Nicole’s post on video games and art has brought up something for me that is a bit of a sore spot. And that would be Jonathan Blow’s latest whack-a-doodle (yes, that is the technical term) rant on Twitter about “art” games (defined seemingly as those made by him) vs. AAA titles (aka dog food). On January 30, 2013, in the span of 6 minutes Blow tweeted 4 times about the current state of video games:
1:58 p.m. This week I’ve played several recent games that are critically acclaimed, but are obviously terrible, even at the acclaim-garnering things.
Immediately folks started to ask which ones. I mean, you can’t just drop a bomb like that and not name names. Hell, I feel the same way about some of the best-selling (though often not critically acclaimed) AAA titles that I play, but in all fairness to everyone in earshot I have to name names and tell them why I think that the games are “obviously terrible”. I think that it’s also only fair to the same folks to tell them when I think that a game is narratively or morally putrid, but still has solid mechanics. I mean it’s only fair. Not everyone is playing with the same value system that I am. Heck, I am the first to admit that while the penis jokes and sexual innuendo in EA’s Shadows of the Damned were just too much for me to bear (there is only so much that I can ignore) that the gameplay was solid (same goes for the point and click adventure game that I talked about on Episode 49, Skygoblin’s The Journey Down).
2:02 p.m.If I let it, it makes me sad about being involved in games / dedicating my life to this pursuit.
Really? Wow. If every mediocre teacher/researcher/scholar out there who got more recognition for their work than I did, or made more money doing it than I did made me question my own life/career choices then maybe it should. Really. I mean we do the things that we do because we love then (if like professors and “art” game designers we have a choice, not like most fast food workers I’m guessing). We don’t do these things because we want mega-stardom. Not that mega-stardom would be a bad thing for some folks, but it’s not why we started down the path. The way that I understand most of my artist friends (regardless of if the medium is fiber, paint, or video games) is that they do it for the love of their art. They have something that they want to share with the world (a message, a vision, an idea) and their greatest achievement is when it actually reaches that audience. Jonathan Blow did just that with Braid (at least the audience thought so). While there was lots of buzz about the game and folks had all kinds of reads of it (and it did well financially), Blow claimed that people just were responding to it the way that he intended. And so the rumors of him being a pretentious jerk began. And then there’s the fact that his second game, The Witness, which was announced in 2009 still does not have an official release date (though in his defense he has been busy with IndieFund which helps support indie game development)
2:03 p.m.It’s like honing your craft as a chef while cans of dog food, rebranded as people food, are getting Food of the Year acclaim.. and
So yeah, apparently he’s talking about TellTale’s The Walking Dead. Look, I am the first to admit that TWD was far from perfect. The gameplay was glitchy at times. It took me like 20 tries to get away from the damned motel and it was more of an interactive fiction with gaming elements than a traditional game, but games seem to be evolving. We saw this coming with titles like Heavy Rain. Even new iterations of my old school favorites like the Final Fantasy series are a little too Quicktime-y for me as more of a purist who still thinks that the series should have ended with VII (we’ll save that argument for later). Blow wants games to be art, but seemingly on his own terms and with his own definition. That stagnates the medium. Perhaps it is the undergraduate English major in him that really wants to just hold on tight to a kind of gaming canon (one prescribed by him).
2:04 p.m. people who think they are experts on games are all nodding along, yep, that makes sense, this dog food is Oscar-quality delicious and etc.
This makes me wonder if he is talking about the fact that the music from Journey was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (the award was won for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). I know that Grammys and Oscars are different things, but no game got nominated for a Grammy. I’m just saying, folks. And I hate to jump to the defense of Journey here because I really did not like that game, but it wasn’t because it was “obviously terrible” or “dog food”, but because it just wasn’t my cup of tea. It was beautiful and the soundtrack was phenomenal, but Journey was just not what I want my gaming experience to be. I want beauty, music, and co-operative play but I need to kill some things (or at least beat them silly) too! Perhaps one day I will go back and play Journey again when I am in a different head space. That’ll probably be the day that I pick up Flower too (and I think that one of my PS3s actually came with Flow).
This brings up a lot of questions about Jonathan Blow as a person and other Indie “Art” game developers more generically (NB that I don’t put “art” in quotation marks because I don’t think that can are –or can be– art, but because it is a visual marker of the pretentious tone that I think that they are saying “art” with. Blow has a reputation for being pretentious, no surprises there, but why piss off your customer base? There are only so many games that other developers and artsy types are going to buy. How do you continue to fund additional games, get your message out, get the reaction that you want, and more importantly not alienate the entire gaming community?
Blow’s tweet rant is reminiscent of sour grapes. Braid didn’t get Game of the Year (in fact lots of folks hated the narrative all together) and it wasn’t nominated for a Grammy, even though the music was beautiful and at times haunting. Let’s hope that this is not where this vitriol is coming from and that it is really his ill-fated, socially inept attempt at critique, because I would really hate to think that this was the way of someone who is attempting to set himself up as a mentor and sponsor for budding indie game devs. We can do better than this as a community folks. We can be critical of the shortfalls of the industry without being totally dismissive of everything that is not our own.
