Game designer Jonathan Blow explains why it's a bad goal to make players just feel smart. Tip me: ko-fi.com/blowfan Clipped from: • Talk with Jonathan Blo... Also this but it's a dead link now: • Video
The best example of this is those misleading mobile game ads where they show people failing ridiculously easy puzzles. It exploits human psychology and is entirely a scam.
“This game makes me hate myself” is one of the top comments in one walkthrough video for The Witness, so Jonathan’s philosophy here certainly isn’t for everyone. The ideal is sufficient challenge, following the psychology concept of ‘Flow’: if the challenge is low and the ability is high, players get bored. If the challenge is high and the ability is low, players get anxious (though for puzzles games I think this manifests as frustration, and if you’ve got a childhood of feeling stupid in math class, there’s a re-emergence of some very destruction feelings of shame). When the challenge matches the ability though … yum. The impossibility is to make a puzzle flow for everyone, given everyone’s different abilities. I think the ideal could be to make the player feel smart by having them bypass a puzzle’s counterintuitive catch, whether big or small
Zelda games are awful. It had 3d models that were impressive back in the N64 days. Everyone now has to constantly praise it like a spell they’re casting because if that praise stops, no one would think those games were particularly “masterful”. The braindead baby gameplay, faux sentimentality and “world building” in the current games make me want to vomit
But Zelda puzzles are largely easy because if they weren’t, many players may get stuck and quit. The design is for the whole family, and the aim is to get as many players to the end as possible. Puzzle-solving is just one aspect of gameplay in the masterful pioneering design behind Zelda’s much-loved recipe
It's funny because I haven't seen a game that people describe with "this game makes the player feel smart" that is "dumb" or "lets you win" like he describes, every time I saw this description in a game it was a game that did exactly what he said is the right thing to do: teach the player the systems and throw difficult puzzles at them.
i love to feel stupid, that's honestly my favorite thing about games. and in action games i love to feel like it's my fault when i die. i realize i'm in the minority here though
He's so obtuse. That's WHAT people mean when they say the game makes them feel smart. A game isn't going to make you feel smart if everything it has you doing is stupid. This is typical Blow: completely misunderstand a phenomenon and then pontificate on it endlessly even though he would have actually agreed with the sentiment if he wasn't autistic didn't take every single word in a phrase literally.
I would neither agree, nor disagree with you on his interpretation of that specific phrase, but I will say that I've seen a trend over the last 15-20 years of games getting less and less challenging. A lot of game designers assume that their audience can only handle a certain level of challenge/complexity, and design their game to make sure everyone can beat it (a "participation trophy"/"everyone is a winner" type of design). I'm seeing a resurgence of big studios making more challenging, deep games again, but there was a good while where things were getting very dumbed down. In fact, most media, including games, movies, books, TV shows, etc, are just becoming shallower and shallower mimicries of media that was created in times where people were treated with more respect and intellect. Rather than having some deeper value, most media today cuts out the real meaning from art that used to have a profound meaning; in the mainstream, at least. I could list examples but I'm sure you can already think of a few yourself. I don't doubt that you would agree with anything I'm saying, but I just thought I'd contribute to the discussion and clarify that I think Jon is mainly upset about this modern landscape, and not so much with that phrase specifically.
@@nuderedfinger Ironically, I wonder if the reason some people think "doom eternal" is boring because they never played it on nightmare. Or maybe the art of perfecting a skill like "not dying in doom" is actually repetitive and boring, unless you like honing skills. And by some people, I mean Johnathan Blow.
