
The Most Dangerous Gamer - TDL
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/
======
sawyer
Blow gave a talk once that I remember vivdly where he described the greatest
challenge facing indie developers (applies to all products, not just games):
going too slow. The average programmer can write maybe 10k lines of production
ready code in a year, but a modest game the likes of Braid took ~100k LOC. In
order to get it done in a reasonable amount of time you can't spend all day
optimizing or constructing beautiful algorithms - you have to plow through as
quickly as possible.

~~~
angersock
Here's the talk in question:

[http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...](http://the-
witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/)

In a course I took junior year of college, my project partner (now cofounder)
and I worked on a zombie outbreak simulation game. Towards the height of the
project, we were probably tearing up and laying down a thousand lines of code
a day, keeping in touch over the phone and fixing build errors and weird
behavior.

Years later, I can't look at that code without wanting to gouge out my eyes.
It makes me physically sick. That said, it worked and worked well for the task
at hand.

Game programming is weird like that, and Blow's talk has a section where he
talks about the relative merits of dumb structures and algorithms for
developers that just have to get the thing to work. It's an interesting
perspective.

~~~
mirsadm
With games like Braid you can afford to do that because as cool as the game
is, it's just a platformer.

Big production games don't have the same luxury as most reviews will focus on
graphics/sound etc. If it runs like crap and looks average no one is going to
accept that no matter how much fun it is.

~~~
timwiseman
I think you may have taken this too far. Graphics and sound can contribute to
or detract from fun, but in the end it is fun that keeps people buying a game.
A game that looks great, but plays poorly will not survive, but a game that
plays fantastically might be around for years later.

I played Planescape Torment many years after it was released because I kept
hearing about it. Comparing it to graphics in other games that I played at the
time the graphics were poor. But it had a tremendous story and was a lot of
fun, so I played it through and still recommend it to others even though it is
now even more dated.

~~~
mirsadm
I agree with you but I think with big studio games it isn't always the case.
The graphics can carry a mediocre game very far. On the other extreme they can
crush a really fun game if it doesn't look "current generation" or has other
technical issues.

Planescape Torment is fantastic. I still play Fallout2 these days. I love that
game :)

~~~
Spearchucker
My experience matches the previous poster. I used to abhor video games of any
kind. Then I was given an XBox for good work or something, and started
checking them out.

Project Gotham Racing looked awesome, and played well. Same for Gears.
Chromehounds looked crap, but played _insanely_ well. I've spent more time
playing Chromehounds than I have any other game, and I play CoD a lot these
days.

------
9999
I agree with most of Blow's supposedly controversial points (on Zynga, social
games, and the juvenile nature of most games...), but I just can't get excited
about his games. Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of
an alienated prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the
meaning of life slapped on as affect? Maybe if he was really good at it, I'd
give it a shot. But he's not Ingmar Bergman, he's not even close.

~~~
icandoitbetter
>Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of an alienated
prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the meaning of life
slapped on as affect?

How can you even make that claim when the game isn't out yet? I seriously have
no idea what to make of your comment.

~~~
9999
I was going off the description of Blow's aims and goals for The Witness from
the article:

Blow’s decision to bare his soul in The Witness springs from this same drive
to live up to the full potential of his artistic medium; a meaningful game, he
believes, must be an honest one. The Witnesss narrator, he freely admits, is a
thinly veiled version of his own psyche. When the narrator speaks of his guilt
over spending millions to create an island filled with puzzles instead of
using that money for worthier causes, this is Blow’s real spiritual dilemma.
When the narrator reflects on his feelings of empty vanity, on his alienation
from others, on his “yearning for truth and deep understanding,” these are
Blow’s pains and desires.

Honesty and truth in storytelling is certainly important, but the kind of
honesty he is talking about there is a boring truth. It reminds me of the same
kind of thinking that produced Cinema Verite, and what Werner Herzog had to
say about that philosophy:

"By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It
reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants."

Even if I am not interested in Blow's pains and desires, I do respect the fact
that he is deliberating on them, and hopefully encouraging other game
developers to do so. However, the potential product of his process as
described in that article just bores me to tears.

~~~
enneff
Going further - how many great (or at least enjoyable) books or films are the
ruminations and self-analysis of a lone individual? Camus' L'Etranger almost
qualifies, except it depicts events involving multiple people, even if it
never speculates on the motivations of the other characters.

Honesty is not enough. I think Blow is more naive than he, or indeed this
reporter, realizes.

------
DannoHung
Blow himself is the most pretentious jerkoff in the world. He makes good games
though.

His game is about a stalker whether he wants it to be or not. Authorial intent
is irrelevant.

edit: Also, I hate how this article is written. It's not journalism when you
turn the subjects into characters in a short story.

~~~
laughinghan
_Blow himself is the most pretentious jerkoff in the world._

I'm curious, care to elaborate?

~~~
muhfuhkuh
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.

~~~
DannoHung
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
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.

------
krisc
Just a heads up for people who haven't played Braid (or you have played it but
still want to dig deeper into the game's meaning), don't read Page 2 of the
article. The author gives away too much! I've played the game and know that
it's just his interpretation, but I still wish I haven't read it...

------
mieubrisse
It appears Mr. Blow has never heard of the likes of Portal or Minecraft, two
of my favorite games that also happen to be tremendously popular. Neither
features the testosterone-laden warrior-men or buxom bikini babes that he
claims have the industry in a death grip, neither can be slotted into the
"money-grubbing sequel" category, and neither is immediately understandable
"on an elementary level" as Clark says. While it's true that games like Call
of Duty are tailored towards a certain audience, Blow and the Clark are
blatantly disregarding evidence that contradicts their damning critiques of
the industry.

~~~
enqk
Only one of them was developed within the industry, and that one (portal) was
actually drafted in school. Finding only two examples is actually pretty
damning too.

------
ahelwer
Interesting. I've avoided video games for quite some time for the same reason
Mr. Blow avoids watching sports. Perhaps I'll check out this new game of his
when it is released.

------
Hari_Seldon
Slightly off topic: The setting for his game is apparently inspired by Myst. I
never got the appeal of Myst, I know it was very popular but to me it just
seemed to be not mush more than a slideshow. It had the reputation of being
the most popular game for people who didn't like games. At the time I was an
avid gamer, maybe that's why I couldn't get into it.

~~~
danteembermage
The game was created in hypercard, so technically it was exactly zero more
than a slideshow. Probably the most atmospheric game I've ever played though;
there was something intensely creepy about wandering around a beautiful empty
island full of strange gadgets.

------
skadamat
Such a great read, very interesting person. I love reading about people who
life societal expectations and focus on spiritual and existential questions.

The game looks pretty interesting, and while I thought it was only for Windows
/ xbox, it's also for mac!

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/braid/id411902645?mt=12>

------
vdm
Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834203>

------
darksaga
After seeing some early videos, I had mixed thoughts. I was impressed with the
idea of the game, but thought for all the time he spent on it, it might be
over the heads of 85% of the gamers out there.

I'm still wondering if he's just putting this game out there, or if he
actually has a target audience he's aiming at.

------
Lockyy
Because this story was already posted a couple days ago and never really
received much attention I'm going to repost my comment from that story.

It was in responce to someone comparing his new "innovative" game to myst and
how Blow is much more derivative than he lets on. It was also a response to
the article implying he was the only person working on truly artistic video
games.

"and don't forget the much more recent Dear Esther. Which is a first person
exploration game based on an island.

Oh and don't forget that other 'cerebral' game that is yet another source mod
(which Dear Esther originally was). The Stanley Parable.[2]

Personally I think this developer is stuck up his own arse. Talking about how
the industry is full of dross for cretins whilst ignoring these games. His
biggest game, Braid, revolves wholly around the twist at the end along with an
interesting gameplay gimmick. He may be an artist within the industry. But by
far isn't the only one, nor is he the best by a long shot.

Comparing the video game industry to literature and movies and saying "Oh,
look at how mindless we are in comparison." Is missing the entire point. A lot
of books, movies and games are mindless. But to then stand up because of that
and say that the industry as a whole is mindless and that your brainchild is
going to revolutionise it and fix all that is wrong is not only egotistical
and ignorant but disrespectful of incredible artists like those who made the
Stanley Parable. (Which was the first video game I played that really made me
think. It is the game that I point to when I need to point out a video game
that is art.)

[1] <http://dear-esther.com/>

[2] <http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable>

~~~
dagheti
Dear Esther was funded by the Indie Fund. One of the founders of the Indie
Fund is Jonathan Blow.

<http://indie-fund.com/about/>

~~~
jblow
Thanks for noticing!

Some posters here have very weird perspectives. Yes, if someone wants to
extrapolate some straw man, based not on statements in the article or evidence
from the real world, but built from whatever feels easy to criticize
thoughtlessly, then sure, it is easy to knock that straw man down. Whatever.

For what it's worth, I liked The Stanley Parable and had a nice chat with the
author of the game at PAX last year. Why would anyone assume that something
like this is not the case?

You guys do know that the subjects of articles you read on the internet are
other real people also on the internet, right? Why would a poster here assume
that I am some kind of inert punching bag rather than, you know, someone who's
been on HN for a couple of years and involved in discussions?

~~~
Lockyy
My reasoning for ranting was less directed at you and more at the idea that
the article held up as you. I never thought about it and hence never realised
that my disagreement was misdirected. I regret not thinking before posting...

------
zobzu
So I though video games werent generating money because of piracy and that
even big titles had troubles. They'd have lied to me?!

~~~
_delirium
There is a lot of money in them still. Perhaps even more than ever. Top
titles, in both indie and AAA spaces, are pulling in revenues that would've
seemed absurd a few years ago. Modern Warfare 3 grossed $400 million in its
first 24 hours. By comparison, the top-grossing opening weekend for a film in
2011 was the Harry Potter film, which grossed $169 million.

And in the indie space, if you're one of the handful-per-year breakout
successes, you can make millions, perhaps double-digit millions, on typically
_much_ lower production+marketing costs. Super Meat Boy grossed somewhere
above $10 million, Minecraft about $80 million, Bastion somewhere in the
single-digit millions. The trick is being one of the few breakouts...

~~~
vacri
"in the first few hours" isn't the same for games as for other media. The
shelf life of most big names is incredibly short - enough that DRM is often
seen as a way to just survive piracy for the release period.

------
bsenftner
I think he's going about his goals incorrectly. We wants to elevate games to a
critically and mainstream accepted Art, so he creates a game that declares
itself Art. Such an approach will have immense push-back from the 'main
stream' (game) industry and even more from the general public. It actually
does not matter what industry we're talking about - an industry that has not
mainstream publicly accepted expressions of itself as High Art worthy of the
equivalent of an Oscar/Emmy/Hugo/Literary-Nobel expression of the human
condition will have virtually no chance of convincing the public one of their
own has broken through into this level of communication.

Think about what Clint Eastwood did with "The Unforgiven": before that film,
the Western was considered a tired, spent, comical film genre. I remember
reading pre-release critics saying Clint had wasted his time on that over used
genre: "what could he possibly say that has not already been said 1,000
times?" they wrote...

What did Clint do? He started the film as a more-or-less classically serious
western. However, as the film progresses, it acknowledges itself through the
presence of dime store outlaw novellas causing kids to idolize the criminal
aspects of the western experience. Then our heroes go about demonstrating the
fallacy of this attitude, and the film ends with the audience being spoon fed
the horror this idolization creates.

I suggest Mr. Blow and others attempting to elevate games to High Art need to
begin with the traditionally insipid game style so popular today. (I can say
this as a former 15 veteran of the games industry. I left specifically because
of all the "pretentious" reasons Jonathan cites.) As the game's traditional
fight-puzzle-fight mechanics play out, the character becomes exposed to the
game engine simulation itself, and the gamer becomes exposed to the
existential dilemma of wanting to continue their suspended disbelief while the
game itself taunts them with the fact they are playing a game. Through such a
careful balance of crossed signal communications, the gamer is left to
question their own existence and the potential of our world merely being a
simulation for the amusement and enrichment of others - at their expense.

No, Matrix fans/critics, I'm not saying "make the Matrix". What I'm pointing
out is how "The Unforgiven" elevated itself by acknowledging the disjoint
between the fiction and the reality, and spoon fed that to the film viewer.
Sure, many a western and plain film fan missed Clint's higher message. Such is
the diverse nature of how Art communicates. Much of what is considered "Art"
today is simply artfully ambiguous. Jonathan can not afford such ambitiousness
if he wants to achieve his goal.

Jonathan's goal of elevating games needs to include all the insipid game
cliches to draw the traditional fan in, and then pull the floor out from under
them, leaving them literally afraid to continue the game because it risks
wreaking their appreciation for game playing thereafter. It's not a success to
simply engage. It's not a success to merely cause consideration and wonder.
Jonathan Blow's goal is to end games as they are today and reboot the entire
industry, reborn as the 21st century's equivalent to the 20th century Film.

------
bashzor
Why does this article make 178 HTTP requests and load Javascript from 24
different domains over a duration of 16 seconds, before even the basic loading
is done?

After that it starts on its three realtime services: Disqus, Chartbeat and
Tubemogul (whatever that is) all keep track of how long you stay on the page.
Not to mention how the site manages to slow down the entire browser during
loading, and has many simple syntax errors. Not cross-browser stuff (like
webkit-only css rules), also simply misspelled CSS.

Worst of all, the font is too small. I'm not going to read kilobytes of text
like this.

This kind of website makes me want to disable Javascript by default...

~~~
dbaupp
If you are using Firefox, RequestPolicy[1] is really nice: allows you to block
all those useless requests (and selectively activate ones that are required).

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/)

