Category Archives: Games as Art

Braid Previews, Game Criticism, Games as Art

Gamer Hate on Braid

16 Comments

There’s a blog called Gamer Hate, run by a blogger with the imposing name of COMMANDERHATE. He was predisposed toward hating on Braid, so I gave him a preview version to play. It turns out that he really likes the game, and he has written a very thoughtful response after playing about halfway through.

He raises the concern that Braid might not find a large audience because it is so different. I think there is a danger of this, but at the same time, Braid’s being different is what makes it worth playing in the first place. Commander Hate had a strong positive reaction to the game; if there are enough people like that, and they tell their friends, then Braid will succeed.

Braid isn’t about trying to appeal to the maximum number of people — it’s about appealing to exactly the right people.

We’ll see how that works out. Then again, my favorite Xbox Live Arcade game of last year was Space Giraffe, which sold quite poorly. So, there is that.

Games as Art, Other Games

Jason Rohrer’s new art game: Gravitation

28 Comments

Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

Gravitation is another art game. It’s good. It’s also easier for new players to “get” than Passage, which hopefully will help more people realize how interesting these games are.

Here is the link.

If you’re not familiar with Jason’s previous game, Passage, you can get it here.

If you’re new to this whole Art Game thing, you may want to check out Rod Humble’s The Marriage and the more-difficult Stars over Half Moon Bay.

It’s great that Jason is managing to create such good games in such a short time period. It makes me wonder if I’ve been going the wrong way working 3 years on Braid.

Game Criticism, Games as Art

Jonathan Blow interviewed by Jeff Lindsay over at Gamehelper.

24 Comments

This email interview of Jonathan Blow was conducted by Jeff Lindsay a few weeks ago. Please disregard the excessive personality-glorifcation at the beginning.

This was a good interview to do, because I managed to clarify several points in my thinking about game development.  Here’s an excerpt:

Marketing is not, in fact, a need.  Getting enough people to buy your game such that you make money is not a need, if you really care about the integrity of what you are making.  That integrity is the primary need; earning enough money through selling that thing, such that you can make more without taking up another job or whatever, is a luxury. People bend to this luxury all the time.  There are lots of ways to rationalize it.  But I think it is usually due to weakness — or rather, lack of commitment to principles.

Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be “professional” about making games.  Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that.  But if you really care about games, it’s a huge mistake, and being “professional” will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.

Appearances, Games as Art

A lecture I just gave at Game Focus Germany.

17 Comments

The title is “Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest.” I gave this lecture on January 24, 2008 at the Game Focus Germany conference. Casey Muratori and Electronic Arts are the absent guest-stars of this lecture. I’m still not sure exactly what this lecture was about, but people seemed to like it all right.

Here is the link to the lecture, which is a .zip file containing PowerPoint slides and an mp3 audio track. The full zip is about 30 megabytes.

This lecture was not a keynote, so its subject matter is smaller in scale than the past couple of lectures I’ve posted.

I like hanging out in Germany. I would definitely come back next year!

Appearances, Game Criticism, Games as Art

Audio and Slides for Jonathan Blow’s lecture at MIGS 2007, “Design Reboot”.

54 Comments

I gave a lecture on November 27th at the Montreal International Games Summit; this lecture was highly critical of current game design practice. It’s about what I think is wrong with the intentions designers have when they set out to create a game, and points out that, as games are played by more people, this will become increasingly societally damaging. It also holds some suggestions about how to create games that are deeper and more meaningful, rather than being throw-away entertainment.

Here’s a zip file containing an audio recording of the lecture, as well as a PowerPoint file containing the slides:

“Design Reboot”, Jonathan Blow, Montreal International Game Summit 2007

Unfortunately there’s nothing embedded in the audio telling you when to flip slides. Hopefully I will make a video version soon, which will be easier for people to deal with (and they won’t need to worry about having slide presentation software installed).

A number of news sites have written stories about it and people have started commenting on what they feel is the validity or the invalidity of the arguments. However, I don’t think this really works, because the news sites are only reporting about 2% of the lecture; the rest of the lecture is very important in terms of providing context and setting examples. So if you are interested in this kind of subject, I recommend you get the full lecture.

Appearances, Braid Development, Braid Previews, Game Festivals, Games as Art

Two Video Lectures about Game Design now available.

21 Comments

Free Play lecture

The first lecture was the keynote at the FreePlay conference, a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne. The lecture is about how to minimize risk and maximize quality as an indie developer, while creating art instead of products; also, it goes pretty deeply into my views about what we could/should be doing as game designers. Sumea, an Australian game developer portal, has posted the video on this page (here is the direct download link; it’s about 92MB).

Indie Game Summit talk (at the GDC)

The second lecture was given in March 2007 at the Indie Games Summit (at the GDC). This talk is more about prototyping; it shares some material with the FreePlay talk, but has a bit more in terms of game demos, and a heavier emphasis on details about Braid (though the version of the game it shows is much earlier). Here is a download link to that one (.mov format). I would provide a Google Video link but WordPress is being lousy and stripping out necessary things from the tags (why would it do such a thing?)

If anyone wants the PowerPoint slides to either of these lectures, leave me a note and I will become motivated to put them up.

Game Criticism, Games as Art, Other Games

In which I compare Space Giraffe to Ulysses.

50 Comments

Space Giraffe

The first time I saw Space Giraffe, I didn’t realize it was an excellent game. Jeff Minter was showing it off at the Game Developer’s Conference, and it looked just like Tempest, except you could push guys off the top of the web sometimes. And Jeff kept saying it wasn’t Tempest. But he was not sufficiently able to communicate to the audience why the game was interesting (which I verified, through several conversations, after his lecture. People pretty much thought it was just Tempest with some psychedelic stuff).

Continue reading In which I compare Space Giraffe to Ulysses. →

Braid Previews, Games as Art

Full text of the Braid interview with Stephen Totilo.

12 Comments

Multiplayer Blog masthead

Stephen has posted the full text of that interview on his Multiplayer Blog. It’s long, but contains a lot of explanation about the ideas behind Braid.

His comments about the interview seem overwhelmingly positive, perhaps embarrassingly so for me. I don’t like publicizing myself, but at the same time, there are ideas about games in there that I want to communicate, and incite discussion on. So maybe just skip the laudatory introduction and go straight to the interview.

Also, the credits for the graphic art are not mentioned anywhere here or the MTV interview so I will point out that the world art is by David Hellman (except that cannon in the World 2 shot which is old, and has been removed from the game in favor of a different cannon) and the character art is by Edmund McMillen.

(Journalists aren’t used to doing credits like that, because usually the credits for a game are like 100 people long.  But on a game with this few people working on it, it feels like an omission to me). 

Braid Previews, Game Criticism, Games as Art

Preview of Braid on MTV News’ site.

1 Comment

MTV News

This preview came from Stephen Totilo’s play-through of a preview version of the game, and a subsequent email interview he conducted with me.

I find his column to be very thoughtful, and the interview questions were very interesting to try and answer. (And I’m not just saying that because of his positive portrayal in the preview).

The full text of this interview has now been made available as well.