Jon Blow interview, widely shared all across the internet. Once again feeling so close to his vision and processes, I would have probably done what he did after Braid except buying an electric car: I would have made me a prefab green house instead. But, same idea.
What the article and comments highlight one more time is the complete lack of understanding of how games are made and what is important when building them. The Witness’ dev blog doesn’t spend a lot of time on the story but quite a lot describing the world editor, cube map filtering techniques, puzzle count and architecture. Full-on game design.
I think people freak out on him talking about the juvenile, silly and intellectually lazy state of the game culture because the hardcore market is shrinking pretty fast and that makes a lot of people cranky. Less and less people are enjoying the juvenile and silly on consoles. So many mobile games are silly and juvenile but people play a few minutes here and there, it’s less embarrassing. I much prefer when people say “yes, it’s juvenile so what” than people feeling offended by this statement, kind of in denial.
Today’s game culture is silly but it doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun with it, nobody said that. I bought Just Cause 2 and I’d like to get Saint Row the Third because I know I’ll have a good time but that doesn’t mean that I have to love it to death. I still haven’t play these games and don’t feel like I failed at life not playing them either. Chill.
I didn’t like everything in Braid, haven’t finished it but I liked a lot of stuff. Brilliant stuff. Synapse-creating stuff.
I don’t get that part of the game culture where you have to vouch for everything or otherwise you are pointed out as a complete pretentious douchebag. If you like and search for different games, trying to expand this game culture, you are a complete pretentious douchebag too.
If it doesn’t show how juvenile we are, I don’t know what does.
And everybody writing about games for a living, fucking please: stop focusing on story in games. Just stop. That’s not what it’s about.