I really liked this interview more than some of the older ones because I felt like you asked great questions without rambling on for quite as long. I think you still stack a lot of questions together in a way that makes Jon struggle to figure out which one to answer, but it sort of works out because you're both on the same wavelength and he gets the overarching idea you're presenting and tries to answer it as a whole. This is a really fun show to watch so far and I'm looking forward to seeing where you take it.
Pr0nogo was less clear and focused than he would have liked to have been on account of recovering from covid, but that just means part 3 will be even better!
At 44 minutes about someone having no idea what made their game good: It reminds me of this show I was watching, a standup comedy competition, and the winner of the first round had no idea what made his punch line so funny (all I remember was that it was something cowboy-ish like "giddy up!") The whole act built up this story that made the punch line so funny, but he thought it was just the punch line alone that did it. He just kept trying and failing to use that same punch line without the setup, so it bombed every time he used it thereafter.
I personally love Batman Arkham(s), mainly because I like the satisfying reaction time combat, but the Riddler trophies to me genuinely explore the mechanics of the game to the point of "completeness" and "orthogonality" the way that Jon Blow describes in older talks. I have 100%ed all three games multiple times, and most trophies do have a new idea, or a slight variation on another trophy, and by the end you feel like you have seen everything that can be done with the gadgets in the game. It isn't Witness quality, but Arkham Knight in particular is genuinely my favourite AAA game for completing 100%.
I understand what he means by bozos and the expert industry who only talk about other people's creativity whilst they create zero. Academics, editors, publishers, critics, gatekeepers, even streamers and reactors: it's so easy to get somewhere quicker, and more shallowly, by talking about someone else's work, and that's all they do. An unknown film maker posting on youtube may remain unknown, even if they make great films, but if they react to a Harry Potter film, they may get 10,000 views within a few minutes based on people already knowing that IP.
Jonathan Blow's second appearance here gave us lots of food for thought - not the least of which was at 2:59:50 where he discussed the difference between a difficult puzzle and an interesting one, and why he prefers the latter. If you missed Jonathan's first round, you can find it here: ua-cam.com/video/rck9tiLoo8U/v-deo.html We'll see him again soon!
I cheated my way through the entire game with the aid of walkthroughs, but still really enjoyed myself, as it was full of revelatory environmental puzzles, and remarkable visual reveals which could only be seen from one location, and the more I played the more I marvelled at the intricacy of the level design. How did anyone make this? The amount of iteration and refinement and planning for everything to interlace in the way needed to support all layers of the experience was daunting. I wasn't surprised to learn it took seven years to develop. Not so keen on the audio logs. I think some of that could have been cut as audiences found some of it pretentious. There is obvious correlations to various forms of Buddhism, which is fine, if that is his preoccupation as a designer, but it would have been better if it had been more understated. It needed to be half of what was there. A bit more cohesive, so that even if you don't agree with the core motivating philosophy, you aren't irritated by its scattergun posturing.
Great conversation, glad to have Jonathan Blow back again sharing his views. I think the discussion on elites is somewhat sidetracked from the bigger issue that many game designers are including terrible elements into their games on purpose. This isn't due to a lack of skill or ability but that their goal isn't to make a work or art but rather a money making entertainment product. This seems to cause more problems in games than in other media, movies don't interrupt action scenes to show stats levelling up and books don't have loot boxes. These systems are being inserted to provide a semblance of progress at steady pace to keep the player hooked on the game but unfortunately have the effect by breaking up the gameplay and making the experience worse (assuming the game was fun in the first place). Keep making great games and don't worry too much about all the studios making stuff that will soon be forgotten.
Your point about systems that hijack player psychologies is something we plan to cover in our next meeting with Jonathan. It's something we are diametrically opposed to, and a subject that many seem to have forgotten!
The part about game critics really hits home with me. I'm a player with 30+ years of gameplay "experience" during which I have developed quite strong critic opinion of games (that I keep to myself). However I've always struggled to find: A) Game critics that have a sophisticated enough "taste" that they understand design decisions to the level being talked about here. B) Actual game designers critiquing other designer's games. If people could point me in the direction of examples of A) and B) I would be eternally grateful.
Check out Matthewmatosis, you won't regret it. He's developing his own games now so we might not see a new game critique for a while or maybe ever, but he did cover some of the most interesting games out there.
On youtube, Farland design dens and DesignOriented both have been in the industry for atleast 2 decades now. You can also look at the post mortem of various games, often uploaded on GDD by the devs who worked on the games themselves
@@mdd4296 wow, DesignOriented was exactly the kind of content I was hoping for. You made my day! (well, maybe you made my year actually given the amount of great content there is!) thanks
@@SpeedfreakUK Thank you for the suggestion, I had watched Tim Rogers in the past presenting about his game Videoball but i had no clue he was writing and producing in depth reviews. This was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
this may sound odd but i think Kenshi is a very good example of "the future of story in games". The story of kenshi is a world that does not care about the player, a brutal world that wants to beat you down, and it's the story of a player fighting back. The stories generated by something like rimworld are also worth mentioning, just being so varied and personal to every player. And something like Factorio is a great puzzle game because you constantly make your own puzzles, solve them, and you decide when they are solved. But the best part is that then game objectively measures the quality of your solution intrinsically! i agree with all his understandings of the problems really closely, and find a lot of parallel thinking. All that, despite really being unable to stand his games! it's quite funny how niche people's interests in games can be.
i think fashion in Elden Ring is one of the most important aspects. Being able to assume the costume for an NPC you like and cosplay them during invasions is a brilliant bit of interactivity. The characters are usually pretty shallow plotwise but have great designs. Through that players collaborate and build their own mythos inside the game. I don't think Elden Ring is a perfect game, frankly I think it feels unfinished in many ways, but it does a lot really well.
I suppose I'd contrast this with other games cosmetics, which are usually completely disconnected from the worldbuilding. ER gets away with a lot just because it's fantasy though.
The whole point about Soulsborne games is that they don't have a story. They seem to have a story but they actually don't. There's lore and world building, but there is no authored story with a plot. This is a conscious design decision. The 'plot' of the story is what you experience playing it through. There is no 'true story' the individual experience and interpretation is the point. You tell someone about your experience playing the game, the things you did, your failures, successes, struggles and so on, how the world makes sense to you, metaphysical thoughts etc. That's the story. Miyazaki has actually talked about how as a kid he loved to read western fantasy literature, like Eddings and so on, in English. But his English was very poor and he wasn't able to understand the text very well, so he would fill in the gaps with his own interpretations and fantasies and to him this process was more interesting than knowing the 'true'(as if that is even knowable) intention of the author.
Did I hear that wrong, you are calling Starcraft 2 a failure? What? You could argue it is such a good RTS that is single handedly destroyed the industry as every new RTS that has come out in the last decade was played for a week and then given up on as so far behind SC2.The top 10 RTS games by player base likely include SC2 and 9 SC2 arcade games.
When assessing work analytically, we feel it's quite useless to factor in popularity or financial figures. Some great games have had little discovery, and some terrible games (like SC2) have generated extreme amounts of buzz.
@@TheNoFraudsClub I can agree to an extent. Yes, COD 20xx is not the best game ever because it generated record breaking profits in the first week of sales.But when a game is the only game an entire community plays for a decade. When that community shuns and ignores every othe entry in the genre? A game is not good because it got you to purchase it or its micro trasactions, but when literally every RTS enjoyer literally spends every second of there rts time playing SC2, what other metric for "good" can we possibly use? Either we call every RTS game ever made horrible, or we call SC2 good. The problem I see with this argument is it comes without any evidence. When Blow said these games are bad, he provided us with alternative games showing why the games he thought were bad were in fact bad (for some definitions fo bad). People have tried this for RTSes, and no one wants to play the games they released. It normally takes me significantly less than 5 minutes of watching an RTS other than SC2 or AoE2 to decide I would rather just go see what the latest Winter video is. And still to an extent I agree. I have ideas on how a RTS should be made, I think the genre has a lot of untapped potential, but SC2 will remain in at least the top 5 greatest RTSes ever made, and by definition good, until anyone makes another RTS worth playing.
We recommend watching Pr0nogo's own video that touches on exactly the disconnect you appear to have with our thought process: ua-cam.com/video/X8Y71UZ4Xpg/v-deo.html But in short, if gamers as a whole recognized that the genre is full of untapped potential, they would also have to accept that every game hitherto has failed to deliver on that potential, and as a result can not be good relative to the titles of the future. When one lives in a headspace removed from the status quo, it doesn't really matter what is or isn't good here and now - what matters is what comes next. We encourage you to stay tuned for what we're bringing to the table, or check out our prototype of the definitive RTS experience made in SC1: www.fraudsclub.com/cosmonarchy-bw/
@@wisnoskij World of Warcraft is to this day the only game MMORPG community plays in any major kind of scale - does that make it a good game, or a game better than all possible alternatives, or its monetization policy any less predatory? Im pretty sure even the majority of WoW players themselves will answer "no" to all those three questions, and then carry on as normal - because there is more to popularity and addictions than "game good/bad".
@@UEDCommander According to mmo-population Final fantasy, OSRS, and Path of Exile all have higher active player counts . But even if this is not true, their are loads of alternatives competitors that do similar order of magnitude of players.
Jon's mind and opinions really shine when he's allowed to express his viewpoints in a lengthy conversation that allows nuance and many ideas to come together. I mostly knew him from short UA-cam clips of his stream, and as much as I like them, they definitely portray him as someone who he is not, which is like this super arrogant "I know everything and you people are clueless" programmer and game designer. I mean the guy clearly has strong opinions and is not afraid to say them, but at the same time, those clips always have a way of removing all of the context that surrounds his strong takes, as well as the fact that most of Jon's streams are not spent in rant mode anyway.
There are no game journalists. Those websites hire freelancers who get paid per word. Their job is to write about any topic as if they are actually experienced in it.
I believe the fulcrum of Blow's(maybe your) dissatisfaction rides on what's believable about games. I've had discussions along these lines with friends, built games to trial ideas, and then reasoned it through from a philosophy-of-truth standpoint, and basically ended up with this conclusion: What makes us satisfied about a game is whether we believe in the things it's saying; not on a "this is literal simulation" level(although for that group of people, attempts at the Holodeck do exist) but whether it coheres against our beliefs. Whatever the game is about, the game has to bend its reality around that premise and eliminate any of the contradictions it presents to present the alluring gestalt. ALL artistically successful games do this, and it even holds true in non-interactive media. Although I can except the occasional tech demo managing to make sales numbers without being a coherent experience, I have never seen a game that both sells well and that people want to talk about years later that contains huge, glaring contradictions in what it proposes to do and what it actually does. And the challenge of doing that is that at the baseline, people - of all ages and demographics, and no matter how smart they think they are - are normalized into some kind of Plato's Cave falsehood about themselves and the world. They have an attachment, and they most likely handed over money to purchase the game out of the expectation that it will *further* that attachment. And they probably don't know that that's what they did, in fact, they'd deny it was the case! And so the story in most popular games is really operating at that level, not really a story in the sense of being self-contained truth, but something that sustains their belief, of taking a simple trope like an underdog hero or a coming-of-age saga and then massaging it to fit a certain audience(e.g. the typical power fantasies of being a super soldier, badass knight, genius strategist etc.), extending it by reframing the things players are attached to as characters, game mechanics, scenarios and plotlines. All the game has to do to be good is say a lot of things that cohere with the attachment and do it at an appropriate play length, pacing and level of production. Done well, it produces a gradual on-ramp into fandom; the marketing message, the aesthetics, the scenario: "All this was made for me. This is my identity now." And attracting a fandom is plenty enough to find a commercial hit. But...the really, really powerful games are capable of doing more than just piggybacking on attachment, but also instilling novel ideas. That's the whole underlying basis of competition as a respectable activity: it's not about sustaining the idea that you're so great and they're so bad, but about learning some kind of truth about where you really stand and also where you could be. A poorly run competition where everyone cheats and the competitors get into fights over the result is one that doesn't give useful information. But when we consider puzzle games, they don't have to be inherently competitive to get that kind of "learning the truth" moment; they're more like a tutor watching over your shoulder. And games with stories can succeed at this on multiple levels because they can leverage one of the oldest tricks around - the esoteric philosophical puzzle, where the same text has multiple readings that occur as you acknowledge the contradictions presented at the surface. It's an concept that in modern times was championed by Leo Strauss, to some dispute from peers. Arthur Melzer has a good book, "Philosophy Between the Lines", make the case both for how it existed in antiquity, and where and how we might have lost this concept and what replaced it. Undertale is my prime example here. It succeeds wildly at exploring its own premise of "well, why does it matter that I kill the monsters instead of sparing them" first by guilting the player for daring to be the bad guy, then by leading them towards strong attachments with the characters through pandering aesthetics and dialogue, and then, finally, in its post-game content, subverting the idea that those characters are pure and indicating that they were hiding something from you. It's a masterpiece and I hated it for being so challenging, because at first, it didn't engage with the topic in the way I imagined(where it would become more obviously morally grey and present clear dilemmas), and then later, as I started to grasp that it was withholding things and presenting this pondering with an overly simplistic exterior, I hated the fandom, which contented itself with the belief that the characters were, in the end, fundamentally good, and the good ending is good. i.e. they got stuck in Plato's Cave and liked it. And recognizing that that was what was going on was, for me, a sort of ultimate, humbling profundity - "Not everyone made it here. They might fight me if I tried to tell them." It holds these layers of truth, like good esoteric philosophy, and it does it in this very concrete, in-your-face way, where it's not that reliant on symbolism or abstract puzzles, of saying, "here, I am art, please work hard to understand me"; it plays a lot of things for a joke and it takes advantage of all sorts of belief-sustaining tropes to deepen the idea of literal involvement in this situation, and so it comforts the mass audience while also leaving something for people who want to go further. You don't have to play all of it to get it, but playing it gets your mind thinking about it. And this relates to the criticism angle. There are not nearly as many philosophy books out there as there are inflammatory political tracts. It's easy to throw critics at the politics because they've been systematically filtered into supporting a side - any side - and presenting the rhetoric that supports that side. Politics is all about normalizing beliefs and resolving difficult things by declaring a side that wins. But it's hard to find philosophy critics who can say much more than "gee, this book sure does spend a lot of time discussing not very much." But spending a lot of time discussing not very much is itself one of the easy critiques of video games that has occurred from the beginning, with the stereotype of the slack-jawed gamer repetitively pushing buttons. It makes sense that we keep gravitating to unsophisticated, easy answers at all levels; it's still Plato's Cave all the way down. And it is also an ethical thing; what motivates the politics is the attachments, and the attachments, being crude emotions, tend to lead us into articulating very childish principles like "well, my people are so good because your people are so bad," or, "we are all equal and if that is not the case we should enforce it." Heather Marsh has some good writing about this; what she advocates for is to enable ourselves to be more autonomous and indifferent to more aspects of society - and not so inclined to take a "right" position and to define ourselves in relation to others. Her specific ideas of how to do that, maybe not quite on the mark, but it definitely got me thinking.
"People who think they're smart" .. **cough** Joseph Anderson **cough** ... I can't stand those reviewers, with their contrived tone of voice. They spend 90% of the time just writing the script for their assembly line youtube content operation
Having finished The Witness recently, I have asked myself this: the game's reason to be appears to be, among the many topics it touched, that it acts as a mirror into our own thought-process, into rationality and into our ability to make sense of the world. It's an experience, hence it has no message, no pragmatic conclusions, no evidence can be drawn from it. It appears reasonable to think games shouldn't be restricted to "fun" interactive toys. Hence, The Witness can't be judged in this regard. Its point is to ask questions, as many as it can in the realm of its own logic, and it certainly succeeds at that. But then, what's the angle according to which we can judge this game? Maybe you had a unpleasant experience, but maybe that was the goal (in part), so who are you to judge? And maybe it can't be judged, or at least it can be like any piece of art can -- very subjectively, very relatively. For all the questions it asks, it offers virtually no guidance or direction, and does this with more or less subtlety -- but it gets us into the mind of its creator. And it seems, like the many intelligent people we hear from in the game, that, in the end, whether we want it or not, it's all the same. To John, to Feynman, to Brian Moriarty, each of us has his own answer -- or has none at all. This virtual island is like an indistinct mud of dead geniuses which, to my dismay, seems to be there to prove that absolutely nothing is provable in this world, that absolutely nothing really matters even. Whatever rocks your boat. There's no answer to anything anyway. Who cares? I'm not saying this game woke up my depression (lol) but it certainly is the most nihilistic experience I've had with video games, and fascinated as I am by Johnathan's sound intellect since his beginnings with Braid, I'm not sure this is the way he intended his game to be taken. I hope you won't be scared by this comment, only it's the honest conclusion I reached when I was done with the game. I wish I could ask the man himself. Thank you for the great interview.
Care to elaborate on how you arrived at those conclusions? I'm genuinuely curious as my experience with The Witness was of bliss and beauty, not of existensial crisis.
I agree for somewhat different reasons. Everything should have telos, a purpose, and the Witness seemed to lack one... Except maybe to ask questions, but in no particular pattern. It's fine to ask why the sky is blue if you're playing with colors, or if blue means anything when someone is colorblind. But there's a reason and direction for it. Witness was throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck. For me, it was a slog I abandoned. Talos Principle, a similar game, was also a bit sloggy but I wanted to see how it ended, because there obviously was an end to it. I think Witness needed an editor. It could have been a great game but sometimes less is more. (Like many books I want to like, but can't, because the writer did not respect my time!)
1:12:00 yes! I'm often annoyed by reviews that rate small works 10/10 cause every piece is perfect and rate a large work 9/10 cause one piece wasn't. That being said it's kinda hard not to. I find it almost impossible to rank albums which have some of the best songs ever and some duds vs albums which are all over good. Kinda why I don't like reviews and instead prefer saying "You gotta play this game - even if only for level 1" or "watch this show even if only for the first 3 episodes" Allthough that idea rarely works as we tend to not wanna start stuff unless we're fully on board
JBlow has some really interesting topics to where I can relate to this current era. Especially the part where it gets me the most that I wish that there's a way to stop the negativity but couldn't find the easier method is that there's a lot of people to where they would jump to conclusions easily or throw accusations after they couldn't handle a conversation.
I think videogames have wanted to immitate cinematic experience because there was a trend and there still is a trend of big game studios to make videogames more cinematic because that makes the game feel more epic and because of the competiton between the videogame companies to produce more hyper-realistic graphics, I assume because that also drew sales. What we ended up with, though, is The Uncanny Valley and shitty storylines because all the attention was paid on the presentation (graphics and sound) and because of the "Cargo Cult" effect.
simple, you spam the heck out of the screen pixels until you have your image, use ray traced raster with entity sphere bvh, with screen vertical/horizontal lines as the intersection planes
Partial rebuttal to the Chekhov's gun argument, if I understood it correctly. The argument is that it's noise if it is not used, and the point of gameplay is allowing the player not to use it. Mutually exclusive, right? What if the gun isn't noise, that if the player doesn't use it, then it's used in some other way. You could even make the player able to hide it, so it isn't used. I do however agree that this is just one choice, and fleshing this out with free choice to something meaningful that makes for a good and polished story is difficult with enough branching paths. This makes games a medium not very fit for it. A possible future solution could be AI, but it would have to get as good at telling stories as the best of writers.
The same could be said of films. Do you really think that actors behave like real humans? Or that the stories are really plausibile? Do you even find even one single character in the movie you can relate to in terms of phylosofical principles or intelligence that doesn't get ignored or killed in the first few scenes?
> Knowledge gap between designer and player makes knowing player reviews inappropriate Jonathan is mistaken here in thinking that it is inappropriate for him to know the review of a 100-hour player who "doesn't know the game as well as me" because he has 18000 hours because the simple fact of the matter is that, however well-meaning any man is, he has a tendency to judge himself and his works as well and good, and without a mirror, it becomes impossible to judge oneself and one's works. Furthermore, experience is not as valuable as correct theoretical knowledge. Is it entirely beyond possibility that maybe because of playtesting and whatnot, certain parts of the game were made too difficult too early because you got too good at your own game in the middle of it? No, certainly not, unless you have a perfect discipline, and considering how much of the world is today, having abandoned both reason and tradition in general, the burden of proof that you have a perfect discipline which gives you a beautiful hierarchy of certainty and unbiasedness would be on you, not us.
38:00 I'd be super interested to get his take on Bloodborne. I feel like that is the most perfectly realized world from Fromsoft. The story is both obvious (show don't tell) but convoluted. The way the world tells that story through a mostly linear experience is masterful.
Maybe art is a tool like a hammer. It just doesn’t make chairs and shelves, it makes new thoughts and emotions. Hammer Inc doesn’t care how I use my hammer as long as it is not to hurt people. Why should we get upset if our art produces thoughts and emotions we didn’t intend?
Sure, but the execution of good animated movies =/= the execution of good live-action movies, and in general I would say that games tend to take more from the live-action side of things. My understanding of what he is saying is not that games can't do things movies do or can't learn from movies at all, it's that game developers often just take things that are considered good practice in film and apply them to games as if the qualities that make those things good in film will automatically translate into games, which is often not the case.
Just like the first conversation with Blow, you asked great questions and got great answers. Thank you for improving your craft. Looking forward to the next one. It's hard to distill questions down because as long as the questions were, I'd still want to hear more of the rest of the unanswered parts too. Thanks for uploading!
When Blow rambled about narratives in games I kept on thinking about Spec Ops: The Line. This game intimately understands and explores the ideas and criticisms presented here.
I'm a great admirer of Jon's work, and this is a nice interview - but i constantly get the feeling that some of the things mentioned are well thought off but not in a rigorous context. For example, yes, its hard to find 'quality' things nowadays but its also probably due to the number of 'things' having grown exponentially. So the ratio of 'nice' things to total number of 'things' becomes much smaller. (he alludes to that I think at one point, but its a crucial point). All are consequences of the age of information , the economic system, and the previously unpredictable impacts of social media and the internet on social dynamics. For example, in the old days you had to search and find, while now you have to run through (filter) a bunch of garbage. In any case, whenever one finds themselves saying that 'it was better in the olden days' should do a nostalgia check - as this information is coming only from memory and imagination, and its probably not the truth. I also think there is a tendency to generalize, which doesn't help much (e.g., academics are like this, and the people in the english departments are like that, etc etc). Our mind tries very hard to convince us that we can group people and behaviours into black and white boxes, but thats really not the case. Otherwise enjoyed the conversation, great points (e.g., on transfer between movies and games etc)
It's difficult to qualify all points when you're in an established flow of conversation - the hope is that deep thinkers will be able to read between the lines for such qualifications.
2:06:21 I feel like Jon doesn't fully appreciate the character of Barton Fink. The protagonist of that movie was an intelligent artist, but didn't have a complete understanding / respect for the lives of "ordinary" people whom he was trying to enlighten. He completely ignores the advice of John Goodman's character, who has actual experience of wrestling, because, after all, HE'S the playwright genius! (here's the clip: ua-cam.com/video/LiN26NHb4ao/v-deo.html ) It really is fitting: Jon dismissing all critics because: "I spent 18,000 hours on it! Of course I understand it and you don't!". Of course the Hollywood executives pushing for a popcorn-story aren't really right either, but there's a nugget of truth in there .
The Coens don’t really respect film directors. That’s what Hail Ceaser is about. They respect the crew more, which is fine. Many hardworking people in film who get no credit really. But they also storyboard everything and everything has to be to the script, nothing changed. Most directors only see scripts as blueprints. Also, a lot of director’s would never dream of story boarding. It goes completely against why they are making the film to begin with. Or if they use storyboards, it’s a soft cushion. They are very literate directors and I do enjoy their films but they can get boring after a while. It would be a disaster if their style was the most dominant. A lot of it is illustrated text. I feel like they are frustrated writers taking it out on film. But their films come out so perfect in how they are constructed and people admire or look up too perfection. Look at Raising Arizona. One of their most cinematic films but not many like that. Me personally, I see perfection as an enemy of cinema. I hate film in which I can see the slots that each scene fits in too.
Fantastic conversation, Blow has a great mind and you hosted in a respectable way, asking fascinating questions which I noticed you struggled with asking, but they are not easy questions to ask so I'm happy you went out of your comfort zone a little.
@@Pr0nogo I simply meant they were difficult questions to articulate. I appreciate when Hosts take their eyes off the question sheet and conjure thoughtful follow ups ad hoc, I also appreciate the difficultly in doing so. I think it’s the way blow answers questions as well, I notice a lot of hosts in response are always like “I suppose I’m asking two questions here, haha”.
35:56 If you have some foreshadowing on not a clear future event, but a possibility of action, I suppose that could be a middle point between interactivity and foreshadowing. Think of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is "forshadowed" to _possibly_ become the same as Darth Vader, but in the next movie, that choice does happen, but he chooses to fight it. So a player could see some possible decisions being foreshadowed and not plain results, I suppose.
I dont know if this was the episode that Jonathan commented (I kinda of binge listened everything) on the possibility that Massive multiplayer games could utilize some fictional astrological variation inside the world to balance powerplay, but I just remembered that the Shin Megami Tensei does exactly that but only with moon phases, they used to had a MMO but I dont remember if they explored this idea with multiple players.
I think it's the developer's responsibility to convey his intentions to the audience, sure no critic (artistic not product review) is going to have 18000 hours of experience on the witness, but if they can't get anything meaningful from 100 hours of gameplay or anything remotely close to what jon's describe as a multi volume book, then what's the point of making all the these subtleties and nuances if nobody gets them? I agree that a game's nuance shouldn't be diluted by bad critics but I still don't think it's productive to dismiss all the theories and interpretations people make about the game because they don't have (obviously) the same understanding as the developer. Elden ring probably had 4 or 5 years of development with 300+ people making it, that's a lot of man-hours, even taking into account that more developers means more dilution of the author's original intention with the game, how can jon make any constructive criticism of the game if he had something like a hundred hour of play time?
(I'm ignoring the fact that jon says elden ring's story is "basically nonsense" even though he skipped the intro cinematic, didn't hear a single npc's dialogue, and had like 10 hours of gameplay)
I've often wished an epic game, like Warcraft, would make a tv show to show the canonical story even when it's already been done in the game. Many games are so hard to understand the story from because you play it out or order or miss out on story from parts of the game you don't play for some reason.
finally , people like Yahtzee think history is SOOOOOO important in games, and usually trash on some games i LOVE , i read so many books and saw so many movies that i kinda like history in games but other things are so much more important
A good story has a lot of detail. Every amount of player choice multiplies the work that needs to be done to maintain the same amount of story detail. So player choice and story quality are opposites.
For the reviews that are positive but don't hit the mark, I often find this in games/movies/books I truly enjoy. I think comes down to: some people are able to pick up and follow the greater threads of significance to greater depth; and that communicating that depth outside of the the game/movie/book itself is futile. Only the media itself can describe the ideas it does to the degree it does (presuming it does so well). Any other articulation will run into the same adaptation issues as translating between any other medium, as mentioned earlier in this talk.
One takeaway I get is that reviewers should try to first figure out the intention of the game and what the devs were trying to accomplish before reviewing
2:08:00 I mean, there kind of is always a lot more old stuff than new stuff. Also, old stuff has been filtered trough time - as some metal gear game pointed or something
Will never understand the gamer's obsession with story and being "cinematic". Games are all about good gameplay, story might not even be there for games to be fun. Good games, at least, not the triple A garbage we have now.
Even if it worked perfectly, I don’t care to see games ape what movies or even books are capable of delivering. Perhaps I’m just jaded and burnt out on bad fiction - it’s been a very rare occasion that somebody wrote a character that I could identify with as a grown man. I’d just rather spend the limited amount of time I have to play games actually having fun.
Both in the previous talk and this talk I feel like some of the perspective on storytelling in games feels a little misguided. There seems to be this desire for what story in the videogame context is to be changed in some fundamental way for it to become better. Like you're not just talking about using the different options of the medium to aid storytelling, but almost talking about reinventing storytelling itself. I feel like that is not what's suddenly gonna make stories better and more engaging. From experiments I've seen at this, I've yet to be convinced that this is the way forward. The only game I've seen be somewhat successful at something like this was Heaven's Vault, and even that has some big shortcomings. Maybe Kentucky Route Zero would fit here too. That said, the stuff Jon said about using the medium's strengths of mood and such, I think those are great pointers for moving forward with the medium.
"Misguided" is an interesting word, considering the subject. The speakers are dissatisfied with what is currently on offer and want to see improvements and innovations. Is it not accurate to say that storytelling needs to be reinvented (at least partially) with each new medium? How would you characterize it differently?
@@TheNoFraudsClub Perhaps I didn't pick the best word. I meant in the sense that I think it's a direction of exploration that seems unlikely to wield much, given the track record of experiments so far, in my opinion. There may be more cool stuff to be mined from exploring in that space, but I think it will be restricted to very niche experiences. I doubt that a sophisticated new innovation in game storytelling would trickle down to triple A, especially as it grows increasingly risk averse. By and large I think the way to improve stories in games will involve simply better traditional writing and better standards for quality, as boring a solution as that may seem. If we can't even handle writing a regular good story, I don't think adding gimmicks will help.
Couldn’t agree more. A heavier emphasis on mastering the basics of traditional storytelling will only make game narratives stronger - though I wonder how large of a demand there actually is for it. I’d like to think good writing would advocate for itself but when games like, oh, let’s say, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Horizon Zero Dawn receive high praise for its story/characters it makes me wonder… I believe games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds, though more experimental or ‘out there,’ work because of their strong understanding of the basics. For the record, though, I adore The Witness and was really affected by how the story’s answers aren’t really in the game but, much like the puzzles, inside yourself. I felt the game’s message wasn’t easy to parse and so was dismissed as pretentious or, worse, non-existent.
@@thegammelier Judging by how it is in other media, there absolutely is *not* a demand for better quality in writing. It's just the way the world works that most people won't have the time or want to watch or read or play a lot of things, so as a result they'll have a small pool of experiences and thus low standards. I think the relatively movement of videogames critique essays is actually a good way forward. We need to devote more time to thinking about stories to learn how to judge them better.
The critique essays are a start but they can also be a danger to the craft. When something is labeled a ‘critique,’ the viewer assumes it’s with some level of expertise or more in depth than a casual review. However, a lot of essayists approach games from gameplay/design first, story second or analyze stories more from the perspective of a fan or casual consumer than with any actual expertise on how/why stories work. Joseph Anderson’s critique of Uncharted 4 comes to mind. Most of his criticisms of the story were deliberate choices by Neil Druckmann to convey a stronger, more character driven narrative rather than what would just be fun or cool. Anderson’s critique, to me, is the opposite of what a person who may be interested in writing for games should hear if they’re just starting out. I don’t mean to pick on Anderson, he’s just the example that comes to mind. I think the bad critiques on UA-cam far outweigh the good, which is a problem. Sure, you probably shouldn’t learn how to write from UA-cam videos alone but these videos will definitely affect some people’s approach to storytelling in games.
I think the fear of decline of society is a trope in itself, and there's a lot of grifters who operate specifically in that space. Some of those grifters have been some of the worst people in history. So it's a dangerous trope, IMO. I don't think Blow is doing that grift, of course. But I think he gets caught up in the fear and doesn't really talk a lot of nuance when he gets into that corner of his rants. I also think those rants do a lot to attract the type of people who want to act elitst and get the benefits of elitism without putting in the work. I think he knows what he's talking about with video games though, and to some extent with literature and art in general.
Decline of society is also dangerous. If it is genuinely occurring (to a significant degree), it would clearly be more dangerous than fearing the decline, unless you're making a more longwinded philosophical argument that fear paralyzes the ability to do anything about the issue - but then we are making observations with the express purpose of coming up with potential solutions (more on that in part 3).
@@Pr0nogo I'll watch part 3 and get back to you. I just have heard him rant about "worrying about the decline of society" in vague terms a few different times on different talks/as an aside rant while doing a programming stream, as he does here, without proposing any solutions to it. I think that's the part of this interview that was weak. I think the rest of it is quite strong. But yeah, maybe he does something more useful in part 3. He has talked about it more usefully in other talks (e.g. people losing the ability to work on historical technology and thus eventually eroding our safety to it crumbling). And no, I'm not talking about paralysis. I'm referring to there being groups of people who use the idea of fall of society to motivate the worst possible things. They thrive in that trope. I think there's reason to talk about it, but it should come with a solution instead of just staying in the fear mongering state, otherwise it will be leveraged by those grifters and would-be despots.
@@Pr0nogo I watched most of part 3 now. need to get back to work tho, and probably need to watch the 2nd half or 4th quarter more carefully. the part I watched seemed more focused and useful
I wonder if John Blow will ever write prose for his games, I feel like he has stories inside him waiting to be told, but his games aren't very successful at conveying this.
I've spent eighteen thousand hours watching jblow clips and interviews, so I'm basically a genius now.
Same, but I still code in JS
@@strawstack LOL
@@strawstack you've angered jblow
I really liked this interview more than some of the older ones because I felt like you asked great questions without rambling on for quite as long. I think you still stack a lot of questions together in a way that makes Jon struggle to figure out which one to answer, but it sort of works out because you're both on the same wavelength and he gets the overarching idea you're presenting and tries to answer it as a whole. This is a really fun show to watch so far and I'm looking forward to seeing where you take it.
Pr0nogo was less clear and focused than he would have liked to have been on account of recovering from covid, but that just means part 3 will be even better!
@@TheNoFraudsClub I agree with the commenter, imho try to make shorter, more focused questions if you can.
@@TheNoFraudsClub cringe third person 😭
At 44 minutes about someone having no idea what made their game good: It reminds me of this show I was watching, a standup comedy competition, and the winner of the first round had no idea what made his punch line so funny (all I remember was that it was something cowboy-ish like "giddy up!") The whole act built up this story that made the punch line so funny, but he thought it was just the punch line alone that did it. He just kept trying and failing to use that same punch line without the setup, so it bombed every time he used it thereafter.
What are the differents references Jonathan talk about, I noted gravity's rainbow but there are more. Can someone share it ?
He mentioned Invisible Cities (by Italo Cavino).
I personally love Batman Arkham(s), mainly because I like the satisfying reaction time combat, but the Riddler trophies to me genuinely explore the mechanics of the game to the point of "completeness" and "orthogonality" the way that Jon Blow describes in older talks. I have 100%ed all three games multiple times, and most trophies do have a new idea, or a slight variation on another trophy, and by the end you feel like you have seen everything that can be done with the gadgets in the game. It isn't Witness quality, but Arkham Knight in particular is genuinely my favourite AAA game for completing 100%.
I understand what he means by bozos and the expert industry who only talk about other people's creativity whilst they create zero. Academics, editors, publishers, critics, gatekeepers, even streamers and reactors: it's so easy to get somewhere quicker, and more shallowly, by talking about someone else's work, and that's all they do. An unknown film maker posting on youtube may remain unknown, even if they make great films, but if they react to a Harry Potter film, they may get 10,000 views within a few minutes based on people already knowing that IP.
I really appreciate that you gave Blow the space and time to speak.
Jonathan Blow's second appearance here gave us lots of food for thought - not the least of which was at 2:59:50 where he discussed the difference between a difficult puzzle and an interesting one, and why he prefers the latter.
If you missed Jonathan's first round, you can find it here: ua-cam.com/video/rck9tiLoo8U/v-deo.html
We'll see him again soon!
I cheated my way through the entire game with the aid of walkthroughs, but still really enjoyed myself, as it was full of revelatory environmental puzzles, and remarkable visual reveals which could only be seen from one location, and the more I played the more I marvelled at the intricacy of the level design. How did anyone make this? The amount of iteration and refinement and planning for everything to interlace in the way needed to support all layers of the experience was daunting. I wasn't surprised to learn it took seven years to develop. Not so keen on the audio logs. I think some of that could have been cut as audiences found some of it pretentious. There is obvious correlations to various forms of Buddhism, which is fine, if that is his preoccupation as a designer, but it would have been better if it had been more understated. It needed to be half of what was there. A bit more cohesive, so that even if you don't agree with the core motivating philosophy, you aren't irritated by its scattergun posturing.
True crafters in the world like Jonathan Blow are a diamond. So many people are after fame and wealth these days.
what a deep thinker. this is one of the best interviews at blow articulating his awesome thoughts on game design and storytelling. much appreciated
Great conversation, glad to have Jonathan Blow back again sharing his views. I think the discussion on elites is somewhat sidetracked from the bigger issue that many game designers are including terrible elements into their games on purpose. This isn't due to a lack of skill or ability but that their goal isn't to make a work or art but rather a money making entertainment product. This seems to cause more problems in games than in other media, movies don't interrupt action scenes to show stats levelling up and books don't have loot boxes. These systems are being inserted to provide a semblance of progress at steady pace to keep the player hooked on the game but unfortunately have the effect by breaking up the gameplay and making the experience worse (assuming the game was fun in the first place). Keep making great games and don't worry too much about all the studios making stuff that will soon be forgotten.
Your point about systems that hijack player psychologies is something we plan to cover in our next meeting with Jonathan. It's something we are diametrically opposed to, and a subject that many seem to have forgotten!
The part about game critics really hits home with me. I'm a player with 30+ years of gameplay "experience" during which I have developed quite strong critic opinion of games (that I keep to myself). However I've always struggled to find: A) Game critics that have a sophisticated enough "taste" that they understand design decisions to the level being talked about here. B) Actual game designers critiquing other designer's games. If people could point me in the direction of examples of A) and B) I would be eternally grateful.
Check out Matthewmatosis, you won't regret it. He's developing his own games now so we might not see a new game critique for a while or maybe ever, but he did cover some of the most interesting games out there.
On youtube, Farland design dens and DesignOriented both have been in the industry for atleast 2 decades now.
You can also look at the post mortem of various games, often uploaded on GDD by the devs who worked on the games themselves
@@mdd4296 wow, DesignOriented was exactly the kind of content I was hoping for. You made my day! (well, maybe you made my year actually given the amount of great content there is!) thanks
Tim Rogers, of ActionButton (and previously Kotaku). He does huge essay-length deep analysis of video game design.
@@SpeedfreakUK Thank you for the suggestion, I had watched Tim Rogers in the past presenting about his game Videoball but i had no clue he was writing and producing in depth reviews. This was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
I loved that you could just spend half an hour talking about one set of puzzles (and that you asked this specific question)
I'd like to hear J Blow's opinions about the game Pathologic by Ice Pick Lodge
this may sound odd but i think Kenshi is a very good example of "the future of story in games". The story of kenshi is a world that does not care about the player, a brutal world that wants to beat you down, and it's the story of a player fighting back.
The stories generated by something like rimworld are also worth mentioning, just being so varied and personal to every player.
And something like Factorio is a great puzzle game because you constantly make your own puzzles, solve them, and you decide when they are solved. But the best part is that then game objectively measures the quality of your solution intrinsically!
i agree with all his understandings of the problems really closely, and find a lot of parallel thinking. All that, despite really being unable to stand his games! it's quite funny how niche people's interests in games can be.
god what a refreshing voice....
i think fashion in Elden Ring is one of the most important aspects. Being able to assume the costume for an NPC you like and cosplay them during invasions is a brilliant bit of interactivity. The characters are usually pretty shallow plotwise but have great designs. Through that players collaborate and build their own mythos inside the game. I don't think Elden Ring is a perfect game, frankly I think it feels unfinished in many ways, but it does a lot really well.
I suppose I'd contrast this with other games cosmetics, which are usually completely disconnected from the worldbuilding. ER gets away with a lot just because it's fantasy though.
@@Eidolon108 Nice perspective. Monster Hunter tho ;D
Did I just listen to 2 people I've never heard of talk about video games for 3 hours? I don't even play video games. Nice talk gentlemen.
The whole point about Soulsborne games is that they don't have a story. They seem to have a story but they actually don't. There's lore and world building, but there is no authored story with a plot. This is a conscious design decision. The 'plot' of the story is what you experience playing it through. There is no 'true story' the individual experience and interpretation is the point. You tell someone about your experience playing the game, the things you did, your failures, successes, struggles and so on, how the world makes sense to you, metaphysical thoughts etc. That's the story.
Miyazaki has actually talked about how as a kid he loved to read western fantasy literature, like Eddings and so on, in English. But his English was very poor and he wasn't able to understand the text very well, so he would fill in the gaps with his own interpretations and fantasies and to him this process was more interesting than knowing the 'true'(as if that is even knowable) intention of the author.
I have to say, your conversations are fantastic. You have great guests and you ask engaging questions. I'm really impressed.
Glad to hear it!
Did I hear that wrong, you are calling Starcraft 2 a failure? What? You could argue it is such a good RTS that is single handedly destroyed the industry as every new RTS that has come out in the last decade was played for a week and then given up on as so far behind SC2.The top 10 RTS games by player base likely include SC2 and 9 SC2 arcade games.
When assessing work analytically, we feel it's quite useless to factor in popularity or financial figures. Some great games have had little discovery, and some terrible games (like SC2) have generated extreme amounts of buzz.
@@TheNoFraudsClub I can agree to an extent. Yes, COD 20xx is not the best game ever because it generated record breaking profits in the first week of sales.But when a game is the only game an entire community plays for a decade. When that community shuns and ignores every othe entry in the genre?
A game is not good because it got you to purchase it or its micro trasactions, but when literally every RTS enjoyer literally spends every second of there rts time playing SC2, what other metric for "good" can we possibly use? Either we call every RTS game ever made horrible, or we call SC2 good.
The problem I see with this argument is it comes without any evidence. When Blow said these games are bad, he provided us with alternative games showing why the games he thought were bad were in fact bad (for some definitions fo bad). People have tried this for RTSes, and no one wants to play the games they released. It normally takes me significantly less than 5 minutes of watching an RTS other than SC2 or AoE2 to decide I would rather just go see what the latest Winter video is.
And still to an extent I agree. I have ideas on how a RTS should be made, I think the genre has a lot of untapped potential, but SC2 will remain in at least the top 5 greatest RTSes ever made, and by definition good, until anyone makes another RTS worth playing.
We recommend watching Pr0nogo's own video that touches on exactly the disconnect you appear to have with our thought process: ua-cam.com/video/X8Y71UZ4Xpg/v-deo.html
But in short, if gamers as a whole recognized that the genre is full of untapped potential, they would also have to accept that every game hitherto has failed to deliver on that potential, and as a result can not be good relative to the titles of the future.
When one lives in a headspace removed from the status quo, it doesn't really matter what is or isn't good here and now - what matters is what comes next. We encourage you to stay tuned for what we're bringing to the table, or check out our prototype of the definitive RTS experience made in SC1: www.fraudsclub.com/cosmonarchy-bw/
@@wisnoskij
World of Warcraft is to this day the only game MMORPG community plays in any major kind of scale - does that make it a good game, or a game better than all possible alternatives, or its monetization policy any less predatory? Im pretty sure even the majority of WoW players themselves will answer "no" to all those three questions, and then carry on as normal - because there is more to popularity and addictions than "game good/bad".
@@UEDCommander According to mmo-population Final fantasy, OSRS, and Path of Exile all have higher active player counts . But even if this is not true, their are loads of alternatives competitors that do similar order of magnitude of players.
Dang a 3 hour listening. Let's go 👍.
Jon's mind and opinions really shine when he's allowed to express his viewpoints in a lengthy conversation that allows nuance and many ideas to come together. I mostly knew him from short UA-cam clips of his stream, and as much as I like them, they definitely portray him as someone who he is not, which is like this super arrogant "I know everything and you people are clueless" programmer and game designer. I mean the guy clearly has strong opinions and is not afraid to say them, but at the same time, those clips always have a way of removing all of the context that surrounds his strong takes, as well as the fact that most of Jon's streams are not spent in rant mode anyway.
A wise man, but not wise enough to move out of San Fran.
There are no game journalists. Those websites hire freelancers who get paid per word. Their job is to write about any topic as if they are actually experienced in it.
I believe the fulcrum of Blow's(maybe your) dissatisfaction rides on what's believable about games. I've had discussions along these lines with friends, built games to trial ideas, and then reasoned it through from a philosophy-of-truth standpoint, and basically ended up with this conclusion: What makes us satisfied about a game is whether we believe in the things it's saying; not on a "this is literal simulation" level(although for that group of people, attempts at the Holodeck do exist) but whether it coheres against our beliefs. Whatever the game is about, the game has to bend its reality around that premise and eliminate any of the contradictions it presents to present the alluring gestalt. ALL artistically successful games do this, and it even holds true in non-interactive media. Although I can except the occasional tech demo managing to make sales numbers without being a coherent experience, I have never seen a game that both sells well and that people want to talk about years later that contains huge, glaring contradictions in what it proposes to do and what it actually does.
And the challenge of doing that is that at the baseline, people - of all ages and demographics, and no matter how smart they think they are - are normalized into some kind of Plato's Cave falsehood about themselves and the world. They have an attachment, and they most likely handed over money to purchase the game out of the expectation that it will *further* that attachment. And they probably don't know that that's what they did, in fact, they'd deny it was the case!
And so the story in most popular games is really operating at that level, not really a story in the sense of being self-contained truth, but something that sustains their belief, of taking a simple trope like an underdog hero or a coming-of-age saga and then massaging it to fit a certain audience(e.g. the typical power fantasies of being a super soldier, badass knight, genius strategist etc.), extending it by reframing the things players are attached to as characters, game mechanics, scenarios and plotlines. All the game has to do to be good is say a lot of things that cohere with the attachment and do it at an appropriate play length, pacing and level of production. Done well, it produces a gradual on-ramp into fandom; the marketing message, the aesthetics, the scenario: "All this was made for me. This is my identity now." And attracting a fandom is plenty enough to find a commercial hit.
But...the really, really powerful games are capable of doing more than just piggybacking on attachment, but also instilling novel ideas. That's the whole underlying basis of competition as a respectable activity: it's not about sustaining the idea that you're so great and they're so bad, but about learning some kind of truth about where you really stand and also where you could be. A poorly run competition where everyone cheats and the competitors get into fights over the result is one that doesn't give useful information. But when we consider puzzle games, they don't have to be inherently competitive to get that kind of "learning the truth" moment; they're more like a tutor watching over your shoulder. And games with stories can succeed at this on multiple levels because they can leverage one of the oldest tricks around - the esoteric philosophical puzzle, where the same text has multiple readings that occur as you acknowledge the contradictions presented at the surface. It's an concept that in modern times was championed by Leo Strauss, to some dispute from peers. Arthur Melzer has a good book, "Philosophy Between the Lines", make the case both for how it existed in antiquity, and where and how we might have lost this concept and what replaced it.
Undertale is my prime example here. It succeeds wildly at exploring its own premise of "well, why does it matter that I kill the monsters instead of sparing them" first by guilting the player for daring to be the bad guy, then by leading them towards strong attachments with the characters through pandering aesthetics and dialogue, and then, finally, in its post-game content, subverting the idea that those characters are pure and indicating that they were hiding something from you. It's a masterpiece and I hated it for being so challenging, because at first, it didn't engage with the topic in the way I imagined(where it would become more obviously morally grey and present clear dilemmas), and then later, as I started to grasp that it was withholding things and presenting this pondering with an overly simplistic exterior, I hated the fandom, which contented itself with the belief that the characters were, in the end, fundamentally good, and the good ending is good. i.e. they got stuck in Plato's Cave and liked it. And recognizing that that was what was going on was, for me, a sort of ultimate, humbling profundity - "Not everyone made it here. They might fight me if I tried to tell them."
It holds these layers of truth, like good esoteric philosophy, and it does it in this very concrete, in-your-face way, where it's not that reliant on symbolism or abstract puzzles, of saying, "here, I am art, please work hard to understand me"; it plays a lot of things for a joke and it takes advantage of all sorts of belief-sustaining tropes to deepen the idea of literal involvement in this situation, and so it comforts the mass audience while also leaving something for people who want to go further. You don't have to play all of it to get it, but playing it gets your mind thinking about it.
And this relates to the criticism angle. There are not nearly as many philosophy books out there as there are inflammatory political tracts. It's easy to throw critics at the politics because they've been systematically filtered into supporting a side - any side - and presenting the rhetoric that supports that side. Politics is all about normalizing beliefs and resolving difficult things by declaring a side that wins. But it's hard to find philosophy critics who can say much more than "gee, this book sure does spend a lot of time discussing not very much." But spending a lot of time discussing not very much is itself one of the easy critiques of video games that has occurred from the beginning, with the stereotype of the slack-jawed gamer repetitively pushing buttons. It makes sense that we keep gravitating to unsophisticated, easy answers at all levels; it's still Plato's Cave all the way down.
And it is also an ethical thing; what motivates the politics is the attachments, and the attachments, being crude emotions, tend to lead us into articulating very childish principles like "well, my people are so good because your people are so bad," or, "we are all equal and if that is not the case we should enforce it." Heather Marsh has some good writing about this; what she advocates for is to enable ourselves to be more autonomous and indifferent to more aspects of society - and not so inclined to take a "right" position and to define ourselves in relation to others. Her specific ideas of how to do that, maybe not quite on the mark, but it definitely got me thinking.
Can't wait for round 3. Great channel, so many good interviews!
We eagerly await the opportunity as well!
Hope more people will find your channel, you're uploading such a great content!!! Thanks again🍜🍻
36:45 regarding the conflicts of design in games: ‘the form of the building must follow its function,’ from The Fountainhead
2:23:43 he said the word!! he said the thing!
this is MUCH better interview job than the 1st JB interview :)
"People who think they're smart" .. **cough** Joseph Anderson **cough** ... I can't stand those reviewers, with their contrived tone of voice. They spend 90% of the time just writing the script for their assembly line youtube content operation
Having finished The Witness recently, I have asked myself this: the game's reason to be appears to be, among the many topics it touched, that it acts as a mirror into our own thought-process, into rationality and into our ability to make sense of the world. It's an experience, hence it has no message, no pragmatic conclusions, no evidence can be drawn from it.
It appears reasonable to think games shouldn't be restricted to "fun" interactive toys. Hence, The Witness can't be judged in this regard. Its point is to ask questions, as many as it can in the realm of its own logic, and it certainly succeeds at that. But then, what's the angle according to which we can judge this game? Maybe you had a unpleasant experience, but maybe that was the goal (in part), so who are you to judge? And maybe it can't be judged, or at least it can be like any piece of art can -- very subjectively, very relatively.
For all the questions it asks, it offers virtually no guidance or direction, and does this with more or less subtlety -- but it gets us into the mind of its creator. And it seems, like the many intelligent people we hear from in the game, that, in the end, whether we want it or not, it's all the same.
To John, to Feynman, to Brian Moriarty, each of us has his own answer -- or has none at all.
This virtual island is like an indistinct mud of dead geniuses which, to my dismay, seems to be there to prove that absolutely nothing is provable in this world, that absolutely nothing really matters even. Whatever rocks your boat. There's no answer to anything anyway. Who cares?
I'm not saying this game woke up my depression (lol) but it certainly is the most nihilistic experience I've had with video games, and fascinated as I am by Johnathan's sound intellect since his beginnings with Braid, I'm not sure this is the way he intended his game to be taken.
I hope you won't be scared by this comment, only it's the honest conclusion I reached when I was done with the game. I wish I could ask the man himself.
Thank you for the great interview.
Care to elaborate on how you arrived at those conclusions? I'm genuinuely curious as my experience with The Witness was of bliss and beauty, not of existensial crisis.
I agree for somewhat different reasons. Everything should have telos, a purpose, and the Witness seemed to lack one... Except maybe to ask questions, but in no particular pattern. It's fine to ask why the sky is blue if you're playing with colors, or if blue means anything when someone is colorblind. But there's a reason and direction for it.
Witness was throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck. For me, it was a slog I abandoned. Talos Principle, a similar game, was also a bit sloggy but I wanted to see how it ended, because there obviously was an end to it.
I think Witness needed an editor. It could have been a great game but sometimes less is more. (Like many books I want to like, but can't, because the writer did not respect my time!)
This dropped on my birthday. What a pleasant surprise!
1:12:00 yes! I'm often annoyed by reviews that rate small works 10/10 cause every piece is perfect and rate a large work 9/10 cause one piece wasn't.
That being said it's kinda hard not to.
I find it almost impossible to rank albums which have some of the best songs ever and some duds vs albums which are all over good.
Kinda why I don't like reviews and instead prefer saying "You gotta play this game - even if only for level 1" or "watch this show even if only for the first 3 episodes"
Allthough that idea rarely works as we tend to not wanna start stuff unless we're fully on board
JBlow has some really interesting topics to where I can relate to this current era.
Especially the part where it gets me the most that I wish that there's a way to stop the negativity but couldn't find the easier method is that there's a lot of people to where they would jump to conclusions easily or throw accusations after they couldn't handle a conversation.
I think videogames have wanted to immitate cinematic experience because there was a trend and there still is a trend of big game studios to make videogames more cinematic because that makes the game feel more epic and because of the competiton between the videogame companies to produce more hyper-realistic graphics, I assume because that also drew sales. What we ended up with, though, is The Uncanny Valley and shitty storylines because all the attention was paid on the presentation (graphics and sound) and because of the "Cargo Cult" effect.
simple, you spam the heck out of the screen pixels until you have your image, use ray traced raster with entity sphere bvh, with screen vertical/horizontal lines as the intersection planes
thank you i am starting out as a solo developer and hearing someone that also feels strongly towards realising ideas is deeply encouraging
How's progress going?
It was crackdown 1. There were 500 agility orbs. I was stupid. I got 499 of them. Forgive me, I was 13 lmao.
Partial rebuttal to the Chekhov's gun argument, if I understood it correctly. The argument is that it's noise if it is not used, and the point of gameplay is allowing the player not to use it. Mutually exclusive, right? What if the gun isn't noise, that if the player doesn't use it, then it's used in some other way. You could even make the player able to hide it, so it isn't used. I do however agree that this is just one choice, and fleshing this out with free choice to something meaningful that makes for a good and polished story is difficult with enough branching paths. This makes games a medium not very fit for it. A possible future solution could be AI, but it would have to get as good at telling stories as the best of writers.
The same could be said of films. Do you really think that actors behave like real humans? Or that the stories are really plausibile? Do you even find even one single character in the movie you can relate to in terms of phylosofical principles or intelligence that doesn't get ignored or killed in the first few scenes?
> Knowledge gap between designer and player makes knowing player reviews inappropriate
Jonathan is mistaken here in thinking that it is inappropriate for him to know the review of a 100-hour player who "doesn't know the game as well as me" because he has 18000 hours because the simple fact of the matter is that, however well-meaning any man is, he has a tendency to judge himself and his works as well and good, and without a mirror, it becomes impossible to judge oneself and one's works. Furthermore, experience is not as valuable as correct theoretical knowledge. Is it entirely beyond possibility that maybe because of playtesting and whatnot, certain parts of the game were made too difficult too early because you got too good at your own game in the middle of it? No, certainly not, unless you have a perfect discipline, and considering how much of the world is today, having abandoned both reason and tradition in general, the burden of proof that you have a perfect discipline which gives you a beautiful hierarchy of certainty and unbiasedness would be on you, not us.
38:00 I'd be super interested to get his take on Bloodborne. I feel like that is the most perfectly realized world from Fromsoft. The story is both obvious (show don't tell) but convoluted. The way the world tells that story through a mostly linear experience is masterful.
Maybe art is a tool like a hammer. It just doesn’t make chairs and shelves, it makes new thoughts and emotions.
Hammer Inc doesn’t care how I use my hammer as long as it is not to hurt people. Why should we get upset if our art produces thoughts and emotions we didn’t intend?
13:00 But theoretically the cut-scenes could be done well just like in an animated movie, no?
Sure, but the execution of good animated movies =/= the execution of good live-action movies, and in general I would say that games tend to take more from the live-action side of things. My understanding of what he is saying is not that games can't do things movies do or can't learn from movies at all, it's that game developers often just take things that are considered good practice in film and apply them to games as if the qualities that make those things good in film will automatically translate into games, which is often not the case.
@@andrewjhamanso, most are doing cinematography at best
Just like the first conversation with Blow, you asked great questions and got great answers. Thank you for improving your craft. Looking forward to the next one. It's hard to distill questions down because as long as the questions were, I'd still want to hear more of the rest of the unanswered parts too. Thanks for uploading!
I'm really grateful for this talk. It was incredibly interesting and inspiring.
I think @skillup really hits the middle ground between product and art review.
When Blow rambled about narratives in games I kept on thinking about Spec Ops: The Line. This game intimately understands and explores the ideas and criticisms presented here.
Go on his stream & challenge your point. Could be a valuable interaction
the line must be drawn here!
That was a great talk. Very deep thoughts from both. Thank you
I'm a great admirer of Jon's work, and this is a nice interview - but i constantly get the feeling that some of the things mentioned are well thought off but not in a rigorous context. For example, yes, its hard to find 'quality' things nowadays but its also probably due to the number of 'things' having grown exponentially. So the ratio of 'nice' things to total number of 'things' becomes much smaller. (he alludes to that I think at one point, but its a crucial point). All are consequences of the age of information , the economic system, and the previously unpredictable impacts of social media and the internet on social dynamics. For example, in the old days you had to search and find, while now you have to run through (filter) a bunch of garbage. In any case, whenever one finds themselves saying that 'it was better in the olden days' should do a nostalgia check - as this information is coming only from memory and imagination, and its probably not the truth. I also think there is a tendency to generalize, which doesn't help much (e.g., academics are like this, and the people in the english departments are like that, etc etc). Our mind tries very hard to convince us that we can group people and behaviours into black and white boxes, but thats really not the case. Otherwise enjoyed the conversation, great points (e.g., on transfer between movies and games etc)
It's difficult to qualify all points when you're in an established flow of conversation - the hope is that deep thinkers will be able to read between the lines for such qualifications.
I would definitely play Braid 2 and a the Witness 2!
The Celeste story and game synchronize: game hard challenge. Character solving (the same) hard challenge
2:06:21 I feel like Jon doesn't fully appreciate the character of Barton Fink. The protagonist of that movie was an intelligent artist, but didn't have a complete understanding / respect for the lives of "ordinary" people whom he was trying to enlighten. He completely ignores the advice of John Goodman's character, who has actual experience of wrestling, because, after all, HE'S the playwright genius!
(here's the clip: ua-cam.com/video/LiN26NHb4ao/v-deo.html )
It really is fitting: Jon dismissing all critics because: "I spent 18,000 hours on it! Of course I understand it and you don't!".
Of course the Hollywood executives pushing for a popcorn-story aren't really right either, but there's a nugget of truth in there .
The Coens don’t really respect film directors. That’s what Hail Ceaser is about. They respect the crew more, which is fine. Many hardworking people in film who get no credit really.
But they also storyboard everything and everything has to be to the script, nothing changed. Most directors only see scripts as blueprints.
Also, a lot of director’s would never dream of story boarding. It goes completely against why they are making the film to begin with. Or if they use storyboards, it’s a soft cushion.
They are very literate directors and I do enjoy their films but they can get boring after a while. It would be a disaster if their style was the most dominant. A lot of it is illustrated text. I feel like they are frustrated writers taking it out on film.
But their films come out so perfect in how they are constructed and people admire or look up too perfection. Look at Raising Arizona. One of their most cinematic films but not many like that.
Me personally, I see perfection as an enemy of cinema. I hate film in which I can see the slots that each scene fits in too.
Best game story of all time is Leisure Suit Larry
Ayo the interviewer has got some good style!
Fantastic conversation, Blow has a great mind and you hosted in a respectable way, asking fascinating questions which I noticed you struggled with asking, but they are not easy questions to ask so I'm happy you went out of your comfort zone a little.
I didn't feel uncomfortable at all, besides getting ravaged by covid at the time. If you have criticism, state it plainly so that I might improve.
@@Pr0nogo I simply meant they were difficult questions to articulate. I appreciate when Hosts take their eyes off the question sheet and conjure thoughtful follow ups ad hoc, I also appreciate the difficultly in doing so.
I think it’s the way blow answers questions as well, I notice a lot of hosts in response are always like “I suppose I’m asking two questions here, haha”.
35:56 If you have some foreshadowing on not a clear future event, but a possibility of action, I suppose that could be a middle point between interactivity and foreshadowing.
Think of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is "forshadowed" to _possibly_ become the same as Darth Vader, but in the next movie, that choice does happen, but he chooses to fight it.
So a player could see some possible decisions being foreshadowed and not plain results, I suppose.
I dont know if this was the episode that Jonathan commented (I kinda of binge listened everything) on the possibility that Massive multiplayer games could utilize some fictional astrological variation inside the world to balance powerplay, but I just remembered that the Shin Megami Tensei does exactly that but only with moon phases, they used to had a MMO but I dont remember if they explored this idea with multiple players.
I think it's the developer's responsibility to convey his intentions to the audience, sure no critic (artistic not product review) is going to have 18000 hours of experience on the witness, but if they can't get anything meaningful from 100 hours of gameplay or anything remotely close to what jon's describe as a multi volume book, then what's the point of making all the these subtleties and nuances if nobody gets them?
I agree that a game's nuance shouldn't be diluted by bad critics but I still don't think it's productive to dismiss all the theories and interpretations people make about the game because they don't have (obviously) the same understanding as the developer.
Elden ring probably had 4 or 5 years of development with 300+ people making it, that's a lot of man-hours, even taking into account that more developers means more dilution of the author's original intention with the game, how can jon make any constructive criticism of the game if he had something like a hundred hour of play time?
(I'm ignoring the fact that jon says elden ring's story is "basically nonsense" even though he skipped the intro cinematic, didn't hear a single npc's dialogue, and had like 10 hours of gameplay)
I've often wished an epic game, like Warcraft, would make a tv show to show the canonical story even when it's already been done in the game. Many games are so hard to understand the story from because you play it out or order or miss out on story from parts of the game you don't play for some reason.
finally , people like Yahtzee think history is SOOOOOO important in games, and usually trash on some games i LOVE , i read so many books and saw so many movies that i kinda like history in games but other things are so much more important
Thanks, it's interesting interview.
I would absolutely love to see a chat with yourself and Michael Broughs, one of the most interesting designers in the medium in my opinion
A good story has a lot of detail. Every amount of player choice multiplies the work that needs to be done to maintain the same amount of story detail.
So player choice and story quality are opposites.
This podcast auto played for me and i gotta say, great content guys. Earned a viewer in me
What an unfortunate looking guy. Bless his soil.
For the reviews that are positive but don't hit the mark, I often find this in games/movies/books I truly enjoy. I think comes down to: some people are able to pick up and follow the greater threads of significance to greater depth; and that communicating that depth outside of the the game/movie/book itself is futile.
Only the media itself can describe the ideas it does to the degree it does (presuming it does so well). Any other articulation will run into the same adaptation issues as translating between any other medium, as mentioned earlier in this talk.
12:55 yeah, seems kinda obvious but many forget it. Game graphic close ups are boring
One takeaway I get is that reviewers should try to first figure out the intention of the game and what the devs were trying to accomplish before reviewing
2:08:00 I mean, there kind of is always a lot more old stuff than new stuff. Also, old stuff has been filtered trough time - as some metal gear game pointed or something
the discussion around 54min sounds very similar to meaningful nonlinear resequencing
loved this, its everything ive been saying to all my friends who want more effort invested in stories in games
Great!
This is making me realize that games really are a new medium still
So is cinema. It’s only 120 years old.
@@curiositytax9360 video games are half that
Jonathan is like smart Charlie Brown if he was a developer.
Will never understand the gamer's obsession with story and being "cinematic". Games are all about good gameplay, story might not even be there for games to be fun. Good games, at least, not the triple A garbage we have now.
Where do you draw the line? Between two points of course!
I wonder if he's ever played Xenogears....
Even if it worked perfectly, I don’t care to see games ape what movies or even books are capable of delivering. Perhaps I’m just jaded and burnt out on bad fiction - it’s been a very rare occasion that somebody wrote a character that I could identify with as a grown man. I’d just rather spend the limited amount of time I have to play games actually having fun.
whoaaa great one!
Great listen and just subbed. Now I get to take a listen to your earlier videos :)
Who do you make the game for, if the experience of the players who spent "only" 100 hours is not relevant for you?
This is closely related to a topic we intend to open up in the next episode with Jon!
niiiice
Gun Ugly is a game about nothing
Both in the previous talk and this talk I feel like some of the perspective on storytelling in games feels a little misguided. There seems to be this desire for what story in the videogame context is to be changed in some fundamental way for it to become better. Like you're not just talking about using the different options of the medium to aid storytelling, but almost talking about reinventing storytelling itself. I feel like that is not what's suddenly gonna make stories better and more engaging. From experiments I've seen at this, I've yet to be convinced that this is the way forward. The only game I've seen be somewhat successful at something like this was Heaven's Vault, and even that has some big shortcomings. Maybe Kentucky Route Zero would fit here too.
That said, the stuff Jon said about using the medium's strengths of mood and such, I think those are great pointers for moving forward with the medium.
"Misguided" is an interesting word, considering the subject. The speakers are dissatisfied with what is currently on offer and want to see improvements and innovations. Is it not accurate to say that storytelling needs to be reinvented (at least partially) with each new medium? How would you characterize it differently?
@@TheNoFraudsClub Perhaps I didn't pick the best word. I meant in the sense that I think it's a direction of exploration that seems unlikely to wield much, given the track record of experiments so far, in my opinion. There may be more cool stuff to be mined from exploring in that space, but I think it will be restricted to very niche experiences. I doubt that a sophisticated new innovation in game storytelling would trickle down to triple A, especially as it grows increasingly risk averse. By and large I think the way to improve stories in games will involve simply better traditional writing and better standards for quality, as boring a solution as that may seem. If we can't even handle writing a regular good story, I don't think adding gimmicks will help.
Couldn’t agree more. A heavier emphasis on mastering the basics of traditional storytelling will only make game narratives stronger - though I wonder how large of a demand there actually is for it.
I’d like to think good writing would advocate for itself but when games like, oh, let’s say, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Horizon Zero Dawn receive high praise for its story/characters it makes me wonder…
I believe games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds, though more experimental or ‘out there,’ work because of their strong understanding of the basics.
For the record, though, I adore The Witness and was really affected by how the story’s answers aren’t really in the game but, much like the puzzles, inside yourself. I felt the game’s message wasn’t easy to parse and so was dismissed as pretentious or, worse, non-existent.
@@thegammelier Judging by how it is in other media, there absolutely is *not* a demand for better quality in writing. It's just the way the world works that most people won't have the time or want to watch or read or play a lot of things, so as a result they'll have a small pool of experiences and thus low standards.
I think the relatively movement of videogames critique essays is actually a good way forward. We need to devote more time to thinking about stories to learn how to judge them better.
The critique essays are a start but they can also be a danger to the craft. When something is labeled a ‘critique,’ the viewer assumes it’s with some level of expertise or more in depth than a casual review. However, a lot of essayists approach games from gameplay/design first, story second or analyze stories more from the perspective of a fan or casual consumer than with any actual expertise on how/why stories work.
Joseph Anderson’s critique of Uncharted 4 comes to mind. Most of his criticisms of the story were deliberate choices by Neil Druckmann to convey a stronger, more character driven narrative rather than what would just be fun or cool. Anderson’s critique, to me, is the opposite of what a person who may be interested in writing for games should hear if they’re just starting out.
I don’t mean to pick on Anderson, he’s just the example that comes to mind. I think the bad critiques on UA-cam far outweigh the good, which is a problem. Sure, you probably shouldn’t learn how to write from UA-cam videos alone but these videos will definitely affect some people’s approach to storytelling in games.
Yes, Barton Fink is indeed a good movie :)
44:36 1:52:07
first comment! (had to do it, great work man!)
Man you could floss that gap with a mattress wtf
This is like the best Blow interview ever done!
18000 hours on what ?
Beautifully brilliant all the way through.
nice talk cant wait for 3rd one
Good interview
The Last of Us had a superb story by any standard. Compared to books or movies, not just other games.
I think the fear of decline of society is a trope in itself, and there's a lot of grifters who operate specifically in that space. Some of those grifters have been some of the worst people in history. So it's a dangerous trope, IMO. I don't think Blow is doing that grift, of course. But I think he gets caught up in the fear and doesn't really talk a lot of nuance when he gets into that corner of his rants. I also think those rants do a lot to attract the type of people who want to act elitst and get the benefits of elitism without putting in the work. I think he knows what he's talking about with video games though, and to some extent with literature and art in general.
Decline of society is also dangerous. If it is genuinely occurring (to a significant degree), it would clearly be more dangerous than fearing the decline, unless you're making a more longwinded philosophical argument that fear paralyzes the ability to do anything about the issue - but then we are making observations with the express purpose of coming up with potential solutions (more on that in part 3).
@@Pr0nogo I'll watch part 3 and get back to you. I just have heard him rant about "worrying about the decline of society" in vague terms a few different times on different talks/as an aside rant while doing a programming stream, as he does here, without proposing any solutions to it. I think that's the part of this interview that was weak. I think the rest of it is quite strong. But yeah, maybe he does something more useful in part 3. He has talked about it more usefully in other talks (e.g. people losing the ability to work on historical technology and thus eventually eroding our safety to it crumbling).
And no, I'm not talking about paralysis. I'm referring to there being groups of people who use the idea of fall of society to motivate the worst possible things. They thrive in that trope. I think there's reason to talk about it, but it should come with a solution instead of just staying in the fear mongering state, otherwise it will be leveraged by those grifters and would-be despots.
@@Pr0nogo I watched most of part 3 now. need to get back to work tho, and probably need to watch the 2nd half or 4th quarter more carefully. the part I watched seemed more focused and useful
🤟
19:20 holy shit Blow has a high opinion of himself
I wonder if John Blow will ever write prose for his games, I feel like he has stories inside him waiting to be told, but his games aren't very successful at conveying this.