Why Adventure Games are the last decent genre around - a lecture by Jonathan Blow
 

Ok, that's not exactly the title of this fascinating lecture by "Braid's" creator Jonathan Blow, but that's one of the main ideas I'm getting from it.

Title: Video Games and the Human Condition

The lecture is basically about what popular modern games are designed to put through their players - or their brains to be exact. These are things like developing compulsive behavior while in the games (Skinner box style), or even forcing the players to modify their real lives to accommodate playing specific titles.

As one of the alternatives Blow presents the kind of games that he makes, in which "most of the actual game happens solely in the player's mind as he tries to figure out things" (not an exact quote). He also underlines that game designers should strive to create works that will be really meaningful to their audiences - not unlike filmmakers and writers. His newest game - the somewhat Myst-resembling "The Witness" - will be, as he says centered around the concept (or the experience?) of "epiphany".

Anyway, here is the whole lecture (you can pick video or mp3):

http://edtech.rice.edu/cms/?option=c...ils&event=2349

It's quite long, but worth the time IMO.

downloading mp3

braid is one of my favourite games of this generation,

Adventure games do not have a monopoly on making you figure things out. Braid is not an adventure game.

I liked Braid, I though it was a fantastic puzzle game, but Jonathan Blow just comes off as the video game equivalent of a trying-too-hard film student to me making superficially arty things that are all forced style and no substance. The fact that he's giving a 1 and a 1/2 hour long presentation about game design having only released one game just makes me perceive him more as someone who'd write "Aronofsky-ish" in a game design document. People like Ken Levine, Warren Spector and Peter Molyneux could probably talk about game design for nearly 2 hours, I think Jonathan Blow should start with a 20 minute speech about how to create a good time-based puzzle and then work his way up from there.

Decent genre, yes. Shame about the games. Can't say it's as strong as it once was.

Um, while I *didn't* write it in my design doc (did a wordsearch to make sure :)), this is what The Inventory e-zine wrote in a preview of my game-in-production, Shadowplay:

Edit: Looking at the press release I sent the zine, I see that I've mentioned Pi a number of times, but the main Lynch/Aronofsky inspiration mentioned was in regards to audio design. So maybe I'm not that much of a pretentious ass after all - though now you mention it, all my game designs are definitely Aronofsky-ish ;)

The lecture was interesting, if a bit unfocused. But it really opened my eyes to what kind of person Blow is, his world view and what drives him. Seems like a really good guy and I'd love to have a conversation with him sometime. We seem to share a lot of values. Also, simply his statement that The Witness is about "epiphany" cranked my interest in that game up by 200% - it's very much the kind of theme that keeps recurring in my own project ideas, and I'd love to see someone else's take on it (though people like Gregory Weir have already explored it on a smaller scale).

i agree, maybe its not fun to admit, but a lot of gaming these days is designed to manipulate rope people in.

i wouldn;t call it evil, id just call it human nature,

fact is though, games that try to respect the gamer as much as possible are usually the deeper, more rewarding experiencess

so while the lecture was a bit all over the place, his basic analysis of the industry as it stands is very much accurate.

I haven't watched the video, not sure that I will, but I've read some stuff from Blow. I'm not sure I agree with his "collecting coins is unethical" view, but I don't fully understand it either.

Regardless of how I feel about his criticism, I fully trust him to make more brilliant and different games. When people got all upset that his new game looks like a Myst clone, I just laughed...there's no way a guy like that would make a simple Myst clone.

Is your game still coming out? I tried to google it, couldn't find anything about it. =(

Yes, it is. Was working on it as late a last night. BTW, I'm happy that the google search didn't turn up anything - means that my efforts to prevent search engines from indexing my unpublished website have been successful :)

And this game has been in development since 2005 right?

Well, good luck with it. I hope to be able to play it soon.

Earlier than that probably, I think I started out with AGS in 2003 and announced Shadowplay in early 2004. Then that Inventory preview happened and launched my life in a whole new direction (long story, but lots of awesome professional and personal experiences all triggered by that single article). It's only this last year I've actually been able to dedicate time to game development and made it my number one priority.

Thanks, not making any estimates when that will be - too many broken promises already which is why I've kept the project under the radar these last years - but it will happen, that I can guarantee. :)