alt Hacker NewsBlow's game design philosophy seems to be mostly about repeating variations of the same idea as many times as possible regardless of whether those variations are actually that fun or interesting.
In theory I should love this, I'll happily play repetitive games like Tetris for hours. The way he does it though just feels so boring because he doesn't do it in a way that makes you feel like you're learning anything until the very end and the bits in the middle are just the same idea with some gimmick that isn't that interesting.
I'm not spending 450 hours smashing my head into a wall before I get to the good bit.
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It is the opposite: he wants the variations to be different and interesting. There are no repetitive puzzles in The Witness or Braid. There are themes, but each puzzle is unique.
Game Helpin' Squad took the piss out of Jonathan Blow's tedious, sanctimonious approach to game design with this parody of Braid called "Time Travel Understander":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI
The fictional creator, "Jimothy Lasic", has supposedly "said repeatedly that if you can't figure out what you're doing in the game you're just not thinking in the right way."
The joke skewers the same self-important sermonizing running from Braid to Order of the Sinking Star: endure my tedium, absorb my philosophy, and if you aren't enlightened, you're thinking wrong.
It's everything the MAGA/Gamergate crowd screams about when a game acknowledges women or LGBTQ+ people exist: preachy, ideological, more interested in lecturing its audience than entertaining it. Apparently "keep politics out of games" makes an exception for a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump supporter assigning hundreds of hours of philosophical homework.
That's what makes the review's discussion of Blow's Trump support relevant: once you present your games as lessons in how to think, your own judgment becomes fair game. You're asking players to trust that adopting your way of thinking will reward their patience. The Game Helpin' Squad parody punches back up at a designer who punches down at his own players' intelligence by assuming that any failure in that relationship must be theirs.
This review follows that question of trust into the contradiction between the new game's celebration of collaboration across differences and the developers whose work it draws on distancing themselves from the project over Blow's pro-MAGA politics. If we're supposed to take the philosophy seriously, we get to question its contradictions too. "You're just not thinking in the right way" cuts both ways.
Unfortunately, Braid's rewind mechanic can't undo January 6, Trump's historical revisionism, or Blow's infamous track record of sycophantic praise for Trump, crackpot COVID-19 conspiracism, and bigoted attacks on inclusive hiring as well as his own colleagues and players. Rewriting history requires a different kind of time travel understander. Meanwhile, understanding why his own star is sinking shouldn't take 500 hours.
I remember seeing a clip of him describing Hollow Knight as "wow, I am in a different room now, cool" and saying such games weren't for him. I understand what he meant in the sense that I know he is very mechanics-focused and is far more interested in plumbing a small number those to their deepest depths, where HK has many comparatively shallow mechanics but with a rich space of interesting interactions -- generally this is what you want in a game where exploration and world building are more central.
I still found it really strange though for an indie hero to be so reductive in how he described such games, particularly when one could more easily produce similarly reductive readings of his games without even being too uncharitable