-take. I'm going to suspect he's not talking about mopping the floor and picking up litter. Though, if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm ignoring politics, I might reasonably assume that he is talking about those things and get quite confused why my other friend thinks he's a fascist.
In modern fascist dialogue, "men and women have differences" is a pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women belong in the kitchen", which itself is pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women should do what men tell them". You can see how this came about because saying "women should do what men tell them" would be unpopular, then fascists justified it with logic like "well women are biologically submissive and men are biologically dominant" and it over time it got watered down to stuff like "men are biologically different from women"
> Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.
From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was, but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. Consider yourself lucky.
> Fascism has a very clear definition.
First of all, that isn't true. Secondly, even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché. That doesn't work in the long run, you'll just get ignored. As a result, you can pat yourself on the back for calling out fascism while all the behaviors and actions that you believe to be fascist are mainstreamed and affecting people's lives. If I was you, I'd be more worried about criticizing those behaviors and actions on their merits (or lack thereof), rather than trying to tie them to some textbook definition fascism and dismissing them wholesale.
> From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was
I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK.
> but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
Again, I doubt the slaves would agree with you.
> Consider yourself lucky.
That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?
> First of all, that isn't true.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
Seems pretty clear to me.
> You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché.
Of course I’m not, I barely use the word. Pay attention to the person you’re replying to. What you’re doing is putting me in a box of other people you’ve seen online and making a bunch of wrong assumptions. You’re not engaging with the arguments, you’re fighting against a straw man in your imagination.
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK.
That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotten the death penalty.
Christianity forbade enslaving Christians, so we just killed our criminals for the past thousand years, but before Christianity we practiced slavery as punishment of crime everywhere as people thought that was better than killing them.
That is complete nonsense. Where did you get that from? You really think most slaves were criminals? What culture did that ever happen (apart from modern USA).
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you.
I sincerely doubt a vegan would agree that eating meat is OK, but as a society, we agree that eating meat is OK. It might not be OK tomorrow, it might not be OK by some moral standard, but that's besides my point.
> That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?
It means fighting for abolition then was a much tougher fight than the fight you have today.
> Of course I’m not, I barely use the word.
I may have misinterpreted your position to the effect of "look in the textbook, Trump is a fascist by definition". Indeed, I have seen "other people online" argue to that effect, and they weren't made of straw. If that's not the case, I apologize, but the point stands even if you're not the kind of person it should be aimed at.
> From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was, but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. Consider yourself lucky.
...do you not also consider yourself lucky about this? Weird phrasing.
What's the point comparing the sympathy to that of Mussolini or Hitler but qualifying it as not a minority position? Those two had even greater domestic support.
It seems that the "covid trutherism" or "spreading covid misinformation" claim is unjustified. Here's Blow's original tweet:
> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?
Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.
2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.
3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.
4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.
Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.
Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.
Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.
Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.
More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
> because he criticizes the Chinese government
I think you are taking a very charitable view here - the tweet immediately before the one you quote is clearly talking about the US vaccine mandate (not China).
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 into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
>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.
I am not missing their point at all, you are missing mine.
>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.
The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.
I am not an expert on Notch's slide into craziness, but I'd argue that the episode you mention it might not be the start. His start was as a "anti-SJW" game developer which got him hated and vilified by his former fans.
I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.
>an expert on Notch's slide into craziness
I am not an expert either, if that episode occurred later than I remember, it could have been as you say.
> he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong
Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".
I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.
> Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum?
I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.
I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances.
I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually.
Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever.
I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.
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 reality is not only a problem of the right
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?
That's an extremely biased presentation of things on both sides.
I tried to summarise what I understand from the two ideologies. Would you share in what way that's biased?
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?
My apologies, not trying to fight here, and I acknowledge you've been more balanced and nuanced in other comments.
Too bad nobody's falling for your lies.
Remember that for these types of people, deporting illegal immigrants is fascist. Any enforcement of immigration law or protecting the border is fascist. The idea of the United States being a sovereign nation is fascist.
By extension, anyone who believes these things is a fascist or a nazi. And that gives them the moral rationale to be ok with wanting them imprisoned or k*lled.
> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.
He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.
1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...
That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is much closer to fascism. I don't like throwing that term but just to return it.
It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.
> there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that
That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.
I quote:
> Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.
The latter part being argued with a post where he merely opines that the sexes have different interests.
“who also” means “in addition to”, it doesn’t mean the points follow from each other.
The quote does not support your point.
Don't be silly, it's brought up as a support clause that is also lacking any factual evidence.
They're reading the statement correctly, imo.
It might be the _logically_ correct interpretation that these are separate things. Now let's talk about rhetorics. Why are two unrelated, heavy accusations combined in a single sentence? Then consider that the added accusation (misogynist) doesn't hold water even on a logical level (let alone the bad faith involved here), it is a crass misreading of the evidence that was brought up for it.
Why are you so hung up on scrutinising Blow’s words to defend him, but then take the critic’s words with a broad general brush to dismiss them?
You even decry the lack of factual evidence in the critic’s case, but for some reason said nothing about Blow doing the same first.
That’s what looks silly to me. You’re not treating them the same.
Not scrutinizing Blow's words. One must be extremely careful when calling anyone fascist or similar labels. The burden of proof is on the accuser, not on the accused. It's obviously right to demand precision from the accuser, and to interpret whatever the accused said in good faith.
> One must be extremely careful when calling anyone fascist or similar labels.
Which I’m not doing.
That is a claim I neither made nor defended, I merely pointed the asker to the information they requested in the article to let them decide for themselves.
I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.
> He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion) (...)
I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.
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 take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.
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.
That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is.
John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.
I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
Braid didn't start the indie boom, Garry's mod did
Soulja Boy never made any videos about Garry's Mod
This is kind of a joke and I know he was mostly poking fun at Braid but this does speak to how mainstream indie games got in that first wave that hit XBLA.
Cave Story before that even
To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out.
Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.
I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.
Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.
But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?
Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.
Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.
But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
> Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.
E.g. Casey and Blow often criticise the Visual Studio debugger. It's slow, has quite limited functionality. And it progressively gets worse over time (e.g. it can no longer update watched values at the same speed as you step through the program).
Do they both have to write a debugger to demonstrate how bad it is?
No. Other people do it, single-handedly. See RAD Debugger (https://github.com/EpicGamesExt/raddebugger) and RemedyBG (https://remedybg.handmade.network). Relevant Casey rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U
And the same is true for a lot of other software.
You don't have to write some software to criticise how bad it is. E.g. I cannot but make fun of Discord for implementing "we will intentionally kill our app if it consumes 4GB of memory and are very good at prioritising fixing memory issues seeing a whopping 5% improvement for p95 of users": https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1pej7l7/restart...
Doesn't mean I have to write Discord to criticise it. All I need is an understanding of rather basic performance and of general engineering practices.
And also, you've probably failed to even understand what they are criticising/saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315616
What the hell language was Muratori teaching with that he doesn't have a sort?
Even C provides a halfway useful comparison sort in the box† and they're so cheap they don't even supply the O(1) growable array type
† It's named qsort, but despite the name it might not just be Hoare's "Quicksort". However it also won't be somebody's half-remembered bubble sort.
He's using C++ as closely to C as possible.
Part of the purpose of the series of Handmade Hero is to build a game from the ground up with no dependencies. So I don't think he's bringing in stdlib
So he could use that, but goal is to be someone who doesn't necessarily need to do that.
Is he writing assembly for his syscalls too, or is it like, "no stdlib, except for real annoying parts"
Handmade Hero teaches depth-first development. I'm not sure who it benefits
Did Casey ever finish the video series?
He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.
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 definition and usage.' Doubt anyone will take my considerations seriously.
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?
I had a larger rant written, but this is the only part that had any value:
Yes, one can argue that lack of produces results does not give big plusses towards their work processes, but it does not necessarily negate the value of the concepts that they preach. The value of a thing is not only defined by who is spouting it, one must evaluate the argument on it's own merits, not by evaluating of the people yelling about it.
There are plenty of concepts in this world that I cannot make work, that does not mean that the concepts are bad. It only means that the failure reflects on me and my in-capabilities.
And this might be something that you are not noticing: You are making claims about programming practices indirectly by stating that THEIR practices are not worth considering due to lack of shipping anything.
It's not really the same. Casey is suggesting people that don't spend 10 years crafting everything from scratch are somehow "lesser than." The user you're replying to is pointing out that Casey has set a completely arbitrary rule for game quality that conveniently leaves out his inability to ship something, and that's funny.
We're not saying games taking longer than a few years are failures, we're saying good games can encompass both approaches. But Casey, and his followers, are doing purity tests to feel good about themselves.
And this is assuming the games they ship are even good or noticeable to the user. I don't much care for Braid or The Witness, and I don't want my favorite dev studios to suddenly write everything from scratch every time. I would have a lot less fun things to play.
it is literally just not ridiculous
If you mean Computer, Enhance!'s Performance Aware Programming series, it's ongoing, but the pace is slower than about 1.5years ago. Given how good it is, and how fastidious and comprehensive Casey is, I imagine it doesn't really pay for itself, even with an impressive subscriber count.
I mean the Handmade hero game
Website says it's on hiatus after 667 episodes
another POV is, business IT projects fail at a higher rate than video games do! the people who post about "shipping" are projecting: "at least my garbage is delivered frequently, which is key to being employed, not key to creating meaning."
If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.
I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.
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.
Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them.
Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“
Jai is a real thing that others are using. I wouldn’t say Jon is an ideas guy. He executes.
Who is using it today?
edit: Oh so others are not using it...
He wrote this whole game in it. Apart from that, a couple dozen or hundreds of beta-testers. Not sure whether the language ever gets released, maybe he's too worried about having to maintain it and not being able to change it anymore.
I'm using it
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
One, but it was something like three years late:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...
Was it rebuilt in Jai?
These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.
The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.
Untrue, there is a game (however it's not very good): http://cleancoder.com/space-war
I truly despise the damage those books did to the SWE as a whole.
I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.
What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything.
Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.
I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/).
Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.
Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.
I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making.
That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)
> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
>> claiming they were all garbage
its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.
Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.
And then made a whole game in his own language.
Blow did not in fact prove that all alternatives were garbage.
And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?
Probably a nuanced point in what's the purpose for espousing the virtues of performance if you don't have the output to show it is worth it?
If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago?
Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?
More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
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 procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them?
What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
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 thing, and never use any other language than system languages, that advice is myopic for most devs. However, I don't really see them arguing for that, at least not entirely.
From following their teaching for a while, they mostly preech about the following things which I agree with, even when talking about higher-level languages, technologies.
- Get the clowns out of the car: Don't make things needlessly expensive. Write simple procedural code that maps cleanly to what the hardware is doing. This is essentially stating OOP, large message passing, and other paradigms that abstract the problem away from the simple computations that are happening on your computer is actually adding complexity that isn't needed. This isn't about tuning your program to get the highest amount of performance, but rather, just write basic code, that is easy to follow and debug, that acts as a data-pipeline as much as possible. Using simple constructs to do the things you want, e.g. an if-statement versus inheritence for dynamic dispatch.
- Understand your problem domain, including the hardware, so you can reason about it. Don't abstract away the hardware your code is actually running on too much where you lose vital information on how to make it work well. I've seen this many times in my professional career, where devs don't know what hardware the code will be running on, and this inevitably makes their code slower, less responsive to the user and often drives up cost. There are many times in my early career (backend engineering), that just simplifying the code, designing the code so it works well for the hardware we expect, greatly lowered cost. The hardware is the platform and it shouldn't be ignored. Similarly, limitations that are imposed by your solution should be documented and understood. If you don't expect a TPS greater than some value, write that down, check for it, profile and make sure you know what your specturm of hardware can handle, and how much software utilization of that hardware you're getting.
- Focus on writing code, and don't get bogged down my fad methodologies (TDD, OPP, etc). Writing simple code, understanding the problem more deeply as you write, and not placing artifical constraints on yourself.
Now each of these points can be debated, but their harder to argue against IMO then the strawmany idea of them proposing that you must optimize as much as possible. And they argue that you will actually be more productive this way, and produce better software.
FWIW, you may have some datapoints showing that they do propose what I called a strawmany version of their ideas, but I have seen them advocating for the above points more so than anything else.
---
I do want to add, for Jon Blow, I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past, and had no problem with their output in terms of gameplay or performance. From his talk about civilization ending relating to game dev, he's more concern that if no one tries to develop without an engine, we as a civilization will lose that ability.
Aha! I think I know my contention with this advice now. Who can actually disagree with this? Like I'm saying yes to everything, no one I know would say no to this. Never had a coworker say aloud: "I want to write code to make things worse."
These are the platitudes of our industry that no one disagrees with. Like you said, this is what Blow + Muratori teachings can be distilled into. But there is something worse it also assumes, coming from such people.
Both Blow + Muratori have extremely privilege dev careers that a good ~80% us will never achieve: they have autonomy. The rest of us are merely serfs in someone's fiefdom. Blow has his fief, Muratori his. They can control their fiefs but not the majority of us devs. We don't have autonomy in the direction of the company, we don't control the budgets, we don't even control who we interview or hire.
Assuming that this onus of organizational standards has to be placed on someone with no authority to dictate it isn't just. Also as someone who has consumed content from these two for about a good 8ish years as their videos pop into my feed: I've never see them advocate for workers to be empowered to make their environments better. They mostly just trash on devs that have no authority.
With that mindset I need to seriously decouple myself from these people. Plenty of other devs advocate for the same things in our craft while also advocating for better rights as workers.
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.
> I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past
He's also said quite openly that if you're only starting, it's fine if you reach for a ready-made engine. It's that you should try and understand how things and systems work as you progress.
Fact of the matter is that code quality is a pretty small part of whether a game is good or not. It can be notable when it's good and it can sink a game when it's really bad, but there's a huge gap in the middle where it doesn't really matter that much (especially to the player).
Some people actually have mouths to feed. Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years; that doesn't make their products "garbage".
> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years
Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something?
Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
After all both in question live off money they've made and/or are making from their (arguably) uncompromised quality work.
That is to say their uncompromised quality work has directly resulted in them being able to not release anything for close to 10 years, and practice their ideals in software they ship even if the "shipping" takes 10 years to do.
It would be more fair to say, that most people don't have the craftmanship and skill (and not the luxury) to be able to produce high quality work and software that enables them the so called "luxury".
Just to be clear, your comments are implying everyone who doesn't write everything from scratch is shipping garbage.
Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is, I would say The Witness is a very compromised game. Maybe if less focus went into the technical aspect, it could've been better.
The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.
Someone can't honestly write this unless they aren't a fan of games to begin with. Are you saying the Clair Obscur devs don't care about their craft because they used Unreal Engine?
There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch.
Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.
Jon can be really interesting to listen to, especially when he's talking about Jai. But he can also be such a fucking tool that I can never listen for long.
I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.
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
Just a comment, that often when people say things that are within your own political belief system, that people often don’t consider them political.
But what is neutral to someone is not inherently neutral to others. Or even if it’s neutral to them, it’s still a form of political expression.
I think an important distinction has to be made between personal values and opinions, and politics, both in the confines of this discussion and generally in society.
I think the lack of this distinction has led to much, and very painful and bitter online discussion, whereas people in a tribalist political mindset try to pigeonhole others based on a throwaway statement into either a friendly or enemy camp.
I broadly agree with the value that competence is more important in politeness or vibes, especially in people who build critical infrastructure - in fact it is a very very welcome property of these people that they care about things on a level that seems unreasonable to me.
This is true basically of everything critically important in life. One example is security. Everyone enjoys the privilege of using a web browser to visit any website and not have their PC compromised thanks to a variety of measures created by people who care intensely about these things.
If the crash testing on my car was done by people who sought out some amicable middle ground so as to not upset engineers who have to redo the frame of the car after a test gone horribly wrong, and accounting, who gets the bill for it, I would be sweating bullets every time I had to drive anywhere.
Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism - the idea that people must be sorted into totally disjunct groups who are the bitter enemies of each other - thankfully doesn't translate into practice. Two people might root for sports teams that are eternal rivals, one person's favorite food might be hated by the other, they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.
That's why there's a blanket ban on discussing politics in every place where people are expected to maintain amicable civility towards each other - family dinners, the workplace, gatherings with friends and acquaintances etc., with everyone usually getting antsy whenever 'politics' is brought up.
> Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism
No it's not. Politics is the negotiation between two or more people who want conflicting outcomes.
> they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.
The Republicans are led by white supremacists and they hate me for being transgender. Please stop carrying water for them. Politics matters and shouldn't be dismissed as "sports" or "tribalism"
> competence is more important in politeness or vibes,
I've been a professional programmer for about fifteen years. You could stand to be more polite.
I am not from the US. I don't have a horse in this race. Please do not imply I am somehow 'carrying water' for the Republicans, whatever might that mean. I do not have any negative feelings toward you for who you are, and I assume you're a competent individual, although I would prefer if we were having a technical debate instead of whatever this is.
I apologize if I come across as impolite, but I assure you that has not been my intention. Please understand that that there is no hidden meaning behind my posts.
In fact I enjoy the fact that Blow can talk shop about things he disagrees with (such as enterprise software with call stacks 50 levels deep).
> Please do not imply I am somehow 'carrying water' for the Republicans, whatever might that mean.
The implication was pretty clear to me, in that by reducing politics down to being things reasonable people can always disagree over, you're giving actual bad actors in the space too much credit.
Sure, on the other hand sometimes people take a with-us-or-against-us position, and trying to remain neutral means you have become political.
I don’t know which of the two happened here, maybe both, but if we’re mentioning one let’s also mention the other.
Edit: just read some tweets and I think I know which one it is XD you were underselling it.
Do people really believe that opinions on interpersonal communication count as politics now? I'm asking sincerely.
How is it not? Respect and how youre trying to influence someone to behave is exerting power. Telling someone how they should exert their power is political.
That's not what people are talking about when they're speaking of Jon Blow's politics. Most likely they are referring to his weird takes on COVID or his MAGA tweets.
>But what is neutral to someone is not inherently neutral to others.
That is 2021 mentality, and the world is over it.
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 "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.
>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.
Don’t follow him much but do you got any links discussing Blow being sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic?
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 in here demanding a smoking gun comment that somehow proves he's awful rather than telling him "sometimes it's ok to stfu" to comments like this that enable and echo chamber him.
And I say this as a fan of Braid and The Witness (at least of the first couple of layers of puzzles...as you go deeper, just like with Braid, you find more and more self-indulgent windbaggery that should have been on the cutting room floor).
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
Wow, what a nauseating subreddit. They are notorious for poisoning the well, bad faith cherrypicking to misrepresent positions, and blowing their positions completely out of proportion, all for the sole effort of smearing whoever or whatever they make a topic about.
And everything in that post are bad faith links to secondary reactionary sources.
I don't really know much about Jonathan Blow or Jai or really follow it but it's astonishing to me that anyone could possibly take anything from that toxic subreddit with any sort of seriousness.
This comment is pretty much the entire discussion whittled down to its essence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275b/ove...
The second paragraph of the linked article?
The Reddit link didn’t load for some reason and the other day be didn’t include anything racist, homophobic or transphobic. What it did cover is definitely a simplistic view ignoring the cultural nuances that might lower women’s participation in stem, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as sexist.
He suggests women are biologically less capable than men in STEM. But I note you didn't include misogyny as a problematic belief.
LOL. He literally said the opposite of that you fascist fuck.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNEUIAEJgP3.jpg "Interest is not the same as ability."
It's the first MOTHERFUCKING LINE, you absolute lying cunt.
Maybe I read it wrong but I took it as him saying women are “naturally” less interested in STEM not that they are less capable in the area.
And I’d say that misogyny falls under “sexist” in the list of problematic stuff
I wonder what his take on the differences of IQ among races are. Bet it's also as "enlightening"
He gets political.. Just as an example, he claimed that it was obvious that COVID was a lab leak in 2021. This is not obvious at all if you read Michael Worobey's rigorous work instead of rely on Blow's arrogant intuitions.
I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
Most of us are grossly unqualified to provide opinions on any domain save some hyper specialized domain we invest years of effort into. I always think about that when reading comments on the Internet :)
If only the tech gurus of the internet stayed in their lanes, or if people knew better than to take their beliefs from clueless entrepreneurs who got lucky once, the world would be a much better place. Alas, tis not the one we live in.
absolutely agree on this. Expertise is essential because it means familiarity w/ the domain methodology, not because you have a certificate
The lab leak theory was always credible. Here in Canada there was a big scandal with Chinese scientists who worked for one of our labs who secretly transferred specimens from Winnipeg to Wuhan in 2019 and the subsequent police investigation went public in 2020.
Here's a good article that's basically a summary of events (as well as teaser for a book): https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/from-our-lab-to-theirs-...
(Apologies to the thread..)
Its not credible: two viral lineages emerged from the market ~1 week apart before the world knew what covid was; they differ by 2 nucleotides; mutation rates are 1e-6 per base per passage; doubling time is about half a week. A group of sick animals better explains the phylogenetics w/ these constraints. Everything points against lab leak: location, timing, and genetics.
One example is linked in the article where he expressed women are biologically less interested in tech.
I don’t know any of the context but how could hurting people’s feelings ever be relevant in the context of technical implementation of the game if that’s what we’re taking about?
He streams on Twitch and often talks about politics. He's a big Trump fan for example.
Wait what really a Trump fan? Is this the same Jonathan Blow who did a talk about Preventing the Collapse of Civilization?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1939982295936782396
> Trump was my preferred President in the last election cycle but nothing will make me hate him faster than this banana republic shit.
(replying to a post complaining on the direction of government contracts/subsidies under the Trump administration)
That particular tweet only says that he preferred Trump to Kamala which IMO is a reasonable opinion. It does not say that he likes Trump. Given the choice between a douche and a turd sandwich you pick one. Maybe post some other tweet?
He's a Trump fan. Is he stupid enough to believe Trump's illogical promises, or does he see through them and is OK with all the unconstitutional and immoral crap he's done? Either way he's political.
He explicitly endorsed JD Vance in a past stream. Buying his games directly fuels authoritarianism.
Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That's probably a good thing. I doubt he's as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He's said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.
I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
He is definitely "online". I saw him tweet about Hasan's dog which - you have to know about streaming political figures and the latest happenings at least a little bit. Maybe not addicted but he knows what is up and still has the views he has.
I wonder how people are able to stay functional while being online. I'm in 2 states. (1) Very productive and joyful. (2) Extreme dysfunctional and commenting on HN and Reddit.
He's an anti-vaxxer.
If you haven't seen much of his posts or opinions in the past five years maybe, but he's gone pretty far off the deep end recently (see: calling all men under the age of 40 supercucks). He's always been sort of a holier-than-thou asshole and that's driven him to increasingly dumb arguments.
I've seen some weird takes of his around COVID.
If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources, successful indie games wouldn't be so disproportionately Scandinavian
>If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources
Compared to the mainstream AAA game cost it's less than minimal, it's pocket change.
And it's not like somebody handed him that money, he made it creating and selling games earlier.
Ok for a decade of a senior dev, that's still like $2mil. That's in the same order of magnitude as a small AA game.
Supposedly the dev budget for the last pokémon game Z-A was only $13 million.
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 more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?
Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
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 fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
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.
Of course programs will be worse when non-programmers are in charge of programming. That doesn't mean they shouldn't but lots of indie game attempts fail because the programmer (educated or not) doesn't have a clue about when to refactor and make sure the design of the system matches the intention of the game. You can only tinker until a certain point, after that you're just creating new bugs by fixing other bugs.
ID software once was a small team and they built complex games by writing tight code which was modular and very clear. Lots of their '3d era' contemporaries failed because their engines were sloppy, complicated, buggy and slow.
A lot of core game logic is presumably Tonda's work. He's a director, not a software engineer. He came into this, many years ago, wondering if the "easy" tools to make a video game meant he could just make the video game he was imagining, and of course the answer is "Yes, but..."
Blue Prince is (an extrapolation of) that first game, but it looks and sounds like competent people worked on it, not like something slapped together by a non-engineer in a week. However while you can hire experts to make "You know, like cool jazz for a mysterious underground area" or "Art that looks thematically like it was sketched, but also feels solid enough that you could lean on it" it's very difficult for software engineers to "just" fix the software to get rid of bugs because what's a bug? Only the puzzle designer knows for sure what they intended.
[[Spoilers! Do not read if you are still playing or might play]]
Is it a bug that "Swimming Trunks" don't let you swim? No! That's a Dad Joke. They're Trunks. Large locked wooden boxes. They're in the swimming pool, and if your pool has water in it, that means they're swimming.
When I picked a time from my near future in Shelter, it didn't work, that's a bug right? Nope. The Shelter cares about game time, not real world time. Make sure you know the date in game.
OK but is it a bug that being in Clock Tower at the Sacred Hour doesn't have any effect? Um, maybe? It seems as though the software doesn't believe clocks repeat, so only the first time will actually work. Or, maybe the second does too? It's hard to say. Try again?
I need food but somehow I keep digging up keys and money. That's a bug right? Nope, probably means you have made a Contraption which changed your dig probabilities.
OK, so that's also why my Door facings are weird even though I put my Compass-based Contraption in a Cloak Room? That one's probably a bug.
Still, "If you draft it quite late" ought to mean my Music Room has the key right? Well, maybe, what did you think "Quite late" meant?
"I thought after a few hours would do it". Huh. Well, maybe. "OK, what about Rank 7?". Rank Nine would be better, but it might be enough, depends. "I still get no key, are you sure this isn't a bug?". The most likely problem is that you've done Music Room. If so the most likely key to wrongly believe you did instead is Vault, although Station is also possible. Check the other locations.
It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.
That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
I think the question is whether Cyberpunk 2077 would ever have been made under the constraints that Blow and Muratori talk about. Like, Order of the Sinking Star looks pretty impressive, but from what I can tell it's basically just a bunch of Sokoban-style games operating on a fixed grid. You don't need anywhere near as complex an engine for that as you do for a game like Cyberpunk 2077.
My impression is that the Blow/Muratori style works well if you're the only person working on a game, or part of a very limited team, which is fair enough, but it naturally limits the scope of what you can achieve.
The Witness is a 3d engine made from scratch. Not all AAA companies use Unreal or Unity.
Having a 3D engine does not a AAA make. The Witness is a beautiful looking game, but the amount of state and interactions it has to deal with is orders of magnitude less than GTA: San Andreas. It is closer to the complexity a Myst remake would have.
It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
>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.
This "not caring", from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.
> Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?
Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.
Yeah, I too was wondering about that comparison...Programming in TS is more pleasant (to me) than JS.
Still, could that be because you're more of a C++ type personality code than a JS one?x
I hate C++. It’s possibly my least favorite language. Slow compilation, awful mess of ideas scattered around, syntax soup, footguns galore. Typescript has become one of my favorite languages. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good and pragmatic. JS, on the other hand? No thanks. Static typing is something I never want to do without again.
It's easy for both C++ and Javascript to be horrible languages. Dislike for one doesn't have to result in fondness for the other.
Brendan Eich at least has the excuse for Javascript that there was a tight deadline. What's Bjarne's excuse for C++?
> 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.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
Looking at this, there's some nice features in there, I guess. Likely the major features are about what it doesn't have. https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md
A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).
Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...
I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade ago.
> 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.
> 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 something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ
I feel like a lot of people go after Jai because of what Jon Blow says about XYZ political issue. Jai seems perfectly reasonable for at least the narrow task of making games in an indie studio. The macro capabilities might be terrifying in a large enterprise, but if you're handrolling all your own code and don't have to worry about a software supply chain, who cares?
I go after Jai because I think the problems it is purported to solve are better and more readily solved with existing frameworks, libraries and engines, and I think the programming language itself is entirely too low a level for these things.
You don't need to design a specific language to implement structs of arrays, you can just... do that.
Jonathan Blow makes Jai because he wants to make Jai. It's the same reason he makes his games at all.
> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?
You can write games in C or Fortran, so why write games in C++? You can write things in C++, why make Rust? Basic worked, why make Python or Ruby?
Why does it need "features" that make it "superior"? It should be good enough that he didn't want to use C++, so he made a new thing...
This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.
Except, this complexity isn't saving time and resources. This complexity admiration culture has resulted in slower code thats harder to understand, debug and maintain too. What should be used only for small amount of time is used from get go like complex architecture and deep abstraction. Fetishizing simplicity is bad too for sure but a blip on a radar and not such a trend and far less of an issue compared to fetishizing complexity thats rampant. Not a game dev or even a gamer, I'm defending attack on simplicity not blow or muratori.
Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.
- Lower compilation times for debug builds. - Better debug messages. - A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in. - Standard input API for cross OS development. - AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax. - A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed. - The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.
>This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process.
I didn't say anything about hating working on the code, but every example of game code I've seen has been a mess, even in games that are considered well designed. So I have to disagree - the process and finished work often are separable. What are ports if not an example of that?
Not sure about the „minimal resources“. Didn‘t he come up with his own programming language for thia one? Maybe should have invested more in art.
FWIW, Sean and Alan's contribution to puzzle designs:
ref: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 and: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454
He'll also be on the Wookash Podcast today [1] (small but nice Gamedev-related podcast)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E
His podcast is really good. Its strengths are that he gets really interesting programmers and basically lets them talk.
I found the voice acting in the trailer very annoying, hope this can be turned off in the final game. Or maybe I'm just too used to the "voice" over this game is him ranting about software development, from watching his streams :D
Yes, we should have Jonathan's voice ranting about JavaScript instead.
The voices used in the trailer will not be the same as the finished game.
This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1]
[1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.
Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?
Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...
I went back to his website [1] and spent almost an hour of a boring zoom call playing Coin Counter [2]. [1] https://jacklance.github.io/games.html [2] https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac222593...
I didn't know of Jack Lance before this post. I've just been playing through enigmash and it's very clever! https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
When Lance passed, it was one of the only times when I heard Blow be actually effusive about a person and their accomplishments.
He seemed very affected by his passing. You could tell how deeply he felt the loss of such talent from the world.
Jack Lance was, based on his output in such a short time, obviously a genius.
I see many individual games (or even just standalone puzzles, even just puns!) of his and I'm genuinely envious of how clever they are.
It hurts to think about what he could have created if he was still around.
I'm always a bit baffled by this project. While it's cool that he can create hundreds of hours of content for his puzzle game, does anyone actually want to play a single puzzle game for this long? Would it not be better to make a few different, shorter, higher quality experiences?
People do the New York Times crossword every day for years..
I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be "largest puzzle game ever". I'm excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though.
One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
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, clock in at 250ish puzzles.
So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?
It's not trying to be Portal. It's a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here's a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks/rule alterations to spice things up.
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
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.
I am equal parts daunted and excited about the size of it. On one hand, of course it's a lot of time (he's said it might the average person 500 hours to complete), and I'm liable to binge. On the other, I imagine there will be some incredible depth to it, and maybe a "little and often" strategy might not be too bad (if possible). Despite adoring The Witness and Braid, I'm still not sure if I'll get this one. Would my life be richer from finishing this or a few hundred films? My money is on the latter.
Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).
Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince?
[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]]
Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End.
Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.
I cheated the Gallery. The art is by one of Tonda's big inspirations, and whereas Tonda thinks he's great I think he's terrible and should knock it off. After maybe an hour I got one answer myself, looked up the rest, continued playing. I consider two of them reasonable puzzles, one is a bit crap and the final one is the worst thing in Blue Prince which overall is an excellent game.
The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.
The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.
† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?
From the article:
> now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer
Soooo we're just gonna bounce over his noxious politics, the smoldering trainwreck that is every collaboration he's ever been a part of, or his grotesque Twitter account. Cool.
Yep. That's exactly what I'm going to do.
So true, we should also ignore Picasso and Degas for saying things we find disagreeable
It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.
That's not what arghandugh was saying at all. But I'm guessing you know that.
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...
I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.
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 didn't have to. He wanted to.
Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something.
So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.
Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html
Pretty strong comment to make given that you have most likely played 0 minutes of the game and used 0% of the underlying engine and languages.
That being said, it's a free country (sort-of). Go ahead and devote "a few weeks" to build "the same thing". We'll be patient.
the game was not the motivation to make the language
Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.
He made Chip's Challenge. He took a decade to make Chip's Challenge.
Or in one of those game engines people like to use.
> you could make this in python in few weeks
lol
I hate this kind of headline. No, Jonathan Blow did not spend the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles. A team of developers made 1,400 puzzles and Blow directed them.
This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White".
(correct me if I'm wrong)
I'm really intersted in giving this game a shot since I'm a big fan of puzzle games
personally I've never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he's comming from which is what opinions are for
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” 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 (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.
However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.
We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games.
Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language.
I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
This is a very reductive take.
Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.
How has Jai introduce ideas if it’s not even released? How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?
It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].
[0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai
*Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.
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?
Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
Jai, odin and zig's creators are all part of the handmade network, a community of programmers. You are vastly underestimating blow's reach/influence.
Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".
Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.
I've never heard of Odin or seen any projects written in it, seen a company hire for it, or seen it discussed at a PL conference. There's no stable compiler for it, and no spec. Yeah, I'm just one person, so maybe I'm just in my own bubble, but these are hobby projects with a very small communities.
> Many programmers
...how many?
> 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.
I'm confused, that's not what I said or implied?
> feedback from tens of thousands of engineers writing tens of thousands of public projects in Rust and Zig
Oh, yes, the Rust team does "market research" and interviews people to see how they use the language, where the pain points are, etc. They have talks at Rustconf about how they gather information on how the language is used. Never seen them mention Jai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0N3m8U0b2k
I've watched enough hours of his streams to know that this is NOT a reductive take. Blow is one of the most arrogant developers and game designers, and believes that nearly everyone else is an idiot.
He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).
C++ & Linux are world-changing tools, but C++ & Linux really do suck in ways that become more offensive with taste. Rust makes very different tradeoffs than ones gamedevs want.
Regardless, if arrogance drives people to make new tools then we should be grateful for that arrogance.
I think you're projecting a lot of your own complexes and insecurities.
He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that's how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).
If/when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don't cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.
Eh, I can write that comment because it's fairly easy to see this side of JBlow if you've been following his work for a while. He is so naturally abrasive about other people's work, loves shitting on things he didn't make himself, loves being the smartest guy in the room, and also is a covid is a hoax, anti-vaxxer, Trump supporter etc.
I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, and that's OK. I realised a long time ago that ego/arrogance isn't a great quality and it's far better to have a strong network of friends and supporters, and that doesn't happen if you're an arrogant prick.
And yes, he built the language (which is totally un-needed) because the "idiots" who made all the existing languages, didn't make one as good as in JBlows brain. Despite the fact that there are 1000s of games which are far better than anything JB has made written in C#, C++, Java, Rust, etc. Did Larian need to write a new programming language to make Baldurs Gate 3?
Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with. A game that is just a modern spin on Sokoban and where he paid a bunch of other game devs to use their puzzles! You could write this shit in three.js and it wouldnt look or feel any differently.
+1 to all of this. I can no longer deal seriously with Blow's ideas, programming language, or games because he can't present any idea without being highly condescending and critical of just about everyone else. I'm glad I've never had to work for or with him, because he's the type of coworker or boss that constantly makes everyone's lives miserable.
If you want to make art, you can do whatever you want.
The issue is JB has seemed to push custom engines as not simply an artistic choice but the utilitarian choice as well.
My main criticism of Blow is that he's consistently highly condescending to other games, game developers, and programmers. Many of whom have been shipping so many amazing and creative things while he's spent a decade making a Sokoban game.
> If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable
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.
The Witness was a slog, maybe he's learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.
I would put The Witness somewhere very high on the list of most impressive games of all time. This is despite it being the only first person game to ever give me motion sickness (a common experience -- the crosshair and adjustable FOV that were added via an update helped a little but not completely), me not generally having the patience for this type of puzzle game, and not even playing it all the way to the end.
There's a pivotal moment where (assuming you find it at all, which isn't a given) your entire perception of the game world flips around, and walking back through environments you've already explored you're now perceiving them in a completely new way. The closest thing from fiction I can think of is the big reveal in Fight Club, in that it puts the entire plot in new light, except in The Witness the flip is basically unrelated to any of the "content" of the game. Very very impressively done.
It's weird that people seem to really have latched on to some off-the-cuff remarks Blow made on stream about not being an atheist (even though he also called out the false dichotomy between naive atheism and literal interpretation of Christianity). Blow has been open about his experiences with meditation practice and its influence on his game design, and I think it shows. I'm not personally a huge fan of the type of games he makes, but the thing he seems to be aiming for in his use of the medium are interesting enough that I'm definitely going to pay attention.
That slog led to some of the most satisfying feelings of accomplishment for me. I love the lack of instruction in that game.
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.
I wish I could have played it, but it made me so violently sick. Only a few games ever have, but none that badly. The other one was Blue Prince which was a tragedy.
Witness for me is one of the best puzzle games ever. If you are into that genre it is very hard to dislike it by any measure. But of course, puzzles might not be your cup of tea.
I was gonna buy it for Christmas!
The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
I love the Witness, like the Portal games and hate the Talos Principle. To each their own, I guess.
The Witness would have been better if it was half as long definitely, but the problem was not that it was long, it was that it didn't have enough interesting content to fill the time. The puzzles are not mechanically interesting enough to enjoy repeating to the level the game forces you to and the variations are explored so slowly it's just tedious.
I think Blow achieved what he wanted, which I guess makes it a good game in a sense but also it wasn't an experience I enjoyed or can easily recommend to others.
I don't hate it but also it's a deeply flawed game. It walked so that Talos Principle could run.
The Talos Principle came out a few years before The Witness though.
I guess I am just entirely wrong on that front. 10 years is a long time ago :)
Good tip, thanks, clearly I'm behind more than a decade. :)
An excellent choice sir, you will have a Christmas holiday to remember.
If you haven't already, and want to scratch a puzzle game itch (sokoban style) check out Void Stranger.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/
For all that is holy, please don't read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.
Strong +1, Void Stranger is amazing and has a spiraling depth that just keeps going and going.
I hope the game will be released with the language.
IIRC he’s always said after, but I hope so too.
Weird that the post above this one in the front page has “Braid” in its title and it’s not about Blow’s famous game.
Okay, but are the puzzles fun?
Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
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.
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.
There is one puzzle piece that you can't reach early in the game; to get it you have to bring a later piece back to the puzzle, put it in its place, then jump on the platform that is drawn on the puzzle piece. But most people just give up in frustration trying to reach the piece because the game hasn't given you enough information to know you need come back for it later.
Braid also has the stars which are so well hidden that I can’t imagine anyone finding them without a walkthrough (though some people obviously did in order to make the walkthroughs).
The Witness is different, it really does teach you everything you need to 100% it. I cheated on the ship puzzle but it’s totally possible to figure out.
So he spent 10 years making a pseudo-3D version of Sokoban with 2010 era graphics?
I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.
If you want to do X, "build a programming language first then use it to do X" is a tried and true way to never do X.
Interesting read. As an indie puzzle dev (shameless plug: https://thinky.gg), I find the biggest leap happens when a system’s rules are rich enough that solving becomes about understanding the space and recombining elements, not memorizing solutions. Games with extensible grids and turn mechanics reward that kind of play and creation much better than static collections of challenges
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.
spoilers