Interesting article about game design from J Blow

[Ozymandiaz]

Found this one:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/15/jonathan-blow-interview-social-game-designers-goal-is-to-degrade-the-players-quality-of-life

I am not too familiar with J Blow (only played Braid without reading up on or around it), but he does have some good points about the intent about certain games.

[Entrenched Homperson]

I disagreed with alot of what he said about the whole "Social Responsibility" of games. I don't see why it's evil for one company to design a game for profit and better for another to design a game for love of their work. I'm sure every developer strikes the balance in between, see sawing between the two. I know if I designed a game, I would make it something I would like to play, and something I would hope others where going to enjoy. I'd probably go about it differently if it where some stupid facebook flash game. I can't believe this guy even compares his work to those things.

[Ozymandiaz]

I disagreed with alot of what he said about the whole "Social Responsibility" of games. I don't see why it's evil for one company to design a game for profit and better for another to design a game for love of their work. I'm sure every developer strikes the balance in between, see sawing between the two. I know if I designed a game, I would make it something I would like to play, and something I would hope others where going to enjoy. I'd probably go about it differently if it where some stupid facebook flash game. I can't believe this guy even compares his work to those things.

Well, we do live in a monatary systems where making a profit in mandatroy in order to survive (and thats imo unfrotunate). But when you have profit as your motive (the prime underlying motive), you more often then not get "soul less" games whos only intent is to sell a large volume as quickly as possible with disregard if its actually good or not (E.eg most new games today from big publishers like EA). And the more of them you can push out quickly the better (E.g. the rapid Modern Warefare and Call of Duty titles comming out every few months, adding nothing new tothe game other them some pretty new graphics or some trivial new elements more fitting an expansion or simply just a patch (tho expansion on "cartrigde" consoles is not that easy I guess).

I think that is a bad trend in gaming, because it gives me nothing, only makes me waste money on the same stuff over and over again. Persoanlly I would not call it evil, because evil and good is relaitve, and more importently this corporate behavior is a symptom of our social and economic systems (but that is a whole other disucsion) .

Suffice it to say I dislike such games and i think its obvious when I play them what the motive behind them was. I bring in Arcen a lot in these forums and such discussions, but I think its a good example. When I play AI War I feel the motive behind the game is the game itself, then profit secondary. To give the player a great strategy game, not to rip me off for flashy graphics and to jsut sell more on the same title, like Supreme Commander 2 did.

[Entrenched Homperson]

And as a player, I like to give back to Arcen as much as possible.

As far as developers like EA and Ubisoft, I can understand why this is happening, and the games are still enjoyable and worth the money (to some extent). When these developers employs hundreds of people it has to output equal to the demand of all those workers. So they have to churn out a new game every 8 months or they will go out of buisness. Like you said, Ozy, you can tell what games where made for profit and decide whether you want it at the cash register, and get however much enjoyment you want out of it accordingly. I still enjoyed Halo: Reach, if it broke I might even get around to buying a second copy (Not likely though), but it's not a critical part of my game collection.

The games that you really enjoy are the ones that the developers pour their soul into. AI War is one of those games, and all it's success and pitfalls comes from that. Its why it has such a hardcore devoted community. People can respond to that level of depth in the work.

But as far as even go so far as to reject games made for profit and not for the gamers just because, when they can still be entertaining and good games (Like a big budget film). It really comes down to the line between Corporate and Independent. We should actually be happy that these lines have been drawn, because it means the legitimizing as a medium of video games as much as film or literature. It's nonsense to deny the art in alot of video games. Dead Space was big budget, but that's probably my favorite first person shooter of all time. With these lines being drawn, it enables a diversity of experience that can only brighten and expand our world, unlike as he says corrupt it in some fashion.

[BobTheJanitor]

I disagreed with alot of what he said about the whole "Social Responsibility" of games. I don't see why it's evil for one company to design a game for profit and better for another to design a game for love of their work. I'm sure every developer strikes the balance in between, see sawing between the two. I know if I designed a game, I would make it something I would like to play, and something I would hope others where going to enjoy. I'd probably go about it differently if it where some stupid facebook flash game. I can't believe this guy even compares his work to those things.

The interviewer brought it up, I don't think he was specifically comparing his own work to it. I disagree with Blow on a lot of things, and I find him (and his game) to have an air of superiority and artistic meaning over a core of nothing much. But on what he said about social networking games, I find myself nodding right along. The games are clearly designed with every trick in the book to get people addicted and to get people investing too much time into them. They use the same evil tricks as MMOs but without giving any semblance of fun back. I've seen people who play farmville all the time, and it's just terrible. I was not at all surprised to find out that they used to get people to install spyware to get more farm bucks or whatever they call their game currency. That's just par for the course for those games. It's not at all about providing a player with an enjoyable experience, it's about getting them hooked on your digital crack and then dangling it one step ahead of them forever.

Edit: That was pretty negative on Blow now that I read back through it. I will say that I thought Braid was really fun from a gameplay perspective. The way that it presented itself as being deep and meaningful and artsy is what I dislike, because I feel like it falls flat there.

[Entrenched Homperson]

I'm saying I like or support those FB games, I'm just saying it's people's decision to play them, like crack. And because it's all mental it's there decision to keep playing them over and over.

[zespri]

I actually have not read the article far enough to find out what they discuss about the social games. The beginning of the article has put me off. He constantly saying things like "the modern games are better designed then old games" and "the genres become refined" but he doesn't offer any evidence of this. How exactly the design is better? What is more refined about a modern game compared to Pole Position, etc. And then he goes on talking about how the witness is going to be modelled after Myst. So I'm assuming that Myst was a lucky exception back these times, huh?

Long story short at this point I lost all my interest in this article.

[BobTheJanitor]

He does have something of a point about how game design has evolved. His example using super meat boy was actually pretty good. From a purely technical standpoint, something like that could have been made in the era of SNES games. But it wasn't, because SMB has over a decade of gameplay evolution behind it. Back then platformers were relatively easy to get through and you got a limited number of lives. It took years of experimenting with things before someone realized that making a game incredibly difficult but also giving you unlimited attempts to retry a level might be fun. It's easy to look back now and say that seems obvious, but most breakthroughs seem obvious in hindsight. Or, closer to our own hearts, look at AI War. It will run on hardware that is ancient and weak by modern standards, but no one was making games like AI War in the Windows 98 days. That took a developer sitting down and looking at everything that had been done over the years in the RTS/4x/Tower Defense/etc. genres and mixing all those ideas up in a bowl along with a dash of his own genius and turning it into something amazing.

Also, Myst was another example of a breakthrough game for its time. Right after it came out, there were tons and tons of copycats trying to recapture its magic (and its revenues). It was helped by a bit of a technical breakthrough as well, of course. That was right when CD-Rom games were hitting the market, and they suddenly had that massive (heh) 650 MBs to fill with pretty graphics and full motion video with real actors. It seems passe now, of course, but at the time it was pretty amazing. And of course Myst was just perfecting a genre. It took the old standard adventure game type that had been around since the days of ADVENT (the oldest of the old schools), up through all the Sierra games, and so on, and used modern technology to make for an enjoyable, immersive experience. That's a bit of a different example though, because it's not the type of game that could have been made on older technology but with more gameplay advancement.

[zespri]

You see, you give proper examples of how the design evolved. He is just repeating again and again that it has evolved. That's the difference.

[BobTheJanitor]

That's why my BS is of a higher grade than J. Blow's BS.

I hate reading interviews with him, because it's full of him saying 'it's like, you know, sort of, like, man, stuff!' He sounds more like a guy about to offer me a bong hit rather than someone expounding on actual concepts.

[Ozymandiaz]

That's why my BS is of a higher grade than J. Blow's BS.

I hate reading interviews with him, because it's full of him saying 'it's like, you know, sort of, like, man, stuff!' He sounds more like a guy about to offer me a bong hit rather than someone expounding on actual concepts.

[Entrenched Homperson]