> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together.
> I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.
Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
We don’t know that, AFAICT (after reading the Ars article and the Bluesky post). Some of the puzzles are probably reused, and other new ones using the same mechanics may have been written. I’m not sure why you’d so confidently state “Blow didn’t design these puzzles at all”… do you have something against him personally?
The license was for the puzzle mechanics. Probably a few of the tutorial puzzles are the same, but Blow would not copy paste puzzles themselves. That would be both financially and artistically silly.
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:
> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.
Here the post after just for a full picture
> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
I left a link to the exact post I'm referring to with the whole thread available for context.
And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump.
I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.
I think when politics are normal, this is a fine position…. Don’t really care if the author is no new taxes vs expanding safety net.
But, politics have become much more extreme. Imagine your wife or friends parents being deported. It’s absolutely sensical to not support people that are loud about hurting your loved ones.
Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.
I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.
It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
> I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)
It's unfortunate that The Good Scott Adams occasionally gets mixed up with The Evil Scott Adams. It's so ironic that they share a name.
Many people know who the The Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blacks are a hate group"), misogyny, conspiracy theories, anti-health-care-for-poor-people ideology, and Trump boot licking, and he obsessively infuses his MAGA religion into everything he says and does. Enough said.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Good Scott Adams, a pioneer of the Adventure game genre, who is devotedly Christian, but in the kind, uplifting, well meaning, Jimmy Carter kind of way. He's a really nice guy, who did lots of quality groundbreaking work!
He didn't infuse his original games in the 70's and 80's with ham fisted Christian themes or any kind of bigotry. And he did a Bible based game in 2013, but it was clearly labeled as such, not trying to sneak religion in through the back door.
Somebody asked him about his faith, and he sincerely talked about his religion, but didn't evangelize or anything like that, he just talked about himself when asked.
To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?
I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”
Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?
I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?
Thanks for taking the time today!
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | next [–]
You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking!
To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started.
To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator.
I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.
ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]
I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize.
In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes.
Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)
Good stuff. I followed the link to Good Scott's wiki page and learned he helped out on a text adventure as recently as 2018. That's pretty interesting.
It doesn't, but historically a lot of the reasons people consume art is due to fashion, and art is a way to put you in in and out groups.
So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.
I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.
For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues...
For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
You're conflating whether one should feel guilty for supporting an author, and whether the author's speech outside a work matters to understand its intended meaning.
The latter is the actual Death of the author, the former is usually called Death of the author by people who want to separate themselves from the authors they know they can be judged for supporting.
I think my point was distinct from naming this idea (Death of the Author). It wasn't about guilt it was about consequences and those are distinct things.
Also, AIUI Death of the Author is not about whether their beliefs mattered to understand the intended meaning, but instead whether "intended meaning" is even a thing anyway. No need to understand it if it doesn't exist. I prefer in other contexts not to try to guess intentions when I can instead look at the effects and it seems to me our law and practice agree.
Notice for example that while proving attempted murder requires that you wanted the victim to die, murder does not. The fact that they are dead satisfies this aspect of the crime, you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die.
> "you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die."
You might be; from the UK's Crown Prosecution Service guidance website[1]: "Involuntary Manslaughter. Where an unlawful killing is done without an intention to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm, the suspect is to be charged with manslaughter not murder.". From Wikipedia[2]: "In English law, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder."
The GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) is crucial there. The intent only needs to be GBH which is way easier to prove, for example weapon use. The prosecutors don't need to prove intent to kill, the death is evidence that you killed somebody (except in the rare cases they can't produce a corpse, for which they have to do more work)
What if there is no GBH intent either? What if you are just being negligent or careless, like speeding while driving thinking you are a better-than-average driver and won't crash, or if you are not speeding and someone runs out in front of you, or if you are throwing roof tiles off a roof as you remove them while thinking people will see and hear what you are doing and walk around the pile, and you end up killing someone?
The death is evidence that you killed somebody, but you can still be "innocent of murder" (and guilty of manslaughter instead. In the UK). That's why there are so many varieties of manslaughter, to determine how culpable the person is, whether they were negligent, whether they were comitting another crime, etc.
