10-27-2023, 08:12 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-27-2023, 08:58 AM by Mason Hall-McCullough.)
Jonathan Blow is an indie game developer who created the games Braid and The Witness. He also presents himself as a critic and expert on the subject of game development. This post will contain spoilers for both of his games. Braid is not worth playing, but if you like puzzle games I recommend you play The Witness instead of reading this post, because spoiling certain parts of The Witness will damage your enjoyment of it. Anyway, please watch the following fun video for context:
As shown in the video, Blow is known for being sensitive to criticism and often derides critics for not understanding his games. After playing his games, I also felt like I didn't understand them, so naturally I wanted to discover what the artist was intending to communicate. After watching numerous clips of his stream and reading a few reddit threads, the conclusion I reached was "not much".
Anthony discussed in a recent video the idea that visionaries should be designing games and not craftsmen, with particular reference to Valve. Jonathan Blow is in my opinion an instructive and extreme example of a craftsman, but The Witness is still an excellent game. Blow desperately wants to be a visionary however, and seems to have a lack of self-awareness of the fact that being a talented programmer does not make him a talented storyteller.
![[Image: dljl2z.png]](https://files.catbox.moe/dljl2z.png)
Braid is a 2D platformer puzzle game with puzzles centered around time reversal. I won't talk about Braid too much because I think it's overrated and doesn't represent what Blow is capable of, but I will say that Braid's narrative is clumsily tacked on to its gameplay, and stands out as the game's weakest element. A vague story that seems like some kind of parody of gaming tropes is alluded to with weird pretentious language, displayed on signs that the player walks past.
The game reaches its climax with in a tense final level that is somewhat fun to play but has a twist that carries no narrative weight: The player was evil all along and you were through time hijinks "saving" the princess from yourself by kidnapping her. Though apparently, the princess was actually a metaphor for the invention of the nuclear bomb. The most charitable explanation I was able to find of this online was that the player's quest to beat the game represents scientific advancement, which is actually bad or deep or something because nukes exist. At best a banal observation, expressed via a horribly unwieldy analogy. After beating the final level you are taken to an endgame zone where you walk through rooms containing only cryptic messages. This area is bizarre, and really made me think some puzzle was going over my head, but it turned out there was no puzzle, aside from that some of the messages contained references to other things that Jonathan Blow wanted to be relevant to the game for some reason.
Braid's puzzle mechanics were interesting and novel, but somewhat gimmicky. I only found a minority of the puzzles fun. The game is also ugly, but it was a true indie game on a low budget so I can more easily forgive this.
![[Image: hipds8.png]](https://files.catbox.moe/hipds8.png)
The profits from Braid were invested into Blow's next project The Witness, allowing Blow to create a small game studio and hire some programmers and artists, though he still retained primary creative control. The Witness spent several years in development which resulted in a highly polished first person puzzle game. The gameplay mostly focuses around maze puzzles that appear on panels around an island that the player can explore.
The Witness has been variously criticized with technical nitpicks such as:
I think these criticisms are largely invalid and The Witness has few technical flaws. These were choices that had positive tradeoffs that the critic is usually too mindless to appreciate, particularly the lack of mobility which may be the most controversial feature. It's good that The Witness forces you to walk or run slowly across the world to reach your destination. It's immersive and rarely felt boring to me because the game is so pretty, and you can use the time to look around and notice other things in the environment you may have missed. In addition to panel puzzles and environmental puzzles there are lots of visual easter eggs that are not "solvable" but still are enjoyable to come across.
![[Image: 8iqso8.png]](https://files.catbox.moe/8iqso8.png)
The Witness brings back Blow's love of random quotes that he considers profound. There is no text in the game whatsoever aside from menus and optional subtitles, so this time the quotes are in the form of audio logs that you can find scattered around the world and listen to as you solve puzzles. You can also unlock a handful of video clips too by completing some of the harder puzzles.
One valid piece of criticism is that the audio logs and video clips are irrelevant and pointless. But even the audio logs rambling about stupid shit like Buddhism fit excellently with the gameplay experience, which is otherwise quiet with the only other sounds you hear being from the environment. You can walk around and continue solving puzzles while listening to the audio and thinking about it if you want. The content of the audio logs are basically wasted potential, much more could have been done with them, but they were still a well-executed mechanic.
The Witness hints at a story with its endings but has nothing substantial enough to be compared to Braid's tangle of prose. Blow discusses this here, giving a few copes which I think are mostly trying to excuse the fact that he's not a creative person and struggles in his attempts to tell a compelling story.
It seems as if his perfectionist disposition ends up naturally guiding him away from trying to create a narrative, instead encouraging him to play to his strengths. Choosing not to put any text in The Witness is another example, he probably settled on this outcome after a lot of experimentation rather than consciously recognizing that he struggles to write words that players will want to read. The finished product is so polished that it is easy to assume that it was constructed carefully to mimic the sublime creative vision that existed in Jonathan Blow's mind, but this was not the case at all. In fact, it evolved from nothing but the basic seed of the environmental puzzle mechanic, and many iterations fueled by sheer effort and attention to detail.
While I don't have as much to base this on aside from this presentation, Noita stands out to me as a game which had a similar design approach to The Witness. Noita's story is very simplistic and told in vague terms through the structure of the world and emerald tablet riddles. They also went through a very long development process in which the basic gameplay focus changed multiple times. All they knew at the beginning was that they wanted to make a game using powder toy mechanics. Such craftsman-led games spend years iterating on their Great Work, and if successful arrive at a final product with incredible intricacy and refinement that no top-down creative vision could ever match.
This detail-oriented approach to design allows craftsmen to create games with great gameplay, graphics and sound design that combine to make a compelling whole, but it's still fundamentally difficult to construct a narrative this way. Games that try to force narrative without a creative vision end up having a totally garbage plot/setting that no one cares about (e.g. many indie games), or may rely on cheap crutches like meta humor to create something passable (e.g. Half Life).
Blow likes to pretend The Witness has some deeper meaning about "understanding the world", but in actuality this is a very surface level theme that is easy to arrive at. Despite containing many challenging and innovative puzzles, conceptually The Witness is very simple and straightforward. He feels that critics don't understand the meaning of the game if they don't mention its theme, but they're usually just not bothering to state the obvious (critics often do misunderstand other elements of The Witness' design though). After all my attempts to see things from Blow's perspective, this doesn't seem to me like mere narcissism, I actually think he is so detail-oriented that he can't even understand what "deeper meaning" is in a more general sense. We can observe this when he plays other games. This is another video I find particularly entertaining so I have embedded it.
Could Jonathan Blow as seen here ever get anything out of a game aside from some specific observation about design details? He leaves the starting area of Elden Ring and emerges into a vast open world, and one of the first things he focuses on, possibly before he even has an opportunity to feel fully immersed in the world, is a bridge on the horizon that is not architecturally accurate. He also hired architects to design the buildings for The Witness, I forgot to mention. I love how his cynical commentary is completely valid and insightful, but is visibly preventing him from enjoying the game.
Now what we have observed so far begins to make sense. To Blow, a game's technical merit is the sum of every individual positive detail it possesses. Understanding a concept is when you arithmetically sum together your understanding of a dozen individual audio/video clips. A creative influence is when you directly quote some writing. This inability to grasp the whole is so deeply embedded in Blow's mindset that when an interviewer asks him "What is The Witness about?", he almost can't understand the question in the sense it is being asked. It's fair to characterize Blow's attitude as as pretentious, what is pretentiousness if not acting like you have important knowledge of a concept when you don't? But it seems almost like an innocent mistake here.
TL;DR: Craftsmen can design great games too, so long as they stick to what they know and avoid narratives.
As shown in the video, Blow is known for being sensitive to criticism and often derides critics for not understanding his games. After playing his games, I also felt like I didn't understand them, so naturally I wanted to discover what the artist was intending to communicate. After watching numerous clips of his stream and reading a few reddit threads, the conclusion I reached was "not much".
Anthony discussed in a recent video the idea that visionaries should be designing games and not craftsmen, with particular reference to Valve. Jonathan Blow is in my opinion an instructive and extreme example of a craftsman, but The Witness is still an excellent game. Blow desperately wants to be a visionary however, and seems to have a lack of self-awareness of the fact that being a talented programmer does not make him a talented storyteller.
*holds down right arrow key*
Braid is a 2D platformer puzzle game with puzzles centered around time reversal. I won't talk about Braid too much because I think it's overrated and doesn't represent what Blow is capable of, but I will say that Braid's narrative is clumsily tacked on to its gameplay, and stands out as the game's weakest element. A vague story that seems like some kind of parody of gaming tropes is alluded to with weird pretentious language, displayed on signs that the player walks past.
The game reaches its climax with in a tense final level that is somewhat fun to play but has a twist that carries no narrative weight: The player was evil all along and you were through time hijinks "saving" the princess from yourself by kidnapping her. Though apparently, the princess was actually a metaphor for the invention of the nuclear bomb. The most charitable explanation I was able to find of this online was that the player's quest to beat the game represents scientific advancement, which is actually bad or deep or something because nukes exist. At best a banal observation, expressed via a horribly unwieldy analogy. After beating the final level you are taken to an endgame zone where you walk through rooms containing only cryptic messages. This area is bizarre, and really made me think some puzzle was going over my head, but it turned out there was no puzzle, aside from that some of the messages contained references to other things that Jonathan Blow wanted to be relevant to the game for some reason.
Braid's puzzle mechanics were interesting and novel, but somewhat gimmicky. I only found a minority of the puzzles fun. The game is also ugly, but it was a true indie game on a low budget so I can more easily forgive this.
The profits from Braid were invested into Blow's next project The Witness, allowing Blow to create a small game studio and hire some programmers and artists, though he still retained primary creative control. The Witness spent several years in development which resulted in a highly polished first person puzzle game. The gameplay mostly focuses around maze puzzles that appear on panels around an island that the player can explore.
The Witness has been variously criticized with technical nitpicks such as:
- The player is not told anything about where to go or what to do
- Movement speed is too slow and you can't teleport or even jump, making it slow to travel across the island
- Some puzzles are too difficult or time-consuming
- The panel puzzles get repetitive
- Some puzzles need to be left alone and returned to later after you learn how to solve them
- The game does not reward the player for a true 100% completion, nor even acknowledge the game as complete
I think these criticisms are largely invalid and The Witness has few technical flaws. These were choices that had positive tradeoffs that the critic is usually too mindless to appreciate, particularly the lack of mobility which may be the most controversial feature. It's good that The Witness forces you to walk or run slowly across the world to reach your destination. It's immersive and rarely felt boring to me because the game is so pretty, and you can use the time to look around and notice other things in the environment you may have missed. In addition to panel puzzles and environmental puzzles there are lots of visual easter eggs that are not "solvable" but still are enjoyable to come across.
The subtitles are very disruptive, Thankfully they're off by default.
The Witness brings back Blow's love of random quotes that he considers profound. There is no text in the game whatsoever aside from menus and optional subtitles, so this time the quotes are in the form of audio logs that you can find scattered around the world and listen to as you solve puzzles. You can also unlock a handful of video clips too by completing some of the harder puzzles.
One valid piece of criticism is that the audio logs and video clips are irrelevant and pointless. But even the audio logs rambling about stupid shit like Buddhism fit excellently with the gameplay experience, which is otherwise quiet with the only other sounds you hear being from the environment. You can walk around and continue solving puzzles while listening to the audio and thinking about it if you want. The content of the audio logs are basically wasted potential, much more could have been done with them, but they were still a well-executed mechanic.
The Witness hints at a story with its endings but has nothing substantial enough to be compared to Braid's tangle of prose. Blow discusses this here, giving a few copes which I think are mostly trying to excuse the fact that he's not a creative person and struggles in his attempts to tell a compelling story.
It seems as if his perfectionist disposition ends up naturally guiding him away from trying to create a narrative, instead encouraging him to play to his strengths. Choosing not to put any text in The Witness is another example, he probably settled on this outcome after a lot of experimentation rather than consciously recognizing that he struggles to write words that players will want to read. The finished product is so polished that it is easy to assume that it was constructed carefully to mimic the sublime creative vision that existed in Jonathan Blow's mind, but this was not the case at all. In fact, it evolved from nothing but the basic seed of the environmental puzzle mechanic, and many iterations fueled by sheer effort and attention to detail.
While I don't have as much to base this on aside from this presentation, Noita stands out to me as a game which had a similar design approach to The Witness. Noita's story is very simplistic and told in vague terms through the structure of the world and emerald tablet riddles. They also went through a very long development process in which the basic gameplay focus changed multiple times. All they knew at the beginning was that they wanted to make a game using powder toy mechanics. Such craftsman-led games spend years iterating on their Great Work, and if successful arrive at a final product with incredible intricacy and refinement that no top-down creative vision could ever match.
This detail-oriented approach to design allows craftsmen to create games with great gameplay, graphics and sound design that combine to make a compelling whole, but it's still fundamentally difficult to construct a narrative this way. Games that try to force narrative without a creative vision end up having a totally garbage plot/setting that no one cares about (e.g. many indie games), or may rely on cheap crutches like meta humor to create something passable (e.g. Half Life).
Blow likes to pretend The Witness has some deeper meaning about "understanding the world", but in actuality this is a very surface level theme that is easy to arrive at. Despite containing many challenging and innovative puzzles, conceptually The Witness is very simple and straightforward. He feels that critics don't understand the meaning of the game if they don't mention its theme, but they're usually just not bothering to state the obvious (critics often do misunderstand other elements of The Witness' design though). After all my attempts to see things from Blow's perspective, this doesn't seem to me like mere narcissism, I actually think he is so detail-oriented that he can't even understand what "deeper meaning" is in a more general sense. We can observe this when he plays other games. This is another video I find particularly entertaining so I have embedded it.
Could Jonathan Blow as seen here ever get anything out of a game aside from some specific observation about design details? He leaves the starting area of Elden Ring and emerges into a vast open world, and one of the first things he focuses on, possibly before he even has an opportunity to feel fully immersed in the world, is a bridge on the horizon that is not architecturally accurate. He also hired architects to design the buildings for The Witness, I forgot to mention. I love how his cynical commentary is completely valid and insightful, but is visibly preventing him from enjoying the game.
Now what we have observed so far begins to make sense. To Blow, a game's technical merit is the sum of every individual positive detail it possesses. Understanding a concept is when you arithmetically sum together your understanding of a dozen individual audio/video clips. A creative influence is when you directly quote some writing. This inability to grasp the whole is so deeply embedded in Blow's mindset that when an interviewer asks him "What is The Witness about?", he almost can't understand the question in the sense it is being asked. It's fair to characterize Blow's attitude as as pretentious, what is pretentiousness if not acting like you have important knowledge of a concept when you don't? But it seems almost like an innocent mistake here.
TL;DR: Craftsmen can design great games too, so long as they stick to what they know and avoid narratives.
![[Image: IfHhJ8F.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/IfHhJ8F.jpg)
![[Image: HfVqWXY.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/HfVqWXY.jpg)
