Games are interesting! A conversation with Jonathan Blow

I like that you took the time to research some previous interviews with Jonathan Blow, and so the interview didn't have to start "from scratch".

Good conversation, thanks for posting. Edit: I've realised that the reason it's easier to listen to you doing your side of the conversation but harder to listen to you asking questions is that you finish expressing the meaning of the question and the listener is in the "time for an answer" mode and just waiting for the sentence to close as a formality, but then before the last word in the sentence drops you change to a new question based on a new idea you just had. So it's not that you shouldn't be having time to speak in the conversation, it's that when you are actually asking questions the delivery is difficult to follow and people want to hear the other person talk so that they can get the answer to the question you almost finished asking.

Some of the most high level discussion on game design you can find

I really like how chill Jon is here. It almost seems like he internalized the dissatisfaction towards the industry and now makes statements from a very stable and eloquent standpoint.

I was very interested in video games for some time during high school and even though I ended up not pursuing this career path, I never miss any new interview of Jonathan Blow. The man is a great inspiration, and his words can bring you to new territories, whatever your profession/skill is, like the rest of my favorite artists. This interview was well conducted and pretty in-depth. Thank you.

Enjoyable and thoughtful chat. Thanks for sharing.

It's interesting that Jon assumes people view him more as a designer than a programmer. He's obviously a great designer (Braid and The Witness are phenomenal), but I've always thought of him as a great programmer first and foremost

@20:00 terrific advice. To finish a project non-excruciatingly painfully you need to find one worth finishing. It'll still be painful, but then perhaps not excruciatingly (since you see, or are in for, the end). But... it is always good to start a seemingly nice project if you have none in mind worth finishing. You can scrap those and still sleep soundly.

Dude this is a great interview! I honestly almost clicked off at first, but your questions were really great and though provoking. Thanks!

Great discussion, thanks for uploading. I'm glad the discussion was two-sided in that there are a lot more factors than game design that determine how a AAA game is made. Unrelated feedback, the 'No-frauds Club' comes off as downer vibe, what about swapping it around to be like "Expert Collective" or something that conveys the same amount of mastery.

This was great, you definitley should do more of these, especially with people like Jonathan Blow. I particularly liked the section "The fiction advances, but the gameplay does not", and the example of Mass Effect was interesting because I imagine many people, including myself, played those games when they were younger and enjoyed them, fully believing that it was an example of good story telling. I now completely agree that in retrospect it really isn't, and doesn't make much sense at all if you were trying to join mechanics and fiction in a unique way. When I go back and look at games I've enjoyed and analyse them like this I can see this problem almost everywhere. It's so true that it's very difficult to do, because you have to have a compelling piece of fiction on it's own, and then a compelling abstraction into "game mechanic" of that fiction, the abstraction part being the real difficulty. When I think of the (very few) games that have done this kind of thing right, it is that particular form of abstraction that differentiates them the most from other games.

The complexity will be there regardless of the functions' length. What makes it understandable is how well the functions fit the abstractions. Arbitrarily constraining function lengths makes functions fitting abstractions well less likely.

Good sensical talk with real examples, thanks

1:40:30 The outer wilds leverages the fiction for gameplay, the whole game is that plus a few novel concepts.

Regarding storytelling working together with the gameplay, Portal 1 is a very good example.

14:00 man, that's how i feel right now. literally picked up a book on algorithms and data structure in plain c to learn the basics again.

Thank you for the interview. Very interesting.

great interview, interviewer also knows his stuff.

Nice !

I really enjoyed how this was a deep conversation rather than just an endless list of questions thrown at Jonathan.