Poll: Gaming is "...juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy" says Jonathan Blow.

[anthony87]

It just frustrates me that they completely disregard all other games as art because they are primarily designed to be fun, or to turn a profit, that doesn't stop them also having meaningful themes that can be explored, or deeper messages about philosophical subjects.

I agree. If someone believes that Braid is the only truly artistic video game, they have a very narrow-minded approach to artfulness.

Especially since Braid wasn't very artistic to begin with.

Oh Journey, will anything ever beat you?

No. Nothing ever will.

ever

OT: Don't suppose someone can give me the cliff notes? I got as far as: "?It just drives home how fictional money is,? Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun." and then stopped because I thought I'd be reading a generalising and insulting article. Not a generalising and insulting attempt at a shitty biography.

I'm guessing it's just Blow tooting his own horn again yeah? Fuck sake....Braid was bloody mediocre at best.

EDIT: Skimmed over the first page, got to the Tai-Chi bit. Is it just me or does the writer of the article seem to have a creepily high level of hero worship-or something along those lines-for Mr. Blow?

EDIT the second: Start of the second page...slagging off Skyrim? Really? I didn't think if was possible for me to take this tripe any less seriously.

(I'll stop making new entries whenever something in that article pisses me off. Otherwise I'll be here all bloody night ^_^)

EDIT 3 (Couldn't help myself): Braid is a more apt example of an artistic game than Flower? Bullshit of the highest degree right there!

 

[ElPatron]

Blow has never tried to big up his own worth, proclaim his own genius, or in any way try to say that his games are better than everyone else's. As others have already mentioned, he's already given plenty of praise to other indie games and developers. His ire seems to be reserved for the mainstream AAA gaming industry. And right now, I can't say I blame him. Triple A games are more popular now than ever, yet Call Of Duty and Battlefield are every bit as braindead as Doom and Wolfenstein were when they created the FPS genre twenty years ago.

No, he is just preaching his opinions as if they mean anything. He's not the only one at fault because people give him airtime - and I can't see why not, everything Blow says will get loads of hits in the article.

It's like arguing that Jesus wasn't actually trying to be a messiah.

Also
>doom
>braindead
Pick on and only one.

 

[Yopaz]

I was entering here and I saw the poll option for pretentious then I saw one for douchebag. My only question was, why can't I pick both? Then I saw the option for both and voted that.

He has created one mediocre overrated game and he can't seem to see there's a single other game out there that is anywhere near good. It's bad when Fox News start to say how gaming makes us all violent murderers who rapes in weekends, but when a person who claims to be a part of the industry does the same that's just stupid. His game isn't a piece of art either. I don't call games art, but there are a few quality plots out there nevertheless.

 

[RaikuFA]

Yet aside from his electric car?the virtues of which he extols with messianic zeal?Blow displays total indifference toward the material fruits of wealth.

When Blow told me, during a typically metaphysical conversation in a park near his Berkeley office, that his windfall was ?absurd,? he didn?t mean it in the whimsical ?Can you believe my luck?? sense; he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke.

...I'm having a hard time accepting that this isn't satire. What the hell?!

Anyway, as someone who has seen every part of the spectrum of games as art through the glory of the word 'freeware'... Blow is someone to be ignored. Aggresively.

Lone Survivor might.

Seriously, Jasper Byrne is a better game maker than Blow.

Goshing heck I want that game. Bookmarked it as soon as it came up on Terry Cavanagh's blog.

Its on Steam. Its one of the better games of this year with Katawa Shoujo.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

This was the image that popped into my head when I read the title:

 

[templar1138a]

I think the best way to describe him would be to call him the Marlon Brando of the video game industry.

And I mean Marlon Brando as a person, not an actor. I've never seen The Godfather, so I don't know how good/overrated his acting was.

 

[Blade_125]

He preaches originality, right?
Take the wheel, Dorkly.
What was his surname again...?

Wow, that is freaking fantastic. Thank you for posting that (although I probably shouldn't have watched it at work. Hard to hold in the laughing).

 

[kortin]

This guy has a god complex rivaling mine.

That gets on my nerves.

 

[The Funslinger]

I believe I speak for gamers everywhere, when I say...

*steps up to mic* *ahem*

Your FACE is juvenile, silly and intellectually lazy!

 

[Tony2077]

this kind of generalize is never good. it doesn't help your view of this guy when he says stuff like that. insulting him doesn't help either

 

[Johnson McGee]

"But the game industry's harshest critic is also its most cerebral developer, a maverick bent on changing the way we think about games and storytelling."

Methinks biased journalist is biased.

IMO Braid is somewhat art-like but compared to something like Bioshock, which has an expansive and in depth critique of objectivist society infused in every aspect of its design, Braid's one line metaphor seems lazy by comparison.

Besides, sometimes I like to come home and take a break from composing symphonies while interpreting abstract art to relax and play something simple.

 

[Xman490]

He comes off as more cynical/dismissive than pretentious/entitled to me. He's pretty much a douchebag, but he has a strong point by pointing out the flaws of mainstream gaming.

 

[bobbele]

Braid is a very good game and it's amazing that he did it all by himself but HOLY SHIT, would gaming be boring if every game tried to be like that.

 

[Berithil]

I'd say he's a super video game elitist, maybe the worst I've come across. Yes, artistic games are nice to look at. They can be innovative and show how impressive games can be. But at the end of the day, video gaming is just entertainment. I wouldn't want to play a game that looks nice but is boring as heck. Is it really all that juvenile and lazy to want be entertained when playing a game?

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

I wonder how long its going to take these "art" folks to realise that the purpose of a game is to entertain us.

Is gaming just an entertainment medium? Or can it be an artistic medium as well? Where is the line between art and entertainment?

Games can be both entertainment and art, but entertainment should always come first. That's true for movies, music, TV, and pretty much everything as well as games.

If I am not moved in any fashion by what you put in front of me, then I couldn't give a tuppenny fuck whether or not it qualifies as 'art'. People who sacrifice any and all entertainment value for the purposes of making an artistic statement are some of the most irritating example of 'missing the point' people I know, because the only way you get your audience to give a shit about whatever kind of 'statement' your making is if you actually get them invested first, and the only way to get them invested is to remember that they came to you to be entertained. Why is this so hard for people like Blow to get when fucking Shakespeare proved this point hundreds of years ago?

If thinking this makes me "juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy" to Jonathan Blow and his ilk, then so be it. I'll just go back to having my worthless 'fun', and hope he let's me know when he decides to actually create something original and ground-breaking, rather than just Hipster Mario (because those were the two words going round in my head all the time I was playing Braid).

 

[OldNewNewOld]

I voted for douchebag simply because he tried to generalize all games as one.

Yes, it's true that there are many games that are juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy.
But at the same time there are games which are art, deep and push the intellect of the player to its maximum.
Gaming consists of a really broad specter of games. There will be every kind you can think of. From simply retarded to extremely good. Generalizing was never a good idea and it didn't change in the case of gaming.

Anyone trying to generalize something that consists of many units is nothing but a douche.

P.S. Braid is just a Mario game with time manipulation and "artistic" graphics. Even the enemies look like Gumba(is that the name?) from Mario.