The Atlantic sucks off Jonathon Blow (videogame auteur) for three whole pages.

[Joe Molotov]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/1/

My favorite part was:

slurp slurp slurp

Worst paragraph in the history of the universe? You decide:

I met Jon Blow in early 2011, when my friend Tom Bissell—a journalist and author hired to help write the script for The Witness—invited me along to dinner one night when Blow was visiting Portland, Oregon. Knowing Blow’s outspoken reputation, I expected a sort of fire-breathing techie-Limbaugh, wreathed in nerd rage. Instead, when I entered Bissell’s condo, I saw an intensely serious-looking man performing a slow tai chi sequence in the living room. His face, bounded by a closely cropped widow’s peak on top and a clenched jaw on the bottom, radiated quiet imperturbability. But Blow’s most striking feature is his eyes, which sit under a perpetually half-furrowed brow and seem always to be evaluating, probing, assessing. His unchangingly flinty expression makes it extraordinarily difficult to gauge where Blow is on the spectrum between enjoying your company and despising everything you stand for.

[Himu]

[Tasty]

Sucking and blowing.

Reminds me of an Escapist article about this hippie programmer who didn't believe in diapers for his kid and made this game about two pixels and one of them dying. I think it was like four pages on how amazing he was. Crazy.

[Great Rumbler]

dot dot dot

[MrAngryFace]

sloppy sloppy blowjobz

[Howard Alan Treesong]

this article was so poorly written that I now hate the author more than I hate Blow

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

The Atlantic has been really going downhill for some time since I started reading it around 2005 or so.

[cool breeze]

I skimmed it last night.  Some of what Blow says (not the article's writer) I agree with...about games, not his weirdities.  And if he's taking $2 Million out of the bank to pay for this game, I can admire his ambition over "Buy Braid cause I don't want a normal job."

but yes, the article is pure wank.

and knowing he drives a Tesla makes me regret buying Braid

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

[Great Rumbler]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

Man, I wish somebody would a type a large number into my bank account. Or like it's almost that...he did something to make that money. Wow, I'm like a philosophizer over here!

[Great Rumbler]

i'm probably going to have to figure out how to get out of a hate crime charge

He's white, so you'll be okay.

[benjipwns]

Surprised this wasn't one of the quotes so far:

Even Blow’s friends choose words like difficult and spiky when describing him. “You have to approach Jon on Jon’s terms,” said Chris Hecker, his closest game-industry friend, over empanadas with Blow at an airy Oakland café. “It’s not ‘Let’s go out and have fun.’ It’s more like ‘Let’s discuss this topic,’ or ‘Let’s work on our games.’ You don’t ask Jon to hang out, because he’ll just say ‘Why?’”

Friendship with Blow requires patience for his rigid, often puzzling personal codes. He enjoys talking, but abhors idle conversation and is intensely private. He goes out dancing several nights a week, yet the suggestion of visiting the same club for a beer will elicit a lengthy anti-bar diatribe. “You’re poisoning yourself with alcohol,” Blow vented, as Hecker smiled knowingly beside him. “You’re kind of socializing, but the loud music prevents you from actually communicating. It’s all set up to help people socialize who don’t feel comfortable being honest about why they’re there. It freaks me out. Just understand what you’re doing, and do it.”

“Hold on,” I objected. “Are you saying people at bars should just walk up to each other and say, ‘I would like to have sexual intercourse with you’?”

“I think we could live a lot closer to a truthful existence and we’d all be better off,” he replied.

A comment:

Astaereth 1 day ago
What a ridiculously insulting article. The profile of Blow is interesting; what isn't is the facile presentation of games as a artless wasteland, with Blow as the only artist and savior of the medium. I really liked Braid and the video description in this article managed to make me hate it a little. Subject does not make something artistic (be it violence or plumbers or an island of puzzles), a contemplative tone does not make something artistic, referencing other artists does not make something artistic, aping the "classy" bits of other mediums (classical music, painterly aesthetics) does not make something artistic.

Art is the skillful application of technique toward personal expression, and there are plenty of games that fall into that category--yes, even a few in the mainstream, like Bioshock, Heavy Rain, and LA Noire. And there's a world of independent artistic games out there that does not begin and end with Blow. To use a film analogy, you've written the equivalent of an article about 1970s Cassavetes while ignoring or denigrating both his contemporaries (Coppola, Roeg, Scorcese, Kubrick) and his predecessors.

It's doubly unfortunate that your simplistic and (although I hate to see the word thrown around) pretentious dismissal of the entire non-Blow video game output to date appears to have been written for people who have never played or heard of a video game before, because you've told those people why they shouldn't ever bother.

There are important discussions to be had about the nature and state of the medium, but boiling them down into "games are guns/sex/juvenile, except for Blow" does nothing but stifle discussion and close minds.

(I came here from The PA Report, by the way, and this is by far the most reductive and frustrating article they've linked to date.)

[Eel O'Brian]

the atlantic has always been pretty good at literary fellatio, self or otherwise

[Eel O'Brian]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

i think about my current financial situation, then read that load of horseshit, and i want to kick his fucking front teeth out

[Timber]

I'm not reading a word of that but The Witness looks really good. Like Myst, only not awful.

[Stoney Mason]

The worse bit about this recent indie wave is how we have to stomach listening to these indie guys pontificate on anything and everything involving gaming.

[brob]

joe blow used to have opinions about video games and write/speak them before he made braid. Sadly people now seem to make such a big deal out of it.

Though I must say, the nerd quarrels I have seen drawn from Blow Saying Stuff™ have been entertaining.

[brob]

And it is exactly that which leads his valiant knights to invoke things like the injustices against Socrates as an argument for why we shouldn't call Blow mean names.

[benjipwns]

Did Socrates make Braid?

[benjipwns]

And to make the half-hour commute from his apartment to Berkeley more constructive, Blow listens to audiobooks of literary classics in his Tesla. When I visited, he had just jettisoned Anna Karenina for being “too much like a soap opera.” Now he was listening to Walden.

Throughout my visit, every time I contorted myself into his Roadster, we would immediately hear an actor doing his best Thoreau impression, declaiming in stentorian tones about the furry beasts in their burrows. This had a certain jarring quality. One day, however, after a long talk about Blow’s vision for The Witness, Shockingly Loud Thoreau seemed almost clairvoyant. “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,” he proclaimed, “all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.”

Blow clicked off the stereo and turned to me. “I honestly didn’t plan that,” he said.

...

To Blow, the puzzles and environments of both Braid and The Witness function as a “long-form stream of nonverbal communication”—which is why he won’t bastardize them by expressing their messages in words. In one memorable exchange after a talk he gave at Rice University, a student pressed him to explain the opening imagery of Braid, and Blow replied with a definitive refusal. “As far as I’m concerned, the entirety of the communication of what is happening there is contained in the game, and that’s all that needs to happen,” he said. “And that’s why I make video games. So that’s why I don’t want to tell you.”

[CajoleJuice]

i stopped reading when it quoted blow as using "addicting" instead of "addictive"

[benjipwns]

Worst paragraph in the history of the universe? You decide:

I'm fine with that, but I keep coming back and can't get over this. I've read it like ten times.

Especially since it's from the writer:

“But I think what has frustrated you about people’s interpretations of Braid is that the atom bomb itself is a metaphor for a certain kind of knowledge,” I continued. “You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it. The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact. You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time and do things over again.”

The response doesn't help:

Blow remained silent.

“Does that make sense?,” I asked.

“Yep, yep.”

“So?”

He smiled.

“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”

[Trent Dole]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

i think about my current financial situation, then read that load of horseshit, and i want to kick his fucking front teeth out

This is an immensely valid, and relate-able point to me, good sir.

Also Braid is terrible. Why is it that only puzzle based games get 'art' paraded around about them endlessly? As that quoted comment pointed out there's plenty of compelling visuals to be found in some 'blockbuster' works as well it's just that there's more to them than just their visuals...

[Stoney Mason]

There are a certain very small set of gamers that are desperate for validation from the critical arts community. So when something like Braid, or Journey, or name any indie darling of the last couple years comes around they overly prop up these creators as creative geniuses. Even though dudes (or very small teams) making individual games on their own has been around since gaming has been around. Not to mention there is as much "art" involved in making a coin-up game, as a pinball game, or any kind of game. It's just stupid. And its an insult to all the other people out there making games.

For what its worth I like Braid. I thought it had a neat little puzzle mechanic when it came out. But that's it. Its no more amazing than any other decent to good game that came out in my life.  So when somebody tries to elevate it to Citizen Kane level, its a bit weird.

[Joe Molotov]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

i think about my current financial situation, then read that load of horseshit, and i want to kick his fucking front teeth out

I'm sorry, Mr. Blow can't hear you over the sound of his revving Tesla. 

[Eel O'Brian]

https://twitter.com/#!/JonathanBleux

[Howard Alan Treesong]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

i think about my current financial situation, then read that load of horseshit, and i want to kick his fucking front teeth out

I'm sorry, Mr. Blow can't hear you over the sound of his revving Tesla. 

but electric cars are silent

[chronovore]

this article was so poorly written that I now hate the author more than I hate Blow

look i try not to judge but if i walk in for a scheduled appointment with someone and they're doing fucking tai chi, i'm probably going to have to figure out how to get out of a hate crime charge

The worse bit about this recent indie wave is how we have to stomach listening to these indie guys pontificate on anything and everything involving gaming.

These three lines, they are like poetry to me.

[Positive Touch]

There are a certain very small set of gamers that are desperate for validation from the critical arts community. So when something like Braid, or Journey, or name any indie darling of the last couple years comes around they overly prop up these creators as creative geniuses. Even though dudes (or very small teams) making individual games on their own has been around since gaming has been around. Not to mention there is as much "art" involved in making a coin-up game, as a pinball game, or any kind of game. It's just stupid. And its an insult to all the other people out there making games.

what really drives me crazy is that most of the games that these people like to call art are just shitty stripped-down imitations of great games we grew up on.  take an old-school classic, strip out the skills, the scores, the challenge, and replace it with tons of ponderous navel-gazing and pretty art and hey! you've got an indie hit.  there's no appreciation for real game-making technique, i.e. giving you a set of skills/abilities and designing varied challenges that play off those skills.

[Great Rumbler]

THERE’S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series. In games, brick-shaped men yell catchphrases like “Suck pavement!” and wield giant rifles that double as chain saws, while back-breakingly buxom women rush into combat wearing outfits that would make a Victoria’s Secret photographer blush. In games, nuance and character development simply do not exist. In games, any predicament or line of dialogue that would make the average ADHD-afflicted high-school sophomore scratch his head gets expunged and then, ideally, replaced with a cinematic clip of something large exploding.

derpderpderp writing is the only thing that matter in videogames derp

Someone point me to a 40+ hour videogame about war atrocities in Africa that ANYONE would want to play and I will gladly concede the author's point.

[Joe Molotov]

he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.”

Truly some d33p sh1t, y0

i think about my current financial situation, then read that load of horseshit, and i want to kick his fucking front teeth out

I'm sorry, Mr. Blow can't hear you over the sound of his revving Tesla. 

but electric cars are silent

Look, the Tesla is a fictional car. One day he's looking at his driveway and there's a 1987 Toyota Camry there, then the next day he looks and there's a Tesla Roadster. All because someone pushed some buttons on a computer. It's a crazy mixed up world.

[etiolate]

It's a horrible article. I imagine Blow is embarrassed by it.

Though I agree with Blow about bars. I have always felt the same way. They skeez me out. Just be honest about your reasons.

And having talked to Blow, he is a guy who doesn't banter around. He talks seriously about games and I appreciate that. He didn't come off as an eccentric egomaniac in person. He actually acted like he was afraid to make any statement that might get misconstrued and come back to haunt him.

[Owl-faced Wizard]

And having talked to Blow, he is a guy who doesn't banter around. He talks seriously about games and I appreciate that. He didn't come off as an eccentric egomaniac in person. He actually acted like he was afraid to make any statement that might get misconstrued and come back to haunt him.

He's been strung up for saying a bunch of dumb stuff though - that's probably why.  Which isn't to say that he doesn't make smart observations sometimes, but yeah.

[Stoney Mason]

There are a certain very small set of gamers that are desperate for validation from the critical arts community. So when something like Braid, or Journey, or name any indie darling of the last couple years comes around they overly prop up these creators as creative geniuses. Even though dudes (or very small teams) making individual games on their own has been around since gaming has been around. Not to mention there is as much "art" involved in making a coin-up game, as a pinball game, or any kind of game. It's just stupid. And its an insult to all the other people out there making games.

what really drives me crazy is that most of the games that these people like to call art are just shitty stripped-down imitations of great games we grew up on.  take an old-school classic, strip out the skills, the scores, the challenge, and replace it with tons of ponderous navel-gazing and pretty art and hey! you've got an indie hit.  there's no appreciation for real game-making technique, i.e. giving you a set of skills/abilities and designing varied challenges that play off those skills.

I think there is a lot of truth here. I think a lot of indie games are simply retro games but because retro game design is hip right now they over state the historical or artistic importance of what these games are doing. I have a feeling if Super Metroid was made right now for the first time it would be hailed as an indie masterpiece with amazing indie design.


I love retro game design in many cases so I don't have a problem with that. The problem is sort of pretending this style of game design is divorced from any of the traditional game design that anybody does in the industry. They are a link in a chain of game design that dates back from the beginning of game design.

And as far as the story stuff when people critique videogames on that front its almost always apparent these people have no understanding of an interactive medium.  It's fine to criticize the limitations inherent in videogames in the current marketplace. I do that all the time. What wrong is to believe that videogames are the same as film or something and you can evaluate them in the same manner without bringing up the interactive bit. That the user has to actually do something people like doing or at that point its simply just a visual novel. It's that same silly navel picking argument of Nathan Drake killing 500 people in an uncharted game. Sure you could make a Nathan Drake game where he doesn't run around and do that. It's not the limitations of videogames that creates that. It's the market reality of that is what a large number of people want to do in a game like that. It's why action movies and comic movies exist in the format that they do.

[Timber]

THE WITNESS

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

 

[Joe Molotov]

art

[Himu]

THE WITNESS

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

 

what game is he ripping off to make this

[Howard Alan Treesong]

THE WITNESS

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

 

what game is he ripping off to make this

Hard to say.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[Great Rumbler]

"The Witness is like that too. The blue mazes are a major aspect of the game, but they are not the point. The point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the mazes are saying - because the mazes aren't just puzzles, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things. This can't be seen in a video; you have to play it to have the experience. The magic is in the player's head, not on the screen."

Yep.

[Joe Molotov]

The real magic was in your heart all along.

[Positive Touch]

I think there is a lot of truth here. I think a lot of indie games are simply retro games but because retro game design is hip right now they over state the historical or artistic importance of what these games are doing. I have a feeling if Super Metroid was made right now for the first time it would be hailed as an indie masterpiece with amazing indie design.

I love retro game design in many cases so I don't have a problem with that. The problem is sort of pretending this style of game design is divorced from any of the traditional game design that anybody does in the industry. They are a link in a chain of game design that dates back from the beginning of game design.

i agree that a lot of these games are treated as genuis-level works when they are really very derivative of old-school games that they emulate.  my bigger complaint is that a lot of them don't even have very good core mechanics and instead focus on artsy b.s.  flower, while is doesn't emulate an old style, gets praise for being "artsy" and forward-thinking, when really it's just shallow and pretty.  shadow complex doesn't get that art label, but imo it successfully copies the super metriod style and is a much better game. 

basically what i'm trying to say is that there's too much style over substance in the american indie scene nowadays.  stupid po-mo bullshit

"The Witness is like that too. The blue mazes are a major aspect of the game, but they are not the point. The point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the mazes are saying - because the mazes aren't just puzzles, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things. This can't be seen in a video; you have to play it to have the experience. The magic is in the player's head, not on the screen."

Yep.

...yeah, this is what i mean.  it's an overly complex and pretentious way of saying "my game is fun!"  your stupid mazes do not contain life-affirming messages that cause us to reevaluate our lives; they're fucking mazes in a videogame.  just make them fun.

[Great Rumbler]

"Myst is like that too. The puzzles are a major aspect of the game, but they are not the point. The point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the puzzles are saying - because the puzzles aren't just puzzles, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things. This can't be seen in a video; you have to play it to have the experience. The magic is in the player's head, not on the screen."

[Timber]

lol what are you guys even talking about

[Timber]

Braid has some really nifty puzzles. You don't have to read or listen to anything Jon Blow says. I don't see the problem here.

[Positive Touch]

the real magic happens when i pull off a super-stylish combo and totally kick some fuckin ass

or when i get teh high scores

[brob]

"Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is like that too. The volleyball game is a major aspect of the game, but it is not the point. The point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the volleyball game is saying - because the volleyball game isn't just a volleyball game, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things. This can't be seen in a video; you have to play it to have the experience. The magic is in the player's head, not on the screen."

[Van Cruncheon]

"Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is like that too. The volleyball game is a major aspect of the game, but it is not the point. The point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the volleyball game is saying - because the volleyball game isn't just a volleyball game, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things. This can't be seen in a video; you have to play it to have the experience. The magic is in the player's head, not on the screen."

[Flannel Boy]

The magic is in the player's pants, not on the screen."

fyp

[Flannel Boy]

As a developer whose independent success has emancipated him from the grip of the monolithic game corporations, Blow makes a habit of lobbing rhetorical hand grenades at the industry.

 

[Joe Molotov]

Johnathon Blow's got EA crapping their pants.

[Great Rumbler]

As a developer whose independent success has emancipated him from the grip of the monolithic game corporations, Blow makes a habit of lobbing rhetorical hand grenades at the industry.

 

Brian Fargo?

[etiolate]

And having talked to Blow, he is a guy who doesn't banter around. He talks seriously about games and I appreciate that. He didn't come off as an eccentric egomaniac in person. He actually acted like he was afraid to make any statement that might get misconstrued and come back to haunt him.

He's been strung up for saying a bunch of dumb stuff though - that's probably why.  Which isn't to say that he doesn't make smart observations sometimes, but yeah.

Yeah, I got that vibe as well.  Whenever the subject got close to something that he's had negative reactions on, he'd avoid saying anything much.

To Blow, the puzzles and environments of both Braid and The Witness function as a “long-form stream of nonverbal communication”

YESSSSSSSSH

And there's nothing ridiculous about this idea. Everyone understands this from playing videogames. You don't need to trudge down a game to say something, the acts to be done within a game and the relationship between player and environment say plenty.

[Barry Egan]

Yes, a video game is literally a series of abstract scenarios strung together and put on a screen.  But if you don't add an aesthetic to these scenarios I guarantee you will not be expressing very much, and certainly not something of much interest to anyones life*.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

*with ulililililia as the exception

[close]