Jonathan Blow: How Mainstream Devs Are Getting It Wrong

The developer behind Braid and The Witness talks about the indie scene, if games should be fun, and the state of Japanese game development.

[cellularmitosis]

Attention sound engineers: when someone is talking, TURN THE BACKGROUND MUSIC DOWN

[as]

did we really need the dramatic background music for this?

[BingtheLizard]

"Respect the player."

Amen to that.

[Bloodbane]

IMO the problem with mainstream gaming is the fact all it does is play it safe, and never trys anything new and its become terribly stale now, oh and of course the excessive hand holding

[vincentrachaka]

'Joy of Discovery', one of the things I explained to the other guy a few weeks. Nowadays everything is put on a silver platter and it takes away the 'I am genius' feeling that comes after understanding the clue given in the game. Totally agree with this guy.

[Redrobyn]

i don't think that's really a japanese thing, it's more of just mainstream games in general tbh

[MaccaMan]

Jonathan Blow is such a cool guy, thinks outside the box. Looks at game design from a good perspective. It's inspiring 

[BockInAction]

What he said is true, but i'm not quite sure why the focus is here only on the japanese industry.
It's a general problem, the only thing that you can watch is, that many japanese games have imported/try to copy the bad western mechanics.

[synthoelectro]

People like this become the next level of Jobs. It's harder than you realize to find people who raise the bar.

[perunplague]

I miss the days where narrative was explained through gameplay and not the other way around

[christianpetersen]

Jonathan Blow is not alone with this opinion. There are other respected game designers that are pointing to the concept of "fun" as an obstacle to the art. And I also whole heartetly agree. I've found that the ultimate cause for hand-holding is that designed narratives in modern RPG's are too dominant, leaving no freedom for the player, not even the freedom to fail. If the player fails, that means loading from checkpoint. As a game designer, you don't want to break the players immersion, and loading breaks immersion, so you do whatever it takes to keep the player from failing, and by doing that, you take away the joy of exploration, gravity of choices and activation of survival instinct etc., and you constantly remind the player that they are playing a game. Makes no sense... I don't need a strong designed narrative, just the oveall lines. I am excellent at perceiving and forming a narrative from play-sessions. Secondly, games are too fixated on killing. I want to be able to fail hard, but failing always means player character death, which also breaks immersion. Game devs have no imagination when it comes to failure, it's all "kill or be killed" BS. I want games without confining narratives and they should have challenges that you can fail at without having your character killed. Because then they would fullfill what I really want from a game experience: Play-pretending to be someone else and having an emotional experience while mastering the underlying and invisible game in order to develop the character I am pretending to be and, ultimately, myself.

[skaruts]

Funny how 2 years later we still see this happening so much. Thief 4 is coming to hold your hand through a thieving "experience" this time around. And everyone will buy this leash, and they will continue to think this is the way to make games.

[NathanBenedict]

 "I like to respect my players' time."
So I'm going to have them stand still for 2 hours waiting for a cloud to collect a secret. Seems fair.

[zappandy]

3 years since this video was released, almost a decade dealing with these issues and the mainstream industry unfortunately hasn't changed that much. I will never get tired of watching this once in a while, it's extremely relevant. As usual Jon shows how eloquent and smart he is. Despite our disagreements, Jon's views only enrich the industry!

[thecousinbellic]

What I find more striking isn't how much games hold your hand, but how forgiving they are compared to their predecessors. I personally die as often in the recent games than I used to in older ones. It's just that you aren't as heavily penalised if you do, making it easier for me to wrap them up. And that's when I begin to think, "boy, these games used to go on forever, and now they're over before I know it" I guess it's one of those changes you neither embrace nor reject

[georgekent]

Listen to what he's saying. It's not that games shouldn't be fun, it's that you can't calculate fun. What you can calculate is a player - game relationship that teaches you as you go, and that's what he's saying is the best way to design a game. He wants you to finish the game having learned how to play it by playing it, not by being walked through it.

Braid is hard, and Japanese games might be difficult too, but it's a different kind of difficulty. If the game is hard to master or solve, but the player understands what needs to be done, that's good design. If the player has no idea what to do, and has to spend hours running around and doing random stuff until they get it right arbitrarily or look up the answer online, that's bad design.

That kind of design might make the game difficult, but it's not fair to the player. Often solution to a problem will be something that doesn't make sense. For example, in a lot of games the player can't progress until they talk to a certain person or walk through a certain door. That doesn't make sense in the real world, so if the player misses that, they're stuck. It's like removing one piece of a puzzle. You'll never finish that puzzle until you look under the couch and it happens to be there, it's not actually hard, it's just frustrating, and appears hard.

Braid on the other hand, will toss you onto a screen. You can see almost everything laid out in front of you. Then the new mechanic of the level becomes apparent as you play, the game doesn't have to tell you every scenario you can use it in. You know what you're trying to do, but just not how to do it. That's something a player can work with, and when they figure it out, it has a feeling of success and triumph. You don't get that feeling from looking it up online, you feel like you cheated or like the game cheated you.

This is what's so weird about many big name Japanese games - notice I'm talking about BIG NAME games, and not all of them. They hold the player's hand through much of the game's obvious basics, so when you get tired of reading menus and skip through something important, you can get easily stuck.

It's the opposite in a game like Dark Souls, where the game teaches you once how to play at the very beginning, and then throws you in. There's a very simple goal, and the information is all laid out on screen, so the difficulty doesn't arise from not knowing what to do, but not being able to do it skillfully enough. That's good design, and that's what John Blow is talking about.

[juliankandlhofer]

I'd like us all to pay attention that the player in the Counterstrike footage did not hit a single enemy.

[KevinDrongowskiSmart]

I don't like that they used footage of a Skyward Sword boss where I legitimately had no clue what to do on while he's talking about how Japanese games hold your hand. A far better example would probably be the 30 hour tutorial that was Final Fantasy 13.

[EdwardtheIRISH]

I've said this before there should be a game mode on a lot of games that just turns off tutorial.

[MrSiloterio]

That's why I seriously was been thinking that a medium should branch out from the typical 'video game' terminology. Call it 'interactive art' or 'interactives'. There should certainly spawn a new breed of interactive art that simply exist not ONLY to provide fun but to evoke as well.