THERE’S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series.

The Most Dangerous Gamer - Magazine - The Atlantic

Time for a rant

If you think Skyrim is about the narrative or the characters, you have missed everything that Jonathan Blow is trying to get at. The characters, the plot, the sidequests - they’re there to create a background against which you, as the player, get to express yourself. And it’s one of the richest and most nuanced backgrounds in any video game to date. The central thesis of the game is expression, and the very point of it being in a video game gives many people the freedom to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t in real life. Gay kids can get gay married in Skyrim even though coming out to their parents might get them thrown out of home. Or a good person can try on an identity as an evil overlord, and see how the amusement suits them. It’s not about wish fulfillment - although it can be used that way - but it is about changing your thoughts, habits, and values within a microcosm.

Mr. Blow may or may not agree with my analysis (and I agree that Black Ops is not exactly highbrow art), but the condescension and dismissive attitude in this article is so palpable that it solidifies into a congealed mess of hatred. Which makes an excellent lubricant while the author is blowing Braid’s creator.

The article spends hundreds of words brushing off other games as stupid and sophomoric, with virtually no counterexamples. Marc ten Bosch’s Miegakure notwithstanding - after all, ten Bosch knows Jonathan personally, so maybe he’s within the halo of Jonathan’s smartness, rather than a second datum pointing to a corpus of smart and artistic games and developers.

There are no mentions in the article of the plethora of games which might be considered artistically meaningful, aside from brushing off Flower as a Thomas Kinkaide painting. And let’s be honest, if we’re going to go there, I’m ready to write off Braid as David Fincher’s The Game. But in a nearly 8,000 word article, not one mention of Notch and his synthesis of creative construction? Not one sentence about Tale of Tales The Path, which is also about noticing things? No mention of other eccentric auteurs like Jeff Minter?

But no; those things wouldn’t fit the narrative. Games are dumb. Movies are smart. Literature is smart. Classical music is smart, and it doesn’t matter how theoretical or mathematical Dream Theater got with Octavarium; they are rock and therefore, dumb. The author is smart, and you, dear Atlantic reader, probably are not.

Half the article is spent building up how smart Jonathan Blow is. He listens to classical literature audiobooks. He does Tai-chi. His childhood was spent learning self denial. He never wastes time – much like characters on Star Trek. He is the lone rebel against the crusading army of dumb that is the video game industry.

And what do we get at the end of the article? This gem:

Blow remained silent.

“Does that make sense?,” I asked.

“Yep, yep.”

“So?”

He smiled.

“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”

After spending 6,500 words or so talking up how smart and well-read and zen-like Jonathan is, we arrive at the climax of the article: the author gets him. The author understands the deep mysteries Jonathan was trying to get at, and is therefor as smart and well-read and zen-like as Jonathan. The rest of the article is just falling actions.

Look, I like Jonathan. He has a lot of smart, thought-provoking things to say about game development. I liked Braid - it made me think, hard, and actually drew some emotion out of me. Pointing out that Jonathan is doing something artistic is good. Fellating him with 7,000 words of praise as an artistic demigod and condemning all other games as hopelessly dumb is probably the wrong path to take, though. The truth might be a bit more nuanced than that.