I love puzzle games so I had a great time with the witness (it is gorgeous and legitimately creative with its mechanics!) up until a point where I found an underground theater room that when I entered a code played a video of some sweaty 1970s dipshit explaining that all art is worthless and science is the One True Religion and got the sense that the game earnestly believed this so I just immediately shut the game off and uninstalled it. When I later found out that Jonathan Blow thinks women are objectively inferior I was completely unsurprised. Fuck that guy and his misogynistic STEMbro faux intellectualism.
At least I got it in a humble bundle where all my money went to charity and Blow didn’t get a single dime out of it, I guess.
EDIT: it also lead to my GF and I just constantly roasting the game for weeks afterwards, during which a Neon Genesis Evangelion title card generator was floating around twitter and I so naturally I made this:
We still laugh about this shit a year later and I can no longer think about J Blow without imagining him as some absurd anime villain convinced his dumb bullshit is the most important endeavor the human race has ever undertook lol
The Atlantic:
At his Berkeley office many months later, as I was playing a more polished build of The Witness, I turned to Blow at the next desk and asked if I was missing some clue for a specific puzzle. He fixed me with a stare that could hammer a nail into a wall. “The clue is, you’re doing it wrong,” he said.
The profile this is from is actually incredibly illuminating and fascinating, and I highly recommend it regardless of how you feel about Blow.
Oh yeah, I’ve read that before. There’s a lot of breathless hyperbole about how amazingly Artistic Braid is that really oversells how deep that game’s subtext actually is but there’s also lots of interesting stuff about how Blow sees the world and sees games and approaches making them. The fact that Blow seems like a legitimately intelligent person in many regards and is clearly a talented game designer makes his retrograde attitudes and unending condescension even more frustrating. Honestly I may even try whatever game he makes next because it’s guaranteed to be different if nothing else. I just will be going into it extremely skeptical of whatever points he is trying to make with it.
Yeah, the praise for Braid is unnecessary, though helpfully contextual for readers who know nothing about games. However, as an examination of a strange, flawed, intelligent, and socially challenged person, I thought it was frank in a way that is totally unflattering, but deeply incisive. It took off for me when Heck started talking around Blow’s abrasive personality - like, even his friends have a difficult time with him. An asshole? Egocentric? Clearly, but he’s nothing if not an interesting subject of analysis.
Another additionsto my ever growing list of developers that can fuck the hell off is Arenanet, for firing two of their writers after fucking trash gamers and internet manbabies organized hate mobs against them.
I’ll stop there, but I’m glad the good part of game dev twitter is having none of this bullshit.
A close friend of mine is on the ArenaNet animation team and is pretty outspokenly against bullshit and has already caught side eye for it, so now I’m real worried it’s gonna cost her that job.
I recently started playing Guild Wars 2 again after taking a break for a couple of months and even spent some money on it. Asked for a refund today because there’s no way I’m touching that game again now. It’s a shame because I quite liked it, but the response from ArenaNet has been unacceptable.
