
The Prickly Genius of Jonathan Blow - prismatic
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-prickly-genius-of-jonathan-blow
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thedudemabry
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.

~~~
justifier
your review reminded me of a favourite article:

[http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/](http://tevisthompson.com/saving-
zelda/)

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

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100ideas
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...](http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/architecture-in-the-witness/)

------
PhasmaFelis
> _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.

~~~
cableshaft
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.

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krig
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.

~~~
emsy
> 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.

~~~
krig
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.

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rrauenza
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...

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jack9
> 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.

~~~
song
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..

~~~
imron
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.

~~~
SolarNet
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...](http://the-
witness.net/news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-world-editing/)

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

