In today's spiteful edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Dracosummoner wonders if you have to love the game's creators in order to love the game.
Have you ever been in a situation where you liked a game or series, but you couldn't stand the people behind it? (I can just hear the "Activision/EA" responses now.) For my part, I'd have to say that I mostly loved the game Braid, but from the interviews I've read of Jonathan Blow, he strikes me as someone who is utterly convinced that he is one of the few good things the gaming industry has going for it right now. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking this. To be honest, that sort of self-righteousness is making me lose interest in his future work.
About Speak Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say has nothing to do with the stories we run. That's why we have a forum on Kotaku called Speak Up. That's the place to post anecdotes, photos, game tips and hints, and anything you want to share with Kotaku at large. Every weekday we'll pull one of the best Speak Up posts we can find and highlight it here.
Jonathan Blow is a video game developer whose critics call pretentious and grouchy.
He once had the audacity to wonder aloud why more people don't make video games for adults who like reading books.
That was some time after he had the temerity to criticize the game-making of the geniuses at Nintendo. That was also some time before he told me, just last week, that he'd be depressed if he did what anyone else was doing in game development. He has to do his own things, he said. "I have to be pioneering."
It would be so easy to misunderstand Jonathan Blow, to cast him off as a blow-hard, to miss his doubts and ignore his excellent ambitions. It would be unfortunate, because Jonathan Blow is the kind of righteous rebel video games need.
Physically, Blow doesn't stand out: white guy, trim build, glasses and a shaved head. His voice is pinched. His gestures, though, are a little different. When I sat with him last week, to discuss his newest game after he'd let me play it almost undisturbed for two hours, he'd lean forward and tilt his head to the side, parallel to the floor, as if to consider the world differently as he organized his thoughts and prepared paragraphs of answers.
He wants to do unusual thing. He'll tell you, as he told me, that he wants "to do a game that is a little more adult in the sense that it is a game for people with long attention spans." And the impression I get is that Blow himself is a game developer for people with long attention spans. Sure, he's good for a quote or a soundbite, good for a quick knock on "unethical" design of reward-centric games like World of Warcraft or a poke at the clumsily complex starts of Assassin's Creed or Prototype. But the truncated take on Blow is off.
In an attempt to explain this willfully critical creator, we could condemn Jonathan Blow as a game designer who doesn't play video games. Because he rarely does. I suggested to him that we could go to a GameStop and I could point to a wall of games and he'd find nothing he cared to play. Not quite, he said, giving me a perfect Jonathan Blow answer: "I could find a bunch of games to buy and take home and play for an hour." The insult is implied.
Blow may be an outsider to gaming's mainstream, a bright, sharp-elbowed indie guy who appropriately lists among the few categories of posts on his blog "engine tech" and "ill-advised rants." His gaming origins, however, were common. He grew up the way many gamers born in the '70s did. He had an Atari. He played Air-Sea Battle. He played what everyone else was playing. "When I was a kid I just loved games and saw the potential," he told me. "At some point my interest in games did not go away, as it has for many people."
He cared about video games a lot. He still does. "I can't explain to you why," he said. "I wonder if sometimes I'm fooling myself and don't care about them as much as I think I do and need something to believe in and this is it. But one thing that has always appealed to me is that I've always wanted to do something in life that is productive or meaningful that, if I wasn't doing it, probably wouldn't get done."
Meaningful?
There is an outside world that sneers at video games. There is a large batch of people who play video games who don't but think of them as nothing more as a good vehicle for tossing angry birds or fighting in virtual wars. Games are a past-time to many, a means of expression to fewer. I seldom hear the creators of games tell me they're in it to be meaningful. But that is Blow.
In 2008 he made what he considers his first game. He hints that that there was a game before all that, a game that doesn't count because he wasn't serious about it. Braid was first, a 2008 Game of the Year contender that was a sort of reinterpretation of Super Mario Bros. that gave the player unusual methods to manipulate the flow of time.
"What I thought of myself as a designer back then was that I'm going to be someone who does new gameplay mechanics that are interesting and explores that," he said. He'd found some great mechanics for Braid. He let players rewind time. He let them set up bubbles in the playing field inside which time flowed at a different rate. His first game, which was a downloadable hit on the Xbox 360 in the summer of '08, brimmed with new gameplay mechanics. For his next project he originally sought to find more. "But I wouldn't be satisfied with that being the point anymore," he realized. "For me, there is a deeper thing happening. There is, through the art of game design, some kind of observation about that universe that is not accessible in the same way from other media. If I can get that, then I don't even care about the game mechanic. If I can do that in a first-person shooter that looks exactly like Doom 3 then I would do it."
Blow's current project is a team effort called The Witness. I've written about what it is, based on what I could glean from a two-hour session with the unfinished work last week. The short version is that it's an evolution of the 1993 PC hit Myst a successor to a genre of graphic adventures and a specific call-back to that original phenomenon of solving non-verbal puzzles on a curiously uninhabited island.
(Myst)
"I liked Myst and other games of that era but what I really liked were games that never existed," he said. "It's like there's some really fucking awesome game like Myst that nobody ever made because it was filled with all of these illogical puzzles and stuff, right?" I didn't follow. He was inspired by an imaginary game? "I can picture in my head what that game would be," he said. "I'm letting that inspire me. I'm not saying [The Witness] is that game either but this is sort of like if those games… if, instead of people making a thousand shitty Myst clones, they actually successfully improved the genre over time. This would be inspired by those. But as it stands, actually, a lot of those games are an anti-inspiration." He explained that the successors of Myst were full of obscure puzzles and confusing graphics that made it hard to determine what was a puzzle and what wasn't. They played by strange rules.
In the Witness you're solving line-drawing puzzles that are clearly presented on blue terminals that are set up throughout a lush, lonely island. The game is entirely about looking at things closely, discovering patterns and systems, learning a language of solutions while grasping still-mysterious larger ideas that Blow wants to convey.
(The Witness)
Blow has "a twinge of nervousness" that The Witness might be bad. I don't, but he did get amusingly mixed reactions when he showed people the game last spring at the Game Developer's Conference. "The biggest correlation that I saw was, as the conference went on, people's opinion of the game went down, because they were tired. They were grumpy. They were overstimulated from too many other things in the conference. People at the end were getting antsy about it. People at the beginning were like, 'Fuck, this is awesome!'" That's why Blow let me play his game alone for two hours last week while he sat in an adjacent room. That experience went much better than when I tried to play a rougher version of it last year at a noisy expo. "This is kind of a game where you want a clear mind," he explained, "so the parts of your subconscious that tell you how to do things bubble up to the surface."
Jonathan Blow may be known in some circles for knocking other people's work, but I discovered, as we chatted last week, that he almost committed one of the very game design sins he opposed. It recalibrated my take on what he criticizes about games. He's not criticizing people or even games but trends, currents even he can be swept into. It happend about a year ago. He's vociferously against rewards-driven game design, what he sees as a Skinner-box approach to game design that compels a player to keep playing by perpetually offering a trickle of rewards for minor actions. That's what he was knocking when he criticized the fealty designers had to littering gold coins into their game worlds, Super Mario Bros.-style, to keep players going. That's what he was referring to when he knocked the eternal treadmill of achievement that is almost every massively multiplayer online game. When you engineer a game to foster those constant reward compulsions, he told me, "there is a lack of faith in what is the core game." The game designer doesn't trust that players will find the playing of a game to be rewarding enough, so he or she adds all these baubles and unlocks to keep the player playing.
Blow publicly railed against that rewards stuff when he was making Braid. And then, in the early stages of The Witness, as he thought of how he'd deposit small radios in his world that could be discovered and, optionally, reveal parts of the game's storyline, he planned to give people a reward for collecting them. Then he caught himself. "It felt like pandering and a betrayal of the subject matter." And yet he came so close, thinking that that's what gamers wanted, to being the game designer he doesn't want to be. He concluded: "the only way I can make a game is not trying to maximize my audience." (It is through the game's specific combination of gameplay to the ideas of its story that Blow mentioned, casually to me, that he is "attempting to be profound".)
There is much to share about a conversation with Jonathan Blow, but let's end with one of those long head-tilting Blow paragraphs, the one he spoke to me as he explained why he doesn't play many games anymore, the one that takes a left turn into Thomas Pynchon, veers through Metacritic and ends, well… you'll see.
It starts with him saying he doesn't play many games these day. "The reason I don't is they don't ask much of me as a player. They're very pandering. 'Press A to win' or whatever. So, in some sense, I'm making a game for people who might like games I might like…"
"Yes, but in a way that is more that is bigger than games in the past did. The coin-op games of the '80s generally asked a lot of you. You generally had to perform or get kicked out. But we sort of charted that space. And there can still be really nice games in that domain, I really like Space Giraffe, for example. I know many people do not. But it's really sort of a game where it's skill-based: do this stuff or you lose. Coin-op games were difficulty-based where it's usually difficult actions that are being tested.
"Over time, games got a lot less difficulty-based. As they got focus-tested, they got like, 'Oh, we sold this game to somebody for like 60 bucks. We can't kick them out all the time. We want to let them get to the end so they feel satisfied.' But, because all that we knew how to make were games where the point was to surpass the difficulty challenge, then in subtracting the difficulty track out, we kind of took away the reasons to play the games. So these fake reasons have to come in and take their place, like, 'Oh, there's a story now with all these milestones of the story to drag you along or there are various other reward schedules.' Those have to be there. I think they would be there regardless because they are powerful mechanisms, but they especially have to be there once you've drained the rest of a point of a game out of a game.
"What I'm interested in... one of the things I think is interesting is finding other things besides difficulty-based challenges to be the meat of the game, to be interesting... going back to Gravity's Rainbow, there is some kind of meat to that that is about it's a difficult book and it's challenging to read. But that's not the majority of it. We have figured out in literature how to put stuff in there that is worth reading for its own sake. I'm interested in that. And so with this game I feel like I have at least been able to see... my process was about going out and investigating. I didn't really know what the gameplay was going to be, but I investigated all these situations and I found these little puzzle phenomena. It's almost like math, where you have these things that behave in a certain way and they combine in a certain way and that's interesting and maybe beautiful, if you think of it that way, and that existed before I found it. I just picked which ones to find and which ones to put together in this game...
"And even if people don't like the game, if it gets like a 5 Metacritic—which I don't think it would—but let's say 6.5 if everybody hates it, I know that this stuff is in there and other people will notice too and that gives me the confidence to not worry about it, because it's there. The better a designer I am, the more accessible I can make these things without diluting them. Because that's the important part. The games industry makes things accessible usually by dumbing things down and diluting them. The extent that I can do that without sapping the essence of golden stuff that's here, then maybe the better that is. But even if I fail at that stuff and I turn out to be a sucky puzzle designer— for the record, I think the puzzles are actually quite good—even if I design kind of bad puzzles I know that the foundation is a quite strong."
That's Jonathan Blow, gamers, for those of you with long attention spans.
Indie Game: The Movie is an upcoming documentary focusing on the trials, tribulations and processes behind some of the luminaries of the independent gaming scene, including Phil Fish (Fez) and Jonathan Blow (Braid).
It's being put together by BlinkWorks' James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and if you like the looks of the trailer, you can contribute to its Kickstarter campaign here.
It was impressive when Robert Bowling, creative strategist for Call of Duty studio Infinity Ward, paid $500 for a batch of indie games that only cost $85. Then Notch, maker of Minecraft stepped up, with $2000.
These guys and a few others are paying lots of money for the Humble Indie Bundle 2, which went on sale yesterday. The bundle is the second offering of indie games being offered to gamers for any price they want to pay. People can name their price and direct their payment in different proportions to the games' developers and various charities.
The games in the second bundle are: Braid, Machinarium, Osmos, Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans (pictured up top).
Bowling and Notch paid a whole lot more than the ordinary gamer, who are spending a little over $7 on average for the bundle, as of the writing of this post.
Indie hit puzzle-platformer Braid has come to retail in Russia, thanks to MumboJumbo and Russobit-M/GFI, giving us the box art giggles with its delightfully inappropriate and mischievous take on Tim and gang. Thanks, Maritan!
Some gamers who loved Jonathan Blow's Braid were perplexed when early footage of his team's next game, The Witness, debuted on Kotaku last month. To those alarmed or confused, Blow offers some encouraging words.
"The only two guys who have played The Witness to completion have said it will be better than Braid when it is done," he writes after addressing the puzzled reaction to the puzzles glimpsed in his game. "I am certainly not going to jump up and down and say "hey this game is better than Braid", or even claim that Braid is good. But I just want to put that out there as reassurance to those of you who are worried about that gameplay video."
The Kotaku gameplay video showed a player moving through a beautifully-lit and apparently uninhabited island that is full of puzzles, many of them blue squares through which the player has to trace patterns. It seemed simple. It seemed Myst-y. It seemed like something that wasn't as obviously wonderful and innovative as many of our memories of Blow and team's previous game, the time-warping Braid.
In a post about The Witness at the game's development blog, Blow hints at the gameplay significance of some of the early blue puzzles in the clip that ran here. I encourage you to read his full post. It won't take long and should put the early gameplay we've seen in better context.
The Witness has no scheduled release date or platforms.
About the Blue Mazes [The Witness blog]
Unattended, unlabeled, unmarked... the new game from the small team led by Braid creator Jonathon Blow was stealthily present at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. The adventurous — and those who recognized Blow standing off in the shadows — got a delightful surprise.
In other words, I knew just about nothing about The Witness. I didn't need to in order to want to play it. Blow and David Hellman's subtle, time-bending Braid was the kind of scrupulously-designed video game that earns its creators a player's long-term trust.
The version of The Witness at PAX is far from finished. The game will be complete a year from now, at earliest, Blow told me once I got done playing and found him so we could discuss. He cautioned me that I was seeing a lot of "programmer art." This was the game's first showing in public, its puzzles still far from complete and refined. It was being presented in a manner intentionally detached from any references that might hype the Braid connection and bias its players. Blow wanted to see, from afar, what people made of their first touch of this game.
What I could make of The Witness is about as much as you can, watching it here in this two-part video I shot at PAX. The Witness seems to be a quiet game set on a lovely landscape landmarked with puzzles. I played it with an Xbox 360 controller, witnessing the island in first-person. Many of the puzzles I found involved using the controller to draw routes on blue squares that were set vertically on posts at the level of museum paintings, trying to inscribe the proper pattern that would solve the challenge and possibly lead to a new one. The puzzles were not just in the posted squares but in the more natural environment. One of the earliest challenges, seen partially in the video here, involves figuring out how three wires or tubes, all connected to a locked gate, can be electrified in order to progress. Trying to solve this, you wind up looking behind trees and bushes and over a roof. You find clues that lead to new mysteries that lead to solutions of their own. Early, it is clear that this is a game for the patient, the un-flustered and the observant.
From my brief conversation with Blow about the game, I heard a confirmation of my own sensation that this is a game about discovery. The pace of the game seems to be that of a gradual dawning. You stroll in first-person view. You look at beautiful or intriguing things — a windmill in the distance, a figure that is either a man or a statue — and you approach. There appears, in so many places, puzzling things. You ponder them. You try to solve them. You're given no instruction and no order, not in the PAX version, what to do next. You try to make sense of it. You play.
Blow didn't bristle when I told him that the game made me think of Myst. But I suspect that if The Witness is as much Myst as Braid was Super Mario Bros., then it can still be something very special
Some of the more crass video games, those for the unwashed masses, are turned into cartoons, or motion pictures. Something with ambitions as lofty as Braid, though, was never going to settle for such a low-brow adaptation.
It's not much surprise, then, to see the indie platformer reborn here as...interpretive dance, brought to the stage by the Chaparral High School Alumni Theatre. I admire the team's enthusiasm, but really, there aren't enough dinosaurs for my low-brow tastes. And where are the glasses of red wine?
2D platformers like Limbo and Braid have created deep metaphorical experiences, but can gamers appreciate them? And can their success move game literacy into new genres?
Earlier today (at the time of writing), an interesting Twitter exchange took place between Trent Polack and Manveer Heir regarding Limbo. [Note from Kotaku: This article had been originally published on Monday, July 26th] With an intro like that, I realize this could easily veer into navel-gazing Twitter wankery. But trust me, this is going somewhere. (And hopefully their Twitter conversation can be understood, if you go looking. Twitter is sort of weird in that it's really difficult to reproduce any significant exchange. In that way, I guess it's kind of like chatting in a pub or at a meet-up.)
I'm also probably going to be putting words in both their mouths, so don't take what's below as a real representation of what these guys actually think. I've heard both perspectives more or less echoed elsewhere, they just conveniently brought it up today. Okay, enough prelude.
Trent raises the titular question, "Limbo's presentation and atmosphere and visual style are all remarkable, but haven't I played this game like a dozen times in recent years?" Continuing, "2d platformers are like the lowest common denominator of video game upon which indie devs seem to project their neat artistic ideas & vision."
Manveer responded with, "Design and ideas go through phases and right now this is our "platformer" phase. Like there was a punk rock phase for music." And, "Distilling a well crafted experience that trumps most other AAA games as 'another indie platformer' is a hugely reductive argument."
They're both valid perspectives. But what really interested me was that fundamental question, "Why are so many indie darlings 2D platformers?" I'm not using 'indie darling' pejoratively, and I'm going to sidestep splitting hairs about what is and isn't "indie." Suffice to say, edge cases aside, I think there's a common set of games we can agree on. As for why there are so many 2D platformers, there are at least two significant reasons. One is purely pragmatic, the other more related to the medium itself.
On the pragmatic side, 2D platformers are relatively easy to develop. A great deal of the indie game community is made up of individual creators or very small teams. Shipping any game with a chance of financial viability (whether or not it's a primary objective, bills still have to be paid) is a significant undertaking, let alone doing it by yourself or with a 3 or 4 other people. Opting to creating a 2D platformer removes a significant amount of risk for what almost certainly begins as a very risky proposition.
To do otherwise requires resources that many indies don't have access to. Simply, Narbacular Drop wasn't Portal or to be more timely, Tag: The Power of Paint wasn't Portal 2. Transforming those experiences from things that were merely fun to something more substantive requires the resources and experience of Valve. Shadow of the Colossus takes a single aspect of games, the boss battle, and uses that to create a beautiful, haunting experience. But that required Sony's financial backing and one of the most visionary creators in the entire industry. That Game Company has been achieving similar successes, but they've also got Sony bankrolling their operation.
This is a solvable problem though and it has, and will continue, to get better with time. The larger challenge, I think, is that of game literacy. Few people can "read" games as well as they can film or books. Being literate in different media isn't just a matter of being able to comprehend a simple description/depiction of events, it's being able understand symbolism, metaphor, what a piece is "really about." Tom Armitage talksaboutthis a bit; read/listen to what he says because it's smart.
A big challenge here for games is so many games are merely defined in terms of success or failure that seeing any greater message beyond that is difficult for many players. So many games are built to be "fun" and nothing but, and creating something that's more (and communicating this) is similarly difficult for creators. And of all the types of games out there, 2D platformers may be the type that both players and creators are most literate in.
2D platformers are well understood mechanically. We've had a chance to internalize their structure since Super Mario Bros. There is a formula and a set of rules, and with that, comes the ability to either leverage or disrupt those rules for the purpose of saying something. Many other types of games are still so amorphous that an aesthetic, meaningful rule decision is indistinguishable from just another feature to make the game better/more fun.
In some ways, 2D platformers are as close to a tabula rasa for games (no pun intended) as we can get. As long as a few simple things are in place to make something appear as a platformer, almost anything else can be included without the thing feeling alienating or confusing. Other styles of game have more strict sets of expectations (e.g. think about what makes an arcade fighter or an RTS). If too many of those expected elements are absent, the message becomes harder to read.
2D platformers are also very playable, largely due to the above. This means players of many stripes can play these games and engage with these experiences without requiring specific skills or genre familiarity. Making a game a first-person shooter immediately puts it out of the hands of many. At least for now, the number of people that want more than just fun from their games isn't colossal. It's probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Now if someone made a deeply aesthetic flight simulator, the number of people actually interested and able to play that game would be tiny. Almost anyone can play a 2D platformer and we want as many people as we can get thinking about games as more than just "fun."
I don't disagree with Trent, I'd love to see other styles of game have the tone of Limbo
, the richness of metaphor and mechanics of Braid
. But I also realize that while I can get a lot out of Democracy 2
and see some of the interesting things it says, most people see an impossible flurry of graphs and charts. For a lot of people, 2D platformers work. And we can build 2D platformers reliably, leaving more freedom to worry about the mechanics and the message.
I'd be worried if some of the best minds in this scene were getting comfortable, or if new folks were just aping what's already out there, but I don't think it's anywhere close to stagnant yet. Part of the reason why I'm looking forward to Jason Rohrer's Diamond Trust of London is I imagine it will have some interesting things to say about the blood diamond trade, but will do so through a strategy game.
I'm looking forward to seeing how more types of games can present substantive meaning. But we also need as many game literate folks seeking out more than just fun as possible. If the easiest way to get them on side is with a 2D platformer, then I'm more than happy to keep side scrolling. At least for now.
Nels Anderson is a gameplay programmer at Hothead Games. He is probably the only game developer in Vancouver (and maybe all of Canada) that was born and raised in Wyoming. He writes about games and game design at Above 49.
Hollywood has tried for years to make a good movie based on a video game, and failed. May as well try making one based on an indie game, then!
Many of the current crop of indie darlings are represented here, from the gorgeous Shank to the clever Super Meat Boy, though it's a shame there's no Braid trailer, featuring a man endlessly sipping, then unsipping, a glass of red wine.
In today's spiteful edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Dracosummoner wonders if you have to love the game's creators in order to love the game.
(Jonathan Blow | 
"What I'm interested in... one of the things I think is interesting is finding other things besides difficulty-based challenges to be the meat of the game, to be interesting... going back to Gravity's Rainbow, there is some kind of meat to that that is about it's a difficult book and it's challenging to read. But that's not the majority of it. We have figured out in literature how to put stuff in there that is worth reading for its own sake. I'm interested in that. And so with this game I feel like I have at least been able to see... my process was about going out and investigating. I didn't really know what the gameplay was going to be, but I investigated all these situations and I found these little puzzle phenomena. It's almost like math, where you have these things that behave in a certain way and they combine in a certain way and that's interesting and maybe beautiful, if you think of it that way, and that existed before I found it. I just picked which ones to find and which ones to put together in this game...
Some gamers who loved Jonathan Blow's Braid were perplexed when 
2D platformers like Limbo and Braid have created deep metaphorical experiences, but can gamers appreciate them? And can their success move game literacy into new genres?
