Remember The Witness? Did Blow finally make true art out of video games?

Remember The Witness? Did Blow finally make true art out of video games?

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>Remember The Witness?
Did you know it took EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE!?

the what now?

karl is much more orangelike

>THE GAME INDUSTRY'S HARSHEST CRITIC IS ALSO ITS MOST CEREBRAL DEVELOPER
Most cerebral? Why? Because he makes fucking puzzle games? Go fuck yourself. Blow doesn't make deep games, he shoves hamfisted moral messages into unrelated gameplay.

EIGHT YEARS HAND CODED

how come J Blow talks about how bad violence is in vidya, but in this pic he looks a sociopathic maniac about to commit a mass shooting?

You didn't play Jonathan Blow's latest work of artistic genius?

>muh line puzzles

i still dont get everyone's obsession with this fucking game

>most dangerous gamer

please

I don't remember him talking about violence being bad. That tweet is accurate--people love games about killing stuff--and it's dumb to be defensive about it. It's both true and not a problem.

>The lesson of #blacklivesmatter: Niggers are working very hard to build fantasies about being oppressed by the white man.

Please don't judge Blow or The Witness based on shitty articles written about the game. It's the writers that are pretentious, not the game. Well, okay, the game is a little pretentious, but it's like 5% wannabe philosophy and 95% excellent puzzle game. Blow is probably a little full of himself but all of his talks that I've listened to are on-the-level stuff about how players experience a game's design. I think he had one stupid lecture back when Braid came out about how MMO reward systems are evil or some shit like that, but he hasn't said anything about that lately.

It's Blow fucking with everyone. The Witness is not a good game, it's Jon Blow's personal "fuck you" to gamers everywhere, especially the ones that just buy games without looking at trustworthy reviews.

t. jonathan blow

what outlets gave it bad reviews?

its very well liked by the hipster games media mafia

this was the last e3 after the Orlando shooting
I cannot respect him for being another typical kneejerky liberal who is fast to blame violence in vidya for violence in real life in order to appear as 'deep', 'compassionate', 'and intellectual'
there was that one time he basically said that the quanity of violent videogames was like porno

>It's Blow fucking with everyone. The Witness is not a good game, it's Jon Blow's personal "fuck you" to gamers everywhere
obligatory: youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0&t=1664s

I fucking wish I was Jonathan Blow, dude has more money than I'll make in my entire life

>The most cerebral developer

He's actually wrong, most games build fantasies about how cool it is to be a soldier, and outside of a few exceptions they aren't murderers, they are killers for sure.

For such a cerebral developer he doesn't seem to understand the basic definition of a word, murder isn't the act of killing someone, it's the act of doing so illegally. Soldiers usually only kill in accordance to the law and thus don't fall under the criteria.

TL;DR he's a fag.

I don't know about you guys but I "like", cringed alittle at a certain one of those tweets

Exactly. It was also Blow's fuck you to shit game journalism, because the game is extremely tedious and has no reason not to be a mobile game if not for a couple puzzles at the end, and then the game ends.
I guarantee that 95% of the mainstream gaming media who reviewed the game never beat it, and gave it a good score because some puzzles are mildly amusing and they took Blow's word for what the rest of the game entailed.
Basically, what this video says.

Oh my god, they both have a head like a fucking orange.

So does Anthony Burch

>in a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish?

It's like they don't even think half a second about what they are writing or hope their readers don't

I'm fairly sure all the "story" stuff in The Witness was just Blow seeing how vapid he could make stuff and still get praised as a luminary since the game journalism industry sucks his dick so much.

Or maybe I'm just giving him too much credit, I dunno.

>games need to be categorized by feelings instead of mechanics
Is Johnathan Blow truly the most 'almond activating' developer in all of gaming!?

>laser guns and carnivorous aliens
>implying we've had fun games like that recently
Nowadays it's all trying too hard to be deep and mature, just like Jonathan Blow really.

>Did Blow finally make true art out of video games?
Probably, but true art isn't always good art.

I really, really have no idea what point this post is making.

Are you saying that TFA is true art? Or are you saying that video games are no more juvenile than movies? Or something else?

Blow is the unfortunate mixture of genuine talent and quite an amazing dedication, with incredibly insecure and consequentially extremely arrogant and self-indulged personality. And it really does cripple his games. Both of his games were close to being quite damn amazing, but each time his arrogance and hubris managed to completely spoil the experience.
A lesson to people with "visionary tendencies": if your main goal is to prove how awesome you are, no matter the amount of talent, or effort and dedication, your work will end up being pretentious wank anyway.

>that video
It's bad. Too many of his complaints are "well *I* thought it was too hard to figure out and got frustrated, so it was badly designed". He doesn't even address the question of whether that's a possible problem to avoid, i.e. is it even possible to make surprising and challenging moments for some players without other players inevitably being lost and confused? He just says "I liked it when it was fair," or "I liked it when it did a good enough job," or that the game "failed to communicate" and rolls with the claim that because he solved almost all of the game eventually, his criticism must be solid.

Puzzle design doesn't work that way. Puzzle design and "Aha!" moments are more like telling a joke--at some point, some people are going to go "that's clever" and like it, and some people are simply going to not get it. When you playtest everything so everyone "get it," you get baby-tier puzzles like Portal.

He makes a few good points in the review, but certainly not worth majorly spoiling the game and whining for 40 minutes. Whenever someone likes this thinks, "I have something worthwhile to say about this game for 40 minutes" they should field their questions to a forum with some humility. Ask "what am I missing here?" instead of saying "Well *I* thought it was badly designed." Instead we get a review that spoils everything for a bunch of players and will just lead to people parroting it and acting smug.

This dude is such a turd. If life was a videogame he would be the villan, or better yet, he would be the villans little bitch sidekick

I think The Witness is an astoundingly brilliant game and it stands out as something different among games that cater to a 3 second attention span.

Actually, most of what he says there makes sense. I mean it's not exactly revelation, and it actually does not say anything of particular usefulness, but he is not wrong either.

Are you lost user. Do you need one of us to page your mom

You're not wrong, but neither is Jon Blow

I'm saying that video games aren't the only medium where the masses are addicted to 'laser guns and carnivorous aliens' (or any other shallow shit) and true art can exist even with that being in place.

Blow's such a pretentious fag, but I do very much like his games.

They really made me think.

>Wanting games to be art

No thanks. I prefer my videogames to be videogames.

also if it didn't come across, TFA is horrible kino

>fun is a buzzword
this guy was ahead of this time

>Muh true art
True art died a long time ago

He should have said "mass killer" instead of "murderer," but part of the appeal of most action games is the ability to destroy with impunity, i.e. that you don't HAVE to think about whether it's illegal or not and can smash whatever gets in your way. I'm not saying that's a bad thing but it's pretty clear that it's a big part of the fantasy.

Why does every who write about video games for a living hate games so much? Outside of their little clique that they worship like with Jonathan Blow, they seem to have an unhealthy, obsessive hatred with video games.

Pretty sure his main complain is the phone games tier gameplay that feel samey most of the time with some creative moments in it

>I'm not saying that's a bad thing but it's pretty clear that it's a big part of the fantasy.
Blow is saying it's a bad thing. That's what "kinda gross" implies.

>I prefer my videogames to be videogames.
Those are in no way contradictory notions. Who fucking told you that games can be either art or game, but not both?

It's kinda sad that the whole "fun is buzzword" thing is being mocked, when really, outside of that one unfortunate sentence, the argument is quite unquestionably correct.
Fun is a terrible way to define quality on a normative scale. There is actually no debate about that shit.

Because art doesn't make a fun videogame.

Searching memory...

Christ no I do not OP and my memory is usually pretty damn good.

No like most social leeches he was using a real world horrific thing, equating it to something that barely applies to it, and then using it for moral grand standing.

It's really rather morbid and belittles an actual real thing that happened. It's like how everything is "x rape" when you do it to women now, and that diminishes the act of someone actually getting raped.

The Witness is fun for a little while until you start reaching really asinine puzzles or puzzles that you don't know how to do, and you end up scouring the island in circles to make progress

If I feel tempted to open a wiki just to make progress then your game is poorly designed, it's not so much that The Witness is a puzzle game as the game itself is a big puzzle, and it's a fucking annoying puzzle like a monochrome rubik's cube.

>Fun is a terrible way to define quality on a normative scale. There is actually no debate about that shit.
I don't know what a normative scale is, but how do you define quality in videogames then? Something other than fun?

>asinine
>fucking annoying
>I feel tempted to open a wiki
Why do you think the problem is with the game and not you? What about all the people that didn't struggle with it?

Jon Blow drinks his own piss.

he looks like a fusion of the singer from smashmouth, rocko from mega64, and a box copy of soul caliber

>Sup Forums is siding with the cretin artfags who want video games to be some garbage where you look at a flower for 30 minutes, the flower turns into Muhammad Ali, gives some hamfisted speech about the nature of feelings, dies and the game ends

You fuckers really, really, really want to be special snowflakes

>but how do you define quality in videogames then? Something other than fun?
How smart it makes me feel and how it addresses social justice issues :^)

>he doesn't want to rummage through a house to learn about a gay child

Not really.
If a game is fun, and the gamer has fun with the game, it's a good game. That's it.

It has many puzzles where you have to wait 30 minutes in one spot to trigger it, and the only way to figure it out on your own is see the event fold out at least once and miss your chance.

Because Jon Blow fucking describes himself as "cerebral"

I expect puzzle games to be fun while activating my almonds, not to be deliberately obtuse

neither Braid nor The Witness are like that at all. in both games the hamfisted speeches are there, but nicely compartmentalized away from the puzzles, easily skippable, and like 2% of the game

This can't be true because there are people on Sup Forums who claim to have fun with Metroid Other M

No I don't. I already have to rummage my own house.

That's a pretty childish interpretation of art. Art is merely about self expression and the skill/talent behind making something tangible out of it. Yet all these game "critics" just use it as a term of validation for how mature and grown-up they are. Somehow something can only be art if it's some vague, minimalist, social political commentary devoid of any humor or excitement.

>tfw you never played a blow game because they look boring as fuck
I love puzzle games tho

>Fun is a terrible way to define quality on a normative scale

You can't define quality subjectively. This is why I don't pay attention to reviews or other people's opinions to define my purchasing habits.

In fact the only thing that matters is: do I find this game fun?

You can have fun with shit games. This is irrelevant.

>many puzzles where you have to wait 30 minutes
>many
"no"
there's like a single one and it's a completely optional bonus collectathon side thing

If that's true then Metroid: Other M succeeded as a videogame.
A game having pretty graphics and engaging narrative is still worthless if the game itself is a chore to play.

If it's fun it's not shit by default.

The problem with calling a game Fun and leaving it at that is that the word itself doesn't tell you very much about the game and why you enjoyed it. When discussing a game, or reviewing it, you should strive to explain your thoughts and feelings on WHY you found it fun rather than leave it at a vague term that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

The fun with shit games is in laughing at how shitty the game is, not fun in the game itself.

Serious question here, did anybody here like or even read the story parts of Braid?

>Because art doesn't make a fun videogame.
First of all, "fun". Does not really mean anything to anyone.
Second of all: how do you know? How are the two not compatible?

>I don't know what a normative scale is
It's any scale that goes from "good to bad" and that you use in public discussions. It's the kind of scale anyone uses if he makes any kind of criticism or review, basically.

>but how do you define quality in videogames then?
The same way I define quality in any other fiction or in almost any other product in general: I establish a set of criteria that can actually be relevant and understandable to my audience, and judge the game on those.
"Fun" is not one of those criteria. What establishes "fun" varies so broadly from person to person that it's largely meaningless. "Fun" is a subjective experience I am having: it's not a quality of the game, it's MY SUBJECTIVE REACTION to some actual, normative or objective aspect of the game.
So if I'm having fun, I'm going to look into what aspect of it is triggering that reaction to me, and I'm going to ask myself if my reaction is reasonably universal and relatable to others. And then I'm going to include that aspect of the game into listing my reasonings on why I recommend the game or not.

But I'm not going to say "it's good because I had fun."
That would be like saying "the car is good because I like it". It's actually non sequitur: whenever I like it or not may or may not have anything do with whenever I think the game has any worth for others.
The point of criticism and any public evaluation is not to inform people about yourself and your feelings, but to tell them something about the GAME that might be valuable to them.

It really, really isn't. See above.

>You can't define quality subjectively.
That is why all evaluative statements are normative, and not subjective.

this
sturgeon's revelation, always. 90% of everything is crap. doesn't stop the good stuff from being good.

>If that's true then Metroid: Other M succeeded as a videogame.

Which means it can't be true. It's called proof by contraposition. We know, factually, that Metroid Other M is not a good game, so we can conclude that it's not true.

There are a couple of perspective puzzles that require you to be at a point on the map when the boat sails by without you in it, then activate the environment puzzles at the right time.

Sure I was exaggerating at 30 minutes, but it's still a fucking long ass time, assuming you picked the optimal speed it still takes a long ass time.

Optional or not, they are still obtuse and tedious, and were designed as parts of the game.

I bet that Blow has never ending fury about the fact that no consumer really cares about his moralizing and just likes the puzzles.

>In fact the only thing that matters is: do I find this game fun?
That is incredibly fucking stupid and selfish way of looking at things. But fine: you don't want to think about anything outside of your super-narrow subjective perspective: the actual reality outside of your head and everyone else in it be damned.
Fine. But in that case, you have literally no right to use the terms "good" or "bad". Only "I like it" or "I don't like it".

Fuck off Jon

>Braid
>really good soundtrack

>The Witness
>no music at all because it disturbs the autismosphere

eh

Hey Jonathan, your game blows.

I thought the witness was cool, its very awe inspiring when you realized theres environmental puzzles too. Most people probably got that right away but I was pretty far into the game before I realized because I'm a dense and stupid motherfucker. So I got to backtrack everywhere and take breaks from the puzzles to look for environmental puzzles, which was very cool. The whole island is insanely well designed to contain all of them, and lots of design easter eggs to boot. After I beat the main game then realized the full scope of the extra content, namely the Giant Cave of Extra Hard Bullshit, I put it down, but I think its worth playing. just get it when its on sale or pirate it.

lots of people on Sup Forums have such a sourpuss attitude about playing 'pretentious' games. I think the occasional walking simulator or artsy puzzle game is a nice change of pace.

The Witness is so fucking pretentious and shit that it's almost disgusting. The game looked great, and there were some puzzle gimmicks that were neat, but holy fuck those audio logs and movies were unbearably fedora. And then you have literally zero music with a slow walk speed so any time between puzzles is boring as fuck. And the puzzle themselves all revolve around boring fucking grids. It's like he tried to make the Talos Principle, but made it 500% more pretentious and easier.

So, if "fun" isn't a valid reason to classify a videogame as good or bad then, what makes a videogame good or bad?

I'm sorry, I just don't see how it's a big deal to have a few extra hidden things in the game that are a pain in the ass. Yeah, it's a troll move for the 100 percenters, but that makes it kind of funny. It's a really minor complaint.

If there is one thing that's more annoying and pretentious than Jon Blowhard, then it is his fans.

>listening to TOVG podcast
>that one dude cocksucking jon for like 5 episodes in a row

But his game wasn't even that good.

It's weird, most people find him to be an arrogant, self-absorbed, douche, yet he somehow has amassed some weird cult that thinks he's the greatest thinker of the 21st century.

The branching conversation started when an user said he found the game to be annoying once he saw the obtuse puzzles.

You then stated that "maybe it was just you (what about all the people who didn't find the puzzles obtuse?)"

I came in to point out that it's impossible for any person but the developer of the puzzles to not find some, even if it's just the optional ones, obtuse, and/or annoying.

Stop acting like I said this wasn't allowed.

>"Fun" is a subjective experience I am having: it's not a quality of the game, it's MY SUBJECTIVE REACTION to some actual, normative or objective aspect of the game.
There's no way to evaluate a game from any perspective other than your own.

>That would be like saying "the car is good because I like it". It's actually non sequitur: whenever I like it or not may or may not have anything do with whenever I think the game has any worth for others.
But whether you like the car is still the ultimate measure of the car's quality. It's nice if you can analyze and explain what it is you actually like about the car, but you're still using your own enjoyment as the standard.

Unless you're trying to say "I didn't like this game but I would estimate about 90% of people who play it will like it, therefore it's a good game, 9/10", which is just silly.

>I'm going to look into what aspect of it is triggering that reaction to me, and I'm going to ask myself if my reaction is reasonably universal and relatable to others
Are you evaluating a game or speculatively psychoanalyzing the population of the world?

>Second of all: how do you know? How are the two not compatible?
Because to reach "art" you need to sacrifice gameplay mechanics.
That's why artistic games are so similar to each other
>A corridor
>You walk

>Factually
Why? because the plot is horrible?
The plot is just an excuse for the action, nothing more and nothing less.

>because the plot is horrible?

no, because the plot is horrible and the gameplay is also horrible. Please don't shitpost about games you have not played.

>THE GAME INDUSTRY'S HARSHEST CRITIC IS ALSO ITS MOST CEREBRAL DEVELOPER

*ahem*

Oh, well, I didn't realize that's the point you were making. That guy was talking about "making progress" and none of the main-game puzzles are too obtuse, I don't think. But yes the game certainly contains a few things that are tedious on purpose, I concede that.

That article was from 5 years ago and literally every comment was negative, talking about how pretentious and up his own ass Jon was.

It's what SJW's hate the most about video games; unlike movies and novels, they can't bullshit a game into being good.

ha ha, i see what you did there!

i played braid during my first semester / year of calculus and it seemed like the deepest shit in existence and it made calculus feel like bending time as the limit approaches one way or another way, totally changes how you see the world once you can calculate the area under a curve and know you're doing it with infinitely small rectangles