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Jonathan Blow Isn't Going to Save Video Games

This article is more than 10 years old.

Braid (video game) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a lengthy profile on Braid designer Jonathan Blow in The Atlantic, and from the way it’s written, it seems that Blow is the only man alive who has ever designed a thoughtful videogame.

It's hard to tell what parts of the piece are coming from the writer and which parts are from the subject, but much of it is the same stuff that indie filmmakers and the like have been saying for years – the art made for the masses is empty, that true art is somehow different, and that whatever it is they’re doing at that moment is going to redefine something. If other people don't get it, they're not ready for it or just wrong. It's a point a view that seems antithetical to games.

Blow is working on The Witness now, but the only finished game we have to look at from him is Braid, and it gives me pause whenever I try to imagine Blow living up to the image that people have created of him. Braid was a great game. It was gorgeous, it was meticulously crafted and it was continuously engaging. The ending sequence was brilliant – an arresting marriage of interactivity and simple narrative.

But Blow’s attempt at literal storytelling in the game was far, far from anything moving the medium forward. It smacked of someone that badly needed another set of eyes to tell him to dial back his angsty teen poetry.  The player hovered over little books to read it, and it appeared as text. Interactive it was not. So when Blow starts talking about the need for maturity in game narrative, I can’t help but take it with a handful of salt.

"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?" Blow says in the profile. "A film and a novel can both do linear storytelling, but novels are very strong at internal mental machinations - which movies suck at - and movies are great at doing certain visual things. So the question is: Where are games on that same map?"

I definitely agree, but he didn’t seem to be quite on the right path to thinking about that question when he was making Braid. As an artist, Blow has a very high horse he rides on, and I never got the feeling he quite trusted gamers with his game. When that relationship starts to get skewed, the game is lost and all we have is an obtuse indie film or experimental theater.

Blow seems to be a brilliant programmer, and a great game designer. Braid is, at its heart, a pretty and well-constructed puzzle game. It made you think, not in an endless analyzing of obtuse metaphor kind of way, but in a video game kind of way. The real narrative in the game isn’t the one that Blow crams down your throat, it’s the one that starts with you not understanding a puzzle, continues with you experimenting with it, and ends with you putting it together. The fact that text utterly fails to do that process justice is an indication that it’s something only a game is capable of.

Video games are already art. Some them are bad art, some of them are better art, some of them are great art. The one thing that keeps them honest is their inevitable connection to gamers. Whatever happens, the player will define a personal experience within a game, and that will be what he or she remembers. Not even Blow’s text could ruin his game.

I’m not ready to say that Braid is art and a game like Draw Something is not. They’re both little programs that people use in different ways, both creations that elicit emotional reactions from their users. The difference is that Braid reminds you that it is art at every turn, and Draw Something is content to be what it is and allow the player to fill in the gaps on their own. When designers are able to trust players to make their own games, games shine for being a unique art form.

The Atlantic is right – Blow is a dangerous gamer. He has serious talent. If he can surround himself with smart people that can cut his arrogance into something that communicates to an audience, he could become a great game designer. But If he helps games develop the kind of insufferable pretension that plagues other media, he’ll have robbed video games of one of their greatest assets.

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