The Future of Gaming Panel feat. Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow, Susan O'Connor, Greg Kasavin, Amy Hennig and Alex Wilmer on the Future of Gaming.

[@jakebruce11]

One of these humans is not like the others...

[@HaMMeR33661]

As a response to 24:00 and onwards... After seeing his progress on the new programming language Jai in the last 5 years, I think his efforts are amazing. As you can see even here, most programmers and technical people hear Blow's "Software is terrible, most of the time we're just getting mad and dealing with problems that we shouldn't have to deal with" and nod. He is so on point with every technical detail that it's ridiculous -- look at any of his other talks online. Software today is ridiculously low-quality, slow and buggy and I'm looking forward to seeing how his efforts to mitigate that turn out in the end.

[@mjthebest7294]

The creators of my two absolute favourite games of all times (The Witness & Soul Reaver) in one place?? I can't believe it, too much power!!

[@molewizard]

They all seem to hate the chairs.

[@stacymitchell1890]

7:00

[@alexandersemionov5790]

One of them is from Big bang theory.... literally Sheldon

[@gd7681]

Incredibly boring intro. Jump to 7:00 for the important bit

[@Marius-vw9hp]

I dont get it. Jonathan Blow is always talking about doing creative stuff, things never done before, being uncommercial. But his games are the most typical, tried out copies of concept of all of indiegames. His flagship title Braid was a 2d platformer/puzzle. That is probably, historically speaking, the least creative, most overused concept of all concepts. He isnt exactly Chris Crawford, spending 14 years of his life on something so radical it never gets finnished and ruining his career. He doesnt take any risks. I dont get why he gets to talk about originality at all, because he has never done anything original himself.

[@peacku]

His titles were not original genres, but their take on mechanics inherent to those genres were definitely original (the time mechanics in Braid or the pattern spotting/intuition puzzles in The Witness). There's a whole spectrum between trying to make the biggest profit out of a game without any soul, and chasing after windmills like Chris Crawford. You can't really blame him for ensuring he can make of living out of his productions by making them commercially viable. He's treated by many like some kind of transcended video game design guru because people just want to feel like something is bigger than themselves, but I have to praise him for bringing a more intellectual approach to an audience that is very driven by respecting standards and best practices and focusing on commercial success rather than video games as an art form. I come from a software engineering background where there's very little room for creativity and self-expression and I feel like many people working in the video game industry do as well, being so closely tied with technology. It helps to listen to these talks and get a different and less scientific perspective on how to approach things.

[@MyAce8]

name an indie puzzle platformer that came out before braid. Oh wait they don't exist because he was the first to do it.