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In a nutshell: Blow's a rich guy and GP is jealous. What's really going on, though, is that mainstream engineering and development CS types don't understand au

In a nutshell: Blow's a rich guy and GP is jealous. What's really going on, though, is that mainstream engineering and development CS types don't understand auteurs the way Hollywood and Greenwich Village does. Blow is no more pretentious or jerkoffy than Quentin Tarantino, Damien Hirst, or Banksy. He's an incredibly intellectual guy and a great game designer. Now, the Fez developer, it could be argued, is a bit of a jerkoff. Telling people to "suck his dick" on twitter because he won IGF award in two separate years (4 years apart) for the SAME GAME still in development, or when he says Japanese games "suck". Now there is where you could direct your hate if you were so inclined.

enneff 15y ago
The article certainly paints him as pretentious. > “I think the mainstream game industry is a fucked-up den of mediocrity,” he told me. “There are some smart people wallowing in there, but the environment discourages creativity and strength and rigor, so what you get is mostly atrophy.” Most people and things are mediocre, by definition, so Blow's comments are obvious and unnecessary. Further, it is incredibly graceless to bang on about how terrible your chosen field is. One should simply prove one's point by producing great work, not by disparaging others. > he plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form I'm pretty sure this has already been achieved, and not by Blow. Braid is a great game, but its greatness is oversold by this article and, it seems, by Blow himself. Since the early days of video games there have been "artistic" video games. (Although the idea that you must draw some kind of line is nonsensical.) > “If the video game is going to be used for art purposes, then it has to take advantage of its form in some way particular to that medium, right?” he told me. "Art purposes"!! The preposterousness of the concept astounds me. Yeah, I'll go on record that this guy is spectacularly pretentious.
krakensden 15y ago
Did you play Braid? Did you read the plot-bits? It was a little pretentious.
- muhfuhkuh 15y ago
  Yep, and it was one of the greatest platformers of all time IMO. The "story", while at times verbose and overwrought, imbued the character a sense of urgency and personality compared to the classic "Princess is in another castle", which is the point of the article: The artization of video games. If we can't think of things like Braid, or Infinite Jest, or Downton Abbey without thinking pretentious, then all games should simply be derivatives of The Jersey Shore or just long fart noises and rubber-band physics. But, obviously, that's not what all people want, or else the aforementioned "pretentious" content wouldn't be so popular.
  - barrkel 15y ago
    It was nowhere near one of the greatest platformers of all time. Nowhere near Super Mario Bros. 3, not even close. I got bored of its puzzles after about 40 minutes. The mechanics: cute and novel. The story: pretentious. The gameplay: meh.
    - lifeformed 15y ago
      The story was one of the weaker parts. The puzzles and gameplay were great. I don't see how you could get bored of them unless you genuinely got stuck and weren't able to solve them. They were varied and creative, and forced you to think in different ways.
      - barrkel 15y ago
        Puzzle-based gameplay doesn't usually absorb me much. I tend to prefer much more open gameplay where there are many different ways of achieving ends. The "aha!" dopamine rush that puzzle type games are supposed to run on isn't very strong with me; the payoff is so weak that I lose interest whether I'm making progress or not. And it's not just games either, it follows through into programming and debugging. Closest thing to puzzle games that I enjoy are stealth territory navigation games like Thief series, Deus Ex, Far Cry 1 & 2 (at least the way I play them), etc. But the rush comes from a plan coming together in execution; in much the same way that I best enjoy programming when designing a bunch of data structures that solve a problem nicely.
DannoHung 15y ago
If Braid had failed and Blow was getting interviewed at Gamasutra rather than The Atlantic, I'd still say he's an incredibly pretentious jerkoff. I'll admit that I wish I had the freedom to build whatever I'd like, but I can assure you that jealousy has nothing to do with his wealth. Actually, the part of the article that quotes him I most agree with is how meaningless the numbers just changing in your bank account seem. Wealth is so far removed from value that it's kind of scary. Phil Fish is an asshole, but I haven't read enough of his thinking on art, design and life to say whether he's a jerkoff or not. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about: "He loathes watching sports, because they yield few tangible returns on the hours you invest in them." Now, I mean, I'm not someone who particularly enjoys sports, but if the article is paraphrasing him accurately, then that's such a boorish way of dismissing a hobby, especially from someone who is in entertainment. Some people like watching sport because they see the performance of the athletes as an art, the culmination of thousands of hours of effort played out upon a grand stage. Others see it as the drama between competing forces, with players and coaches as the actors in an improvised play. Some people just enjoy analyzing the tactics and strategy employed and attempting to know what the outcome would be. And the really weird people (in my opinion) just wanna crunch the numbers. Personally, I just don't care for the rules of many sports and would rather be doing something less passive. I mean, I'm not gonna tell him that he should like sports, but that's such a strange way for him, in his position, to say that he doesn't like them. I watch lots and lots of movies. How many of them do I get anything out of after the film is over besides in-jokes? Vanishingly few. How much of the music that I listen to really makes me feel something? A handful of songs. What he so out of hand dismisses in general is the umwelt of experience, the notion of being in the moment. Fully engaged. Blow doesn't seem to be happy with the idea that people like to be immersed. He wants to make people rationally grind through games, to never be in the moment, to always have their mind on and trying to analyze. He characterizes everything else as evil or wrong or garbage. And then he goes and practices Tai Chi.
- crystalis 15y ago
  It's nice how you've written him off entirely because he likes one thing and not another! You completely disregard the possibility that some people are only ever fully engaged and in the moment when their mind is on and they are performing analysis. There's so little to what you're saying, you can mad libs your whole rant to paint you as the asshole.

enneff 15y ago

The article certainly paints him as pretentious. > “I think the mainstream game industry is a fucked-up den of mediocrity,” he told me. “There are some smart people wallowing in there, but the environment discourages creativity and strength and rigor, so what you get is mostly atrophy.” Most people and things are mediocre, by definition, so Blow's comments are obvious and unnecessary. Further, it is incredibly graceless to bang on about how terrible your chosen field is. One should simply prove one's point by producing great work, not by disparaging others. > he plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form I'm pretty sure this has already been achieved, and not by Blow. Braid is a great game, but its greatness is oversold by this article and, it seems, by Blow himself. Since the early days of video games there have been "artistic" video games. (Although the idea that you must draw some kind of line is nonsensical.) > “If the video game is going to be used for art purposes, then it has to take advantage of its form in some way particular to that medium, right?” he told me. "Art purposes"!! The preposterousness of the concept astounds me. Yeah, I'll go on record that this guy is spectacularly pretentious.

krakensden 15y ago

Did you play Braid? Did you read the plot-bits? It was a little pretentious.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago
Yep, and it was one of the greatest platformers of all time IMO. The "story", while at times verbose and overwrought, imbued the character a sense of urgency and personality compared to the classic "Princess is in another castle", which is the point of the article: The artization of video games. If we can't think of things like Braid, or Infinite Jest, or Downton Abbey without thinking pretentious, then all games should simply be derivatives of The Jersey Shore or just long fart noises and rubber-band physics. But, obviously, that's not what all people want, or else the aforementioned "pretentious" content wouldn't be so popular.
- barrkel 15y ago
  It was nowhere near one of the greatest platformers of all time. Nowhere near Super Mario Bros. 3, not even close. I got bored of its puzzles after about 40 minutes. The mechanics: cute and novel. The story: pretentious. The gameplay: meh.
  - lifeformed 15y ago
    The story was one of the weaker parts. The puzzles and gameplay were great. I don't see how you could get bored of them unless you genuinely got stuck and weren't able to solve them. They were varied and creative, and forced you to think in different ways.
    - barrkel 15y ago
      Puzzle-based gameplay doesn't usually absorb me much. I tend to prefer much more open gameplay where there are many different ways of achieving ends. The "aha!" dopamine rush that puzzle type games are supposed to run on isn't very strong with me; the payoff is so weak that I lose interest whether I'm making progress or not. And it's not just games either, it follows through into programming and debugging. Closest thing to puzzle games that I enjoy are stealth territory navigation games like Thief series, Deus Ex, Far Cry 1 & 2 (at least the way I play them), etc. But the rush comes from a plan coming together in execution; in much the same way that I best enjoy programming when designing a bunch of data structures that solve a problem nicely.

DannoHung 15y ago

If Braid had failed and Blow was getting interviewed at Gamasutra rather than The Atlantic, I'd still say he's an incredibly pretentious jerkoff. I'll admit that I wish I had the freedom to build whatever I'd like, but I can assure you that jealousy has nothing to do with his wealth. Actually, the part of the article that quotes him I most agree with is how meaningless the numbers just changing in your bank account seem. Wealth is so far removed from value that it's kind of scary. Phil Fish is an asshole, but I haven't read enough of his thinking on art, design and life to say whether he's a jerkoff or not. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about: "He loathes watching sports, because they yield few tangible returns on the hours you invest in them." Now, I mean, I'm not someone who particularly enjoys sports, but if the article is paraphrasing him accurately, then that's such a boorish way of dismissing a hobby, especially from someone who is in entertainment. Some people like watching sport because they see the performance of the athletes as an art, the culmination of thousands of hours of effort played out upon a grand stage. Others see it as the drama between competing forces, with players and coaches as the actors in an improvised play. Some people just enjoy analyzing the tactics and strategy employed and attempting to know what the outcome would be. And the really weird people (in my opinion) just wanna crunch the numbers. Personally, I just don't care for the rules of many sports and would rather be doing something less passive. I mean, I'm not gonna tell him that he should like sports, but that's such a strange way for him, in his position, to say that he doesn't like them. I watch lots and lots of movies. How many of them do I get anything out of after the film is over besides in-jokes? Vanishingly few. How much of the music that I listen to really makes me feel something? A handful of songs. What he so out of hand dismisses in general is the umwelt of experience, the notion of being in the moment. Fully engaged. Blow doesn't seem to be happy with the idea that people like to be immersed. He wants to make people rationally grind through games, to never be in the moment, to always have their mind on and trying to analyze. He characterizes everything else as evil or wrong or garbage. And then he goes and practices Tai Chi.

crystalis 15y ago
It's nice how you've written him off entirely because he likes one thing and not another! You completely disregard the possibility that some people are only ever fully engaged and in the moment when their mind is on and they are performing analysis. There's so little to what you're saying, you can mad libs your whole rant to paint you as the asshole.