The issue is not so much that he’s “not a leftist” as it is his arrogance. He thinks his knowledge extends well beyond his very real skill at game development (the witness is a great game!). One example is his very confident takes on “lab leak” that have not held up.

(HN is also a very big fan of this hypothesis, without realizing it has gotten weaker with time. In their defense, I don’t think anyone wants to think about COVID anymore)

They are both hypothesis, I don't understand your take here -- "this guy has a hypothesis that obviously is wrong (in my opinion), therefore by insisting on HIS hypothesis he's arrogant and shouldn't be listened to." This is just politics.

He's possibly the most arrogant person I've ever encountered in real life.

He thinks he's the foremost expert on basically any topic, from literature to politics, to science, to videogames etc.

Elaborate on this real life encounter! I am curious.

You do not talk about Fight Club..

Does he have game development skill? Or did he get lucky with Braid?

Because the Witness is a tedious slog, as is Order of the Tediously Long Title.

The hardest part of the Witness is the fact you aren’t told the rules of the line-drawing puzzle you’re presented. But often, they’re not that hard to discover. It’s not half as clever as Blow thinks it is. It’s essentially “what number am I thinking of”? Then being called a fool when you didn’t guess 12,859,155. Cool.

The Witness & Order of the Sinking Star are great games, the fact that you personally do not like them does not take away anything skill-wise from him.

They are not great games.

Especially in The Witness where there are times where failure of a puzzle forces you to re-input previous puzzles. Or there are a couple of dozen of the same puzzle with only minor variation with the same rule. "Yes, I can draw an L", "Yes, I can draw it backwards", "Yes, I can draw it and a cube, truly a masterfully built puzzle".

Tell me you haven’t played a game without actually telling me you haven’t played it.

Because I have a different opinion I couldn’t have played the game?

Respectfully disagree! I really enjoyed discovering the rules in each biome. even if it led to some tedious trial and error now and then

[delayed]

In the very next sentence I say that they’re often not hard to figure out.

I get more of a “Ah, ok” rather than a “satisfying eureka moment”.

All through your post you are assuming I’m getting stuck or “don’t enjoy figuring things out”, which I find presumptuous and condescending. Because, I’ve not had much problem with the figuring things out. It’s more with the repetition. You get a rule, then you get a couple dozen puzzles with slight variations of that rule. It’s tedium.

And Order is sokoban. Just, like, a lot of it. And even what you could claim is clever gameplay in it is just cribbed from the games he implemented.

They’re average games. They’re ok. They are not mind-expanding journeys into the very nature of the meaning of puzzles.

I found his tech opinions pretty insufferable well before he started mixing politics in.

Something about the lone programmer off goat-skinning every aspect of the tech stack, while telling you how you are writing software wrong...

So, I generally like Jon, but he can be an ignorant blowhard and this typically does not diminish his supreme self-confidence or rudeness (see e.g. https://x.com/stylewarning/status/2028976562544988476). I don't think this is the only instance where he blocked someone who politely pointed out a technical error either.

If by "not a leftist" you mean "into right wing conspiracy theories" then yes, you are correct that the right wing loves their whack-a-doodle conspiracy theories, and Jonathan Blow subscribes to them himself, so by that association he might be considered "not a leftist".