Jonathan Blow on The Player Experience

[@TomBrienProfessional]

I love this advice and he's generally right, but its a mistake to lock the credits behind 100 puzzles, or to treat them as a reward. Credits are only really ever used for business and career reasons. Players practically never USE them for anything. They're kind of an outside-of-game thing like adjusting your accessibility settings. So they should be simply accessible for anyone doing research. If someome applied for a job with 10 years at "Thekla Inc" on their resume, I wouldn't know that they worked on The Witness, and in the end I think Jon's attitude to this is a net negative for his team at no real gain for the players.

[@foldupgames]

I think it's enough of a trade-off to have a skip button.

[@SR-ti6jj]

The gayer experience

[@anon_y_mousse]

I don't agree regarding the game credits, but as long as they're not shoved in your face at the start it's good. Preferably, a game should have a menu item to view the credits and otherwise never show them, even at the end of the game. I'd like it if every game at the end would show some sort of celebration or fireworks or whatever, something I want to see when I win. Also, this is sort of a non sequitur, but I feel like Jon is the evil version of me, but on the gaming side of the industry. I'm also writing my own programming language to make my side of things easier, and I've been working on it for a while and haven't released it, yet it actually works. I've seen videos of people using Jai, I know it works, yet it hasn't been released. And if anyone is curious why I say he's the evil version, it's because he has no hair. Everybody knows that bald guys are the villains in old movies.

[@raldbthar]

The guy made 2(two) games

[@thebreg]

and half of a programming language

[@raldbthar]

@@thebreg that's impressive, but has nothing to do with gaming

[@thebreg]

@ my point exactly

[@hundvd_7]

@@raldbthar And one of them has _very_ spotty player experience. Which is the reason it's only got a 85% on Steam despite such niche and acclaimed games always getting Overwhelming Positive ratings. For a lot of people, said experience turned out great. But for a lot of them, it was absolute garbage. Which is 100% the game design's fault.

[@nexovec]

firstly, no, and second, that alone is like 15 years of experience. Also how can you unironically type that jai isn't relevant to gaming?

[@NIMPAK1]

Maybe the guy that made puzzles where you literally have to do nothing but wait shouldn't be talking about player experience.

[@lucy-pero]

what are you referring to? both his games have great player experience in my experience. I've felt so good and satisfied and calm while playing his games and that's very rare

[@Contemplative05]

Isn't that quite literally an optional puzzle that's awarded to enthusiast players who 100% mastered all the game by finishing the endgame? It's not like the game asks anyone to do it if they don't want to, and it doesn't even do anything important players would be seeking except making the player satisfied. If it doesn't satisfy you, then isn't it good you can ignore the puzzle? I think this is a nitpick among other more prevalent concerns you can make criticisms on about The Witness. I see the intent though, it kinda serves to force you to go through the entire journey of that video in one go, so I can see the reason they put it there (even if I wish I wasn't locked in a puzzle so I could rewind at times).

[@joaopedrorodrigues6820]

I was finding strange hearing him talk like an actual human being and not offending anyone directly. And then it all clicked: he was being interviewed, he just acts stupid with his twitch chat

[@nexovec]

Oh come on. It's evil to have my own logo on my video game now? I get that Jon's going for an extremely calm and minimal player experience like he did with witness, and I know why he does that, and that the logo might distract from that, but this is obviously a total exception.

[@rodrigomendes1980]

He might be thinking of exagerated logos. There are cases where we spend like 10-15 seconds looking at non skippable random logos and videos. And after watching all of that the game goes to a loading screen, and all that previous time was wasted since it didn't even start loading anything. I am guessing like 1-3 seconds of logos or random stuff would be ok. But I would say what least start loading stuff instead of wasting that time doing nothing (loading wise)

[@grimmingpitb461]

you can do what you want. Yes branding is not about user experience.

[@Vladislav888]

>It's evil to have my own logo on my video game now? It depends. If it shows during the loading screen that is unskippable anyway or it's a part of a loading animation, like loading spinner thing - it's fine. If it shows at the beginning of a game as a cutscene - imo it's bad even if it's skippable. You're wasting my time to show me, someone who already bought your game, an ad. As long as it doesn't lengthen the path from clicking on an icon to the gameplay - it's fine.

[@Muskar2]

When I was a young gamer, I used to explicitly find the intro logo videos and delete them so the startup of the game would be faster. So it actually did disturb my experience. Hiding it in the end-game credits is obviously a little extreme and ideological

[@nexovec]

@@Muskar2 In most games nowadays they only appear for like 3 seconds and you can skip with a spacebar. Then it takes like 10 minutes to load the game(looking at you, rust and tarkov)