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No lie, I was watching this clip thinking the exact same thing. So obnoxious.
Billy's less of a prick now, tbf.
This is the definition Google gave me: "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed."
That's absolutely Jonathon Blow.
Blow is a huge asshole, very unpleasant to deal with, and one of the biggest, most pretentious dick around.
His twitter summed up is: "I have no experience or knowledge about this, therefore it's shit".
His twitter summed up is: "I have no experience or knowledge about this, therefore it's shit".
I'm basically getting all my information on this guy from this thread, but I love how highly he thinks of himself, yet his idea of streaming is to point a camera at a television hilariously off center with an always present reflection for four hours, I've never seen a lower quality stream.
I liked braid and the witness, but only as games, not really interested in reading more into them than that.
Blow thinks he's god's gift to game design and that any way of designing games that isn't exactly according to his philosophy is wrong. He thinks his farts smell like roses.
He's also a misogynist and a complete fucking idiot. I don't think I'll support his next game, even if I did like Braid and The Witness.
He's also a misogynist and a complete fucking idiot. I don't think I'll support his next game, even if I did like Braid and The Witness.
What mess? Him not liking the game?
This seems more like people not being able to deal with someone else not loving their favourite game and Undertale fans are particularly annoying.
Any receipts for this? Given his other comments, I wouldn't be surprised, but curious to see what exactly he said.
Blow is brilliant but not sure if I could stand watching him for such a long time. But yeah, great developer and extremely smart dude.
I was thinking Joe Rogan, but this is definitely better.
Fuck Jon Blow.
There was a youtube series where he was just talking to people/his family about his life and things and it was pretty nice from what I seen of it. Still a pretty weird dude, but he didn't seem so insufferably douchey. I could be wrong based on other replies to that post though.
I'll see if I can find it. I was so disappointed when he turned out to be a far right nut case.
That's hilarious. Blow is so far up his own ass that it's difficult to sympathize with him on anything regarding game design he hates.
I'm not really sure I understand the point of the thread, but that isn't to say that Jon Blow has never said an interesting thing nor has moments in his stream where he is entertaining, just that the video linked in OP is basically 4 hours of a person playing a videogame. It's not made any better by the fact that the game being played is relatively boring to watch in this context. This isn't a breakdown of BotW as a game, or a critical analysis, it's a dude playing a game for 4 hours. You're gonna have to weigh the value of that yourself.
If you actually *want* to see Jon Blow be entertaining or informative, by all means, watch some of his speeches or game design-related discussions on YouTube. Learn about his programming language, Jai, or the compiler / game he is writing to support it. But don't expect anything special out of the video linked in OP.
If you actually *want* to see Jon Blow be entertaining or informative, by all means, watch some of his speeches or game design-related discussions on YouTube. Learn about his programming language, Jai, or the compiler / game he is writing to support it. But don't expect anything special out of the video linked in OP.
Typical free speech bullshit regarding, I wanna say it was Milo? I would need to double check.
Said women were not biologically engineered to be engineers or programmers or something. Again I would need to look up the exact quote.
I only learned about the covid thing from this thread.
Jon is short for Jonathan. What exactly are you asking?
edit: Oh. I get it! No, I assure you he would be using his name for an account, like he does everywhere.
In seriousness, I think Jonathan does situate a lot of his critiques of games he's playing (in this video and in general) specifically in the context of his being a game designer. Which he definitely is! So that's fair! But when he's vocally criticizing elements of design with a tone like they were designed 'wrong', or that their design is insufficient to their intention, it pushes a video like this from let's-play to an object of critical analysis. He's making arguments about how the game has been constructed and the ways in which that construction is wanting.
He does, but there's a bit of a difference between playing a game specifically with an eye to critique it, and just playing it and occasionally getting frustrated. It makes sense that many of his frustrations are going to vent out through a narrower view of what is "right" and "wrong" from a game design perspective, and different people will probably find that either illuminating in some way, or downright obnoxious. It doesn't help things that out of the hundreds of games he's probably played (and recorded himself playing) it's the critical darling of Zelda; that alone is enough to bring out posters who aren't particularly interested in hearing what he'd have to say. But, he plays a lot of videogames, and most of them it's just as uneventful as any other streamer playing a game. *Sometimes* it results in a more colorful breakdown, if he has a particular bone to pick.
That being the case, looking through the video (there's no way I'm going to watch 4 hours of it), this is not a video filled to the brim with vibrant commentary about Nintendo's design here. Most of this is Link running around climbing on stuff, which is about what you'd expect to see from anyone playing. This is mostly a response to people asking for highlights of the "critical points" of the video -- I have no idea what they are, where they are, or whether they're even good points. That would have been the job of the person presenting the video.
Oh yes this. The attitude I hate most in the game-industry, that is highly prevalent. The, "Every game is failing at all these things, while we are doing perfect". I've always liked just appreciating what everyone else does right and being more critical on my own work, trying to push it further.
I can only get like two tweets because thankfully discord previews don't disappear even though a tweet gets deleted. But he had a pretty long conspiracy thread with tons of replies to people back on March 18th which he all deleted after the blowback about his conspiracies.
*sighs*
Oh Twitter. You do a good job of making me lose respect for people I've previously liked.
no? you didn't watch the video. he went in from second 1 with a "this game better be the stuff of gods" mentality and immediately took a dislike to it when anything didn't meet his crazy expectations.
it's perfectly reasonable to not like it and many don't, what isn't reasonable is going into it wanting to hate it and then going "all this game of the year shit for it? nah uh. let's be real here."
all sounds pretty similar to the botw video here
It's textbook anti-playing, where like you said they go in wanting to hate the game. So the player intentionally fails at puzzles or intentionally pretends that the game isn't giving clear instructions. Or the player moves the camera to weird, illogical places and says things like "this makes no sense". You go into a fight and do nothing to defend yourself and claim the game did nothing for you in that instance. The player opens a menu or two and immediately gives up on what they're looking at rather than discerning what's in front of them. The worst part about an anti-play is how unaware the player is that what they're doing is extremely obvious. Like a five-year-old attempting to lie to a parent about who ate the cookies when they're covered in crumbs.
Wasn't trying to be reductive or critical of it, I'm just saying I see people call the witness this masterpiece, best game ever made, etc, and I try playing and I just don't see it, all it appeared to be was just an okay puzzle game with the main gimmick being you walk through a pretty world from puzzle to puzzle and nothing really beyond that. It seems like a fine game but I don't really get why it's revered as a masterpiece by some.
I started calling The Witness "Myst for Assholes" years ago and I stand by that.
Welp.I can only get like two tweets because thankfully discord previews don't disappear even though a tweet gets deleted. But he had a pretty long conspiracy thread with tons of replies to people back on March 18th which he all deleted after the blowback about his conspiracies.
I love The Witness. But I follow him on Twitter and every time one of his tweets comes up in my timeline, which is VERY rare, he always comes off as a really annoying person. I realize this is a really petty thing to say but I can't help it
I mean he's a guy that made 1 good game in Braid and then The Witness which was bleh.
And he's criticizing Nintendo on game design...
I think pretentious fits.
There has to be better ways to handle this than saying people aren't allowed to criticise design decisions until you've made X games that I approve of.
Not that I found anything remarkable skimming through the video or anything, but I can't disagree that the Great Plateau insta death zone is more ambiguous than it needed to be, for example.
The Witness is an absolute masterpiece but Blow has been insufferable for years and the "philosophy" bullshit in the game is as pretentious as it gets.
What is this even supposed to mean?
What is this even supposed to mean?
It's not THAT he is criticizing its HOW. Like he can't put the metal door across a chasm because he's at the wrong angle, and he says something like "Come on guys we learned this in 2005" something to that effect. Oh we learned that you are bad at games and don't realize the door is orienting to you and you need to stand somewhere else?
I'm pretty sure that poster meant JONATHAN BLOW needs to stop using the word pretentious because he doesn't know what it means, because Blow calls the Zelda puzzle-solved jingle "pretentious" in the video.
Jonathan Blow got a ton of praise for making a game where the premise is exploring an island and solving puzzles.