Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe: Jonathan Blow, Marc Bosch[video]

This is a game Design talk that covers the relation of Game Design and mathematics. Jonathan Blow is the creator of Braid and The Witness, and Marc Bosch the creator of Miegakure (a puzzle game about exploring and understanding the fourth dimension).

Here's the quote about the talk from the Youtube summary.

> We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in general.

One of the points of their aesthetic is to make a narrow enough search space often only making one possible way to solve the search space. You begin the game with a small enough search space that it's easy to learn the rule. When you introduce a new mechanic you enlarge the search space, but your mechanic should be found out by being the only way to solve the puzzle.

It seems Jonathon Blow and Marc like to introduce the mechanic in by their aesthetic, because the User makes the satisfying logical discovery themselves. When the search space is too large or it's just some random combination or the user stumbles upon the solution without learning why it works it makes for a bad user experience it will either be too dull or frustrating.

I watched this quite along time ago and saw it on hacker news before as well, but just shared it with a coworker looking to create puzzle games and thought I'd share here as well because it's a very interesting talk.