www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928 -> www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/
Close The Most Dangerous Gamer Never mind that they're now among the most lucrative forms of entertainment in America, video games are juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy. 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. With his next release, The Witness, Blow may cement his legacy--or end his career. In a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish?
Image credit: Jake Stangel Like many wealthy people, Jonathan Blow vividly remembers the moment he became rich. At the time, in late 2008, he was $40,000 in debt and living in a modest San Francisco apartment, having just spent more than three years meticulously refining his video game, Braid--an innovative time-warping platformer (think Super Mario Bros. meets Borges), whose $200,000 development Blow funded himself. Although Braid had been released, to lavish praise from the video-game press, on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service that August, Blow didn't see a cent from the game until one autumn day when he sat down at a caf in the city's Mission district. "I opened up my Web browser and Holy fuck, I'm rich now," he recalled. Blow's similarities to the average millionaire end right there, however, because unlike most wealthy people, he seems faintly irritated by his memory of striking it rich. 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?" 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." For the world's most existentially obsessed game developer, coming into seven figures just provided another opportunity to ponder the nature of meaning in the universe. As Braid grew into a bona fide phenomenon in its first year--selling several hundred thousand copies, winning armloads of industry awards, and becoming Exhibit A in the case for the video game as a legitimate artistic medium--Blow made several upgrades to his austere lifestyle. In place of his old Honda, he now drives a $150,000 crimson Tesla Roadster, a low-slung all-electric automotive dynamo that offers a highly realistic simulation of being shot out of a cannon whenever Blow clamps down on the accelerator. And after a yearlong victory lap filled with lectures and laurels, he moved into a spacious hilltop condo that overlooks the eastern half of the city as it slopes down to the sapphire-colored bay. 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. books on physics and Eastern philosophy lie in haphazard piles, as though he has only half finished carting his belongings in from a moving truck outside. His minimal collection of furniture is almost all rented, including the springy beige sofa he got just a few months ago, after he arranged to have several video-game journalists over and realized he had nowhere for them to sit. "Having a big high score in my bank account is not interesting to me. I have a nice car now, but I don't really own that many objects, and I don't know what else I would spend money on. So for me, money is just a tool I can use to get things done." More specifically, Blow has decided to use his money--nearly all of it--to finance what may be the most intellectually ambitious video game in history, one that he hopes will radically expand the limitations of his chosen field. Although video games long ago blossomed into full commercial maturity (the adrenaline-soaked military shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for example, racked up $400 million in sales during its first 24 hours in stores last fall), the form remains an artistic backwater, plagued by cartoonish murderfests and endless revenue-friendly sequels. Blow intends to shake up this juvenile hegemony with The Witness, a single-player exploration-puzzle game set on a mysterious abandoned island. In a medium still awaiting its quantum intellectual leap, Blow aims to make The Witness a groundbreaking piece of interactive art--a sort of Citizen Kane of video games. Video: Taylor Clark shows how radically Jonathan Blow's games challenge the mainstream. It's a characteristically audacious plan for a man who has earned a reputation not just as the video-game industry's most cerebral developer, but also as its most incisive and polarizing internal critic. To Blow, being labeled the most intellectual man in video games is a little like being called the most chaste woman in a brothel: not exactly something to crow about to Mom and Dad. "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." 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. He has famously branded so-called social games like FarmVille "evil" because their whole raison d'tre is to maximize corporate profits by getting players to check in obsessively and buy useless in-game items. His entire public demeanor forms a challenge to the genre's intellectual laziness. Blow is the only developer on the planet who gives lectures with titles like "Video Games and the Human Condition," the only one who speaks of Italo Calvino's influence on his work, and the only one to so rile up the gamer community with his perceived pretentiousness that the popular gamer blog Kotaku used him as the centerpiece of a post titled "When You Love the Game But Not Its Creator." Yet as harsh as Blow can be toward his industry, he applies even stricter standards to his own work. With The Witness, produced with about $2 million of his own money, he plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form--a medium capable of producing something far richer and more meaningful than the brain-dead digital toys currently on offer. Blow envisions future games that deliver experiences as poignant and sublime as those found through literature and film, but expressed in ways distinctive to games. "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?" "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. 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. I was surprised, then, when after a pleasant dinner mostly spent bemoaning the game industry's artistic failings, Blow offered to let me play an...
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