Steve

Tone Control 9: JONATHAN BLOW :o

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Does anyone recall the name of that book that Jonathan mentioned somewhere during talking about the leadup to Braid? Something about different vignettes of cities? It sounded interesting but I figure it's easier to crowdsource this than dig back through the episode.

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Einstein's Dreams I think, which is weird because I absolutely hated that book when I read it. Maybe I should give it a second look.

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Great cast. I always heard that Blow was intense and thoughtful in a quiet way, so it was great to hear that play out over an hour (and in particular to hear him talk about the trajectory of a game design career from an earlier decade).

 

Einstein's Dreams I think, which is weird because I absolutely hated that book when I read it. Maybe I should give it a second look.

 

Invisible Cities is the Italo Calvino book upon which Einstein's Dreams was based, I'm guessing lordgankoo will find what he's looking from either you or me.

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Einstein's Dreams was a huge disappointment for me as well. Invisible Cities has been sitting in my Kindle for ages now. Maybe I should finally read it.

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Very interesting to me that Jonathan Blow talks some (mild) trash about Sands of Time, a game which, in my experience, is usually only mentioned in glowing terms (other than the combat). It's worth mentioning that Sands of Time's time travel mechanic, and its continue-from-save mechanic, are both narratively justified. I think Blow's criticism of them is somewhat unfair.

 

Also—spoilers for Braid—I was really hoping Steve would confront Jonathan about the hub-world star, which I consider an almost unforgivable sin in an otherwise wonderful game.

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I thought it was a completely fair criticism that the sands being finite makes the rewind mechanic less pleasant than it could be. See for example Gunpoint for a better implementation.

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I think you're misinterpreting that if you think it's trash talk. He's talking about the pure aesthetics of the design and his aesthetic ideals are rooted math / programming. It's not even what makes a "good" game, I think he'll tell you he'd rather make something that meets is aesthetic ideals than something people think is good, or fun.

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He didn't say it was unpleasant, though. That would've been a better criticism. He said it was "bolted in" and "ugly".

From a design perspective those are equivalent.

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I'd love to listen to this but I've been trying to do a complete spoiler-blackout for The Witness.  I don't want to know anything at all even very general about the kinds of puzzles it has or what kind of stuff is on the island or the general idea of the game.  Anyone be willing to tell me how much of this episode I could safely listen to?

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They go through his college and work experiences in chronological order, so you should have not trouble figuring out when you want to stop listening.

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Man! That part about  how he came up with some of the puzzles and mechanics by programming the game itself blew my mind! I've had that experience before programming a thing/learning how some basic thing works/makes me think about what I can do with it mainly with regards to education but for whatever reason I had never thought about how that would work when making a game! It's the coolest/best feeling. Thanks Steve! (and Mr. Blow!)

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From a design perspective those are equivalent.

I disagree. But we might be equivocating. Let me explain my thought process: I would call Sands of Time's rewind mechanic "unpleasant" because in my experience, running out of sand and being kicked back to my last save was often a mildly annoying experience. But, as I mentioned above, both the rewind mechanic and the save game mechanic are actually incorporated into the game's narrative, keeping them very much in-line with the game's aesthetic. For this reason I disagree that they are "ugly". (eot, I think this addresses your argument, as well.)

 

Minor spoilers for Braid again: the reason I mentioned Braid's hub-world star is because I think it's a very similar issue. It's something that is entirely in keeping with the game's aesthetic; the possibility or impossibility of undoing mistakes is probably the central philosophical point of Braid. But from a gameplay perspective, I would call the hub-world star "unpleasant"—actually, I'd probably use stronger language. Certainly it's not "fun" to have to restart your entire game just because it won't let you take puzzle pieces apart again.

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@CustooFintel

Problem : reloads. Solution : rewind time. Execution of solution : rewind is a resource that runs out until you have to reload anyway.

The particular execution of the proposed solution doesn't actually solve the initial problem, only pushes it back one step.

This is taking a solution to a problem and only partially implementing it, thereby only partially solving the problem. I'd say that's a pretty good definition of 'bolted-on' and 'ugly' in the context of systems-design. That it happened to appeal to you (and others) aesthetically is immaterial to the specific point Blow was making.

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@CustooFintel

Problem : reloads. Solution : rewind time. Execution of solution : rewind is a resource that runs out until you have to reload anyway.

The particular execution of the proposed solution doesn't actually solve the initial problem, only pushes it back one step.

This is taking a solution to a problem and only partially implementing it, thereby only partially solving the problem. I'd say that's a pretty good definition of 'bolted-on' and 'ugly' in the context of systems-design. That it happened to appeal to you (and others) aesthetically is immaterial to the specific point Blow was making.

 

That's one way of looking at it.  Another way is to say that the problem is not reloads but frequent reloads.  If you assume that it should be possible to fail and "die" and have to reload, you're going to want to tune the difficulty so that it doesn't happen too often.  You don't want the player to spend more time watching a reloading screen than playing the game.  You want the possibility of occasional failure, but if it happens too much, the player never gets a chance to be immersed the game.

 

But now, maybe that makes the game too easy.  So how can you have high difficulty but only occasional complete failure?  In a combat-oriented game, you can do it with hit points.  In a platformer, where the danger is plummeting to your death, that doesn't work.  But the limited rewinding sand solves that problem.  It's like hit points for platforming.   Playing Sands of Time with infinite sand would be like playing a shooter with infinite health.  (Or maybe health that infinitely regenerates, even if you've dropped to zero and gotten knocked down for a moment.)   The pacing of the game is that you have to make it through a given series of challenges with the understanding that you can make a couple mistakes, but only a few.   Too many mistakes and you have to try again.  And it works great.  It's beautiful and elegant.

 

Prince of Persia (2008) tried a different strategy.  In that game, if you fall, your companion catches you and brings you back to the most recent solid ground.  So here the challenge is not to make it though a moderate series of jumps with a couple mistakes but rather to execute a short string of challenges with no mistakes.  I think it also works pretty well, and is more elegant than just saving and reloading with every mistake, but it's not quite as good as Sands of Time (and by Sands of Time, I mean The Two Thrones, which refined and surpassed everything in Sands of Time except for the characters and story).

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They go through his college and work experiences in chronological order, so you should have not trouble figuring out when you want to stop listening.

 

Thanks.

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I'd say that's a pretty good definition of 'bolted-on' and 'ugly' in the context of systems-design. That it happened to appeal to you (and others) aesthetically is immaterial to the specific point Blow was making.

This is essentially my point, though I may not have stated it very well. That Blow criticized Sands of Time's reload mechanic in the context of systems-design, with no nod towards its place in any other context (such as aesthetics), was—in my opinion—unfair. If we were to critique Braid in the same way, we might point out that its rewind mechanic sometimes fully works, and sometimes partially works, and sometimes doesn't work at all; sometimes you still have to restart a level, or even the entire game. My point being, these claims are technically accurate, but it would be unfair to simply say "Braid's rewind system is inconsistent" and then move on.

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That Blow criticized Sands of Time's reload mechanic in the context of systems-design, with no nod towards its place in any other context (such as aesthetics), was—in my opinion—unfair.

 

I guess I don't understand why you think that's unfair, or even relevant.

He wasn't discussion the merits of Sand of Time as a game. He wasn't Critiquing it. He was talking historically about how he got the idea for the rewind mechanic in Braid, that he thought you could do more with it in a systems-design sense. What part of that anecdote necessitates being 'fair' to the narrative of Sands of Time, or even having to mention it at all? What has that got to do with it?

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Regarding "all designers should be programmers", I think that it's a good idea to try to influence game designers who are starting out to learn how to code. For me personally, I find the programming knowledge that I've learned is integral to my design process.

 

However, I don't think that invalidates the skill of designers who have gained the ability to think systematically the hard way (through experience working on games in larger teams). And the flip side of the coin is that if all designers knew how to code, that might actually push the needle too far in the other direction - there might exist game design space that only gets explored because a designer's brain isn't "wired" to understand how systems work on a programming level. When I think up ideas, my mind almost always jumps straight to code feasibility, which I've thought might actually be shutting down some ideas that would be ultimately worth exploring.

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What part of that anecdote necessitates being 'fair' to the narrative of Sands of Time, or even having to mention it at all?

Nothing, really. Blow was under no obligation. Simply, Sands of Time is one of my favorite games, but it's also a bit old now and out of the public consciousness, and I didn't want the conversation to go without a word in its favor. I wasn't actually anticipating any debate.

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I thought this episode was amazing.

 

I've been listening to lots of writers talk about writing lately and Blow echoes so much of what they say about creativity. Listening to the awesome KQED Forum interview with amazing writer George Saunders (10th of December, Civilwarland in Bad Decline) and this episode they say basically the same thing: 

 
If you achieve what you set out to achieve in a short story you've failed....My work got interesting to me when I'd go in and not really know where I was supposed to go.
 - George Saunders
 
When you drop the original idea to follow something better, that's when you know you're on the right track
- Jonathan Blow

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