Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirkc | Hacker News Reader

Read up on Jonathan Blow [1], sounds like you might like his philosophy. The short of it is that he believes time is valuable and should be respected. I also love Braid, a game he made.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow#Philosophy_and_v...

View on HN

I have sort of opposite take on video games to him. To me, video games fill in the time slots when I'm too tired to pursue anything meaningful - they're just mindless entertainment, which would otherwise be spent re-watching shows or, in the pre-electronics era, reading newspapers or staring into the fire. That's the reason I've never finished Braid - I can spend all those brain cycles on my actual work or interests, not on figuring out made-up complexity. The only complex game I play is Magic: the Gathering, and I play it for the social factor and with physical cards only - it's fun meet with friend/friends once in a while and compete in a mentally challenging game. Our friendship is better for that. I don't really see what exactly I am supposed to be getting out of playing games like Braid or The Witness though.

EDIT: There's a minority of population (which is heavily overrepresented in our industry), which enjoys solving pure logical puzzles just for the sake of solving them. Just look at how much praise Factorio gets on HN. Also famously, Feynman enjoyed to figure out keylocks and ancient hieroglyphs as a past time. Puzzle games cater mainly to such audience I guess.

I flip between thought-games and mindless games, it's no different to when I want to go out and ride my bike or just watch YouTube. Different modes for different moods.

Jonathan Blow is a refreshing character, truly passionate, opinionated but I don't feel like it's at the cost of others, and his games are pure. They don't pretend they're not games, and they eschew allll the bullshit that comes with modern games. I didn't need to sign up for an account, count any Special Points, fuss with menus or anything. Boot up the game, play away.

> he believes time is valuable and should be respected

That's what he says, but not what he does. https://youtu.be/KZokQov_aH0 Haven't experienced a bigger author disconnect in gaming in the decade.

I'm not going to watch a 40 minute video to try and work out what your argument is.

You could have at least picked out some particular puzzles like the backwards-moving-cloud puzzle piece in Braid or the Eclipse Film puzzle in The Witness. Those are tiny optional side-puzzles to games which otherwise very much do not waste your time. My interpretation is they are Jon's way of critiquing completionism.

timestamp 24:16

Wow, that platform moving does seem painfully slow!

Alright, I'll concede that some platforms do seem to move needlessly slowly.

No one is going to watch a 40 minute video with no context, dude.

It's certainly wasted in a narrative sense (yeah - that real ending is really sucky.), but the puzzles & environment can be fairly pleasing. It's not a total waste, basically. But yes, that review you posted was fairly accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com