Jonathan Blow: Video Games and the Human Condition

Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) has an interesting rant on social video games: [VIDEO] The gist being that games like Farmville are A/B tested to maximize addictiveness and profit, rather than maximizing fun.

He is the exact opposite of a "hipster". He is a very smart (and in my opinion humble) guy. I don't know where his portrayal as an arrogant guy comes from. He held an amazing talk / presentation at Rice University called "Video Games and The Human Condition": [VIDEO]

There are all kinds of ethical ways to get your most dedicated customers to "pay more" (what's the MBA-speak term for "trying to get everyone to pay exactly as much as they're comfortable with"? I can't remember). There are pre-order bonuses, special editions, purely cosmetic items that don't change the gameplay, mission packs, "mission pack sequels," actual sequels, "pay what you want," donations... It gets "unsavory" when you're focusing more on designing the perfect skinner box than actually creating a game. I think games are all about the feelings and mental states you get into when you play them. An action game gets your adrenaline pumping, competitive ones especially so. Strategy games require incredibly deep thought to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Puzzle games really stretch your brain to the limits of logic (or maybe they're just bullshit). From my experience, the games that people malign when they talk about mobile games and "social games," on the other hand, promote nothing but anxiety, and use it as a tool to wedge themselves into your subconscious so that you will fork over more cash into their creator's pockets. See the common practice of games based around waiting for something to happen, and bugging you with an alert whenever it does. I don't think very well of people that create things (I won't dignify them by calling them games) that do nothing but prey on anxiety, compulsion, and our attractions to flashing lights. It's the difference between creating s

I think that many of us with addictive personalities it is difficult not to be 100% committed to something. So for myself it was a goal of shifting my interest away from gaming and initially towards programming. The best wake up call for me was realising that my focus on games was really just manipulation. I would watch Jonathan Blow's talk on Video Games and the Human Condition now. When you understand that you are being completely manipulated it becomes easier to do something differently. Another idea is to focus on the wasted effort. If you channelled all this time into creating something - your own game for instance. You would have something tangible at the end of it. Good luck. [VIDEO]

I'd argue that all 'games' are about manipulating attention - its just a question of what means they use to do so. Game design is really a sort of meta-game about designing systems that effect the behavior of players. Consider: Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design ( [LINK] ) I'm fully with you on the notion that we shouldn't be manipulating players life like farmville. Johnathan blow put on a great talk about games and the human condition where he covers this aspect quite scathingly: [VIDEO] To completely ignore this aspect is to develop a game with no real-stickyness factor. Money aside, don't you want a game that people enjoy playing? The entire point of an MMO is to have a large reoccurring user-base. There is an art to it, and getting it right can make really powerful games: [LINK] For board games like chess, much of the appeal for the average player is that you get to sit down with a friend and compete, and in doing so the 'intellectual nature' of the game ends up pulling them in for the long term. Perhaps the answer to the meta-game of stickiness is to create a community around the game in a similar vein to the one from the ants ai challenge's forums. Were I to work on this project, I'd make a strong push toward git-like integration ala the work done behind KhanAcademy's live editor like discussed in this talk: [LINK] . - being able to share code behaviors with your team-mates (you are going to implement a guilds system, no?) and encourage discussions about behaviors at

I've followed Jonathan Blow for a while. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion. But he has given some amazing talks. [LINK] <-compares games to televison [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]

I see a lot of parallels between gambling and video games, specifically in how video game reward mechanisms resemble gambling with the way the brain responds to intense situations and risk/reward scenarios—simply put, you can get quite a rush from either, and there's an entire industry built up around both to profit from this. I'd love to see a thorough comparison between these two. I think there's a lot of room to explore similarity in stigmas around addiction and indulgence in these pastimes, how people justify it, and the addiction mechanisms at play. Maybe there's even an exploration of healthy gambling habits that mirror healthy entertainment habits? I'd love to read about this stuff. Jonathan Blow has a great presentation on the mechanisms of video game addiction and the role of the game designer in building ethically responsible games [0]. I highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in exploring this line of thinking. [0]: [VIDEO]

My wife and I spent over seven person-years building stuff for education in the 1990s on our own dime (funded by unrelated consulting) -- hardly anyone cared: [LINK] No doubt we could have done a better job on that software (including about marketing and financing). But puzzling over that situation, to try to understand what went wrong (despite magazine articles back then going on about the need for better educational software), I read widely in the alternative educational field. I discovered many surprising things about the differences between "education" and "schooling" (including regarding self-development, citizenship, employability, and obedience). One big clue though should have been reading Seymour Papert writing about how almost all schools took his Lego/Logo system and turned a playful fun open-ended educational experience into a structured unpleasant one. This book by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto explains why hardly anyone cares whether kids learn, especially page 363-365 (power divided by 22) which explains twenty-two groups involved in education none of whom benefit by kids actually learning anything: [LINK] See also by Gatto: [LINK] "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the M