The Prickly Genius of Jonathan Blow | Hacker News Reader

The Prickly Genius of Jonathan Blow

newyorker.com

57 pointsprismatic19 comments

I just spent two hours hammering away at a handful of thorny puzzles in this game. I broke out a graphical editor (Monodraw, you're awesome) to prototype ideas. I took many, many photos with my phone. I drew intricate diagrams in a paper notebook. And after each puzzle was successfully checked, I was far less motivated by the audio "ding" than I was by the satisfaction of making the right connections and drawing the correct inferences from all possible sources of available information.

Mr. Blow often talks about "unethical" player motivation in game design, and rightfully draws some skepticism when he does so. But he has absolutely delivered one compelling alternative in The Witness.

Brilliant game. My initial reaction was: incredible graphics / environment, ... BUT a bit disappointed in the puzzles (first few puzzles) - "really, that's it?!". However, after taking a break and coming back to it, and discovering more of the game, and solving some of the more challenging puzzles, and seeing the world open up... WOW... I think this is turning out to be one of those amazing, memorable games you think about long after you're done with it. It is a work of art aesthetically - just love that polish, and Jon's attention to detail in those puzzles and overall gameplay, plus talent as a game designer is evident. The whole team is talented. I watched the GDC talk by the artist and follow handmade hero's blog where he talked about some of the behind the scenes testing / development. It's all linked from The Witness blog, and worth reading.

Also been drawing and taking photos. I've even got the pieces from the tetris-piece-style puzzles cut out so I can play with different configurations.

your review reminded me of a favourite article:

http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/

Thank you for this. This has spoken everything I was feeling inside since Zelda II.

I've been enjoying the game too. This quote from Jonathan's development blog more than anything in this New Yorker article has helped me understand his narrative intent with the game:

> "But if you have an eye for detail, you may notice the elements of modern construction shoring up the design of an older structure with a different purpose. The design of the new structure tells you something about what the newer guys were doing there, and how it differs from what the older guys were doing there. And if you look really closely, you can see traces of the original footprint of the site (perhaps these are very subtle, some bricks just rising above the dirt in a few places), and infer the purpose of this very old site too.

> "If you see the different civilizations that came to this island as embodying different philosophies; and you see the structures they built as representative of the way these philosophies led them to interact with the world; and you see further that when they replaced a site, it represents the rejection of some older worldview that they consider no longer useful, then perhaps you start to get some idea of the amount of backstory that can be encoded into the world, nonverbally.

- http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/architecture-in-the-witn...

> The money is—for now, at least—all gone. The Witness cost close to six million dollars, vastly overshooting Blow’s original budget of eight hundred thousand dollars. When Braid’s profits ran out, he borrowed funds from a friend.

This is interesting to me. Blow's genius is clear, but that might not have been enough to finish the game properly if he didn't also know people who could just lend him a few million dollars. This is what people mean when they talk about privilege, I think--it's not an insult, just an observation of the resources available.

Six million isn't that much for game development anymore. If you're wanting to make a quality console game, even an indie game, you're most likely spending at least three or four million dollars. There's AAA console games that are eclipsing $100 million in development costs, easy.

So considering Blow had a critically acclaimed and very successful game and has a very active presence giving talks in the game developer community, it's not too surprising he knew a guy or could find a guy who would be willing to lend him a reasonable amount of money (for video game development) for his next game.

That's not so much privilege as he put in the leg work to get the reputation and networking needed to have a friend that would be willing to lend him six million.

I'm loving the game so far (playing on the PS4). It's one of the most visually stunning games I've seen in a long time. The only criticism I have of the visuals is that the game is a bit static. There's no wind, no dust, no animals... It's very much like the old puzzle games in that way. Like walking around in a painting.

The puzzle aspect, though, is in my opinion, close to perfection. The mechanic is extremely simple: Trace a line from A to B. But the way it ramps up the difficulty by introducing new variations and then combining them, and how it integrates the environment in the puzzles.. it's pretty fantastic.

One side effect of playing the game I've noticed is that my brain stays in puzzle mode afterwards, looking for patterns and trying to "solve" anything that looks remotely like a puzzle or a hint in the game.

> The puzzle aspect, though, is in my opinion, close to perfection.

I found most of the puzzles so far sudoku-esque (mainly the symbol-puzzles). You don't get the solution by structured, logical thinking, but by trying out what could work. I didn't find it very statisfying. The puzzles that are integrated in the world were good interesting but sometimes needlesly ambigious. What I really liked was how much he did with such a simple concept.

I can see how it could play like that, especially with the trivial puzzles in the beginning. I found myself more sitting and staring at puzzles and thinking until it clicked and I figured the mechanic out. But I consciously tried to avoid brute forcing it, since I knew that there was some logic there to unravel.

> The only criticism I have of the visuals is that the game is a bit static. There's no wind, no dust, no animals... It's very much like the old puzzle games in that way. Like walking around in a painting.

I had the similar feeling with "Everybody's Gone to the Rapture", although I suppose it's not as bad. The few 'things' that were more dynamic in nature, such as the wheat fields with the winds blowing through them, added so much more life to everything that I wished they'd gone for a simpler style and more interactivity instead of the admittedly beautiful static world they went with.

I suppose with both games you could argue that the static quality is an artistic choice, but then I guess I just wish there'd be more games that go for the Myst-like gameplay without being somewhat static. In the Myst series part of why it worked so well was that 1) it was kind of a new thing, and 2) the worlds look so strange that I don't expect normal things from them. On top of that the slideshow gameplay probably affected my expectations too.

Contrast that with 'Rapture', where a ball on a field is an immovable object, and many of flimsy gates and fences are more difficult to get through than the Doors of Durin...

We've been playing this as a family, my wife and I, with our kids, 7, 11, and 13. It's amazing to see how each of our brains think a bit differently -- each of us specializing in different kinds of puzzles.

We all celebrate together when we get to the end of a puzzle sequence, which has a world event happen. We try to let our youngest do the final step to put the event into action :-)

Edit: I should also add we enjoy having to play the game outside of the game. We've gotten out blocks and tetranimos from the shelf, as well as paper and pencil. We might need add a mirror to out tools...

> Although Blow, who is now forty-four, was a wunderkind programmer—one of his jobs before Braid’s launch was with I.B.M.—he chose to design each puzzle in The Witness not by algorithm but by hand, usually on graph paper...

Wat? It's not just that he "worked for IBM" but that's an literary abortion. Either there's nothing more to demonstrate his early promise, or the writer thought an editorial aside using dashes is a thing.

It's funny how mainstream media still associate working for IBM as being a "wunderkind programmer". Not really my experience at all I must say... But then the prevailing wisdom of "no-one ever gets fired for buying ibm" still rings true in a lot of places I guess..

If you look at some of his design and implementation talks on Braid, then it's quite clear that if not a "wunderkind programmer" he's still clearly very talented in this regard.

His dev blog on The Witness also has some technical articles by him that show he's quite capable. It is a custom engine after all, architected mostly by him, with a few other programmers. For example: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-w...

I love the image this article paints of his approach to programming. Somewhat (quite?) unorthodox, but from what I can tell ultimately very pragmatic.

Oh I'm not saying that Jonathan Blow is or is not a talented developer... I don't know that, haven't listened to his talks so I reserve my judgement.

I'm just commenting on the fact that Medias still see working for IBM as being a sign of talent when I don't think that's necessarily the case. I find it interesting that the perception of big corporation like IBM continue to influence the way people see employees associated with those corporations.

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