http://web.archive.org/web/20080219094358/http://www.gamehelper.com/magazine/features/jonathan-blow-says-fuck-that

Thanks, that clears it up for me.

This brings to mind Charles Schulz and his Peanuts strip. Some in the cartooning and comics field feel that his allowing Snoopy and Charlie Brown and the other characters to be used in Met Life commercials, toys, plush dolls, bedding, and so on has diminished what they feel is otherwise a great achievement and legacy. The specific argument I read used Bill Watterson in contrast for the way he handled Calvin and Hobbes.

But I have no problem with the basic idea of buying ad space and doing interviews (I am already doing interviews, and will be buying what little ad space I can afford). It just has to be done in a way that doesn’t betray the game.

What if a designer creates a game precisely the way he wanted from the outset, and completes it in a form that satisfies the design. At this point, with completed game, he then decides he wants to increase the probability of making money off it, so he decides to market it, buying add space, doing interviews and what have you (I’m really not sure what goes into marketing your average game).

Is the integrity of the game compromised in this scenario? If so, in what way? Or is your point merely that the common marketing practices in the games industry are, in and of themselves, a negative item?

I think we should keep in mind that Jon is primarily sharing his personal opinions with us. He’s looking for answers, so are we. On his path so far he has found some really interesting things. But what is right for him does not necessarily have to be the right for me, or my games, nor is it some absolute truth. I find Jon’s idea very inspiring, but at the end I have to find my own way, right? I feel he’s helping me in my own search by questioning old concepts and proposing new ones, even though some thoughts he’s provoking are painful.

Anyway, this is probably obvious to most of us when reading/listening to Jon, but I have to regularly remind myself.

Great work, Jon. Keep going.

When I talk about “expecting more from the player”, I don’t necessarily mean difficulty. It can be anything — expecting thoughtfulness, curiosity, creativity. But, expecting *something*.

I think meaningful games have to challenge players, in the same sense that other media present challenges. Obviously the sort of challenge presented by a gunfight is much different than the type provided by a morally unfamiliar situation. The challenge of the gunfight in a game as you point out is generally not a real challenge, but it is also often not a meaningful challenge even if it is difficult. The challenge of a puzzle in general is no more meaningful: solving an instance of 3SAT is if anything more meaningless, regardless of NP-hardness or whatever. So I think it is erroneous to put the blame on difficulty.

The interest of the puzzles in games like Mr. Heart Loves You are obviously not derived from difficulty. The challenge of the game is really only incidentally related to the fact that you need to complete the puzzles to proceed. You could make “beating” such a game arbitrarily easy without affecting the relevant challenge. The point of gating the player’s progress is to enhance the real challenge not by making the game “harder” but by changing the way the player views the puzzles.

So I agree that the typical notion of “challenge” in a game is very flawed, but I think I have a different reason (or at least different than what you have articulated here). Mainstream games represent a bad way of challenging the player not because they are easy, but because the challenge in the game is progression itself. Progression can line up nicely with a more meaningful challenge, for example in a puzzle game where every puzzle forces the player to learn something new, but it is essentially never meaningful on its own.

In general, I think disentangling progression in a game from the substantive challenge is a good way to reconcile the conflict between challenge and accessibility. A hard game need not be such that getting to the end is difficult, any more than it is difficult to get to the end of a hard novel. I guess games without progression are common, but such games in my perception tend to try to avoid being challenging. Passage is a good example (although did not enjoy it for a variety of reasons) of a game which tries to present a challenge without gated progression. Even the mechanics of a game like DMC could be the basis of a challenging experience, but instead they are imposed somewhat arbitrarily on a gated progression which for most players replaces rather than enhances the potentially interesting underlying challenge. I have not played Space Giraffe, but it looks as though its format gets more directly at the same general type of challenge (I do not mean at all to compare merit or depth by that comment; I have no idea).

Sorry for such a tangential, long post which amounts mostly to getting my thoughts in order…