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Jonathan Blow threatens to boycott conferences that "disinvite speaker[s] due to "cancel culture"-style pressure" [UPDATE: He's a COVID truther too]
- Thread starter Icolin
- Start date
Kinda makes sense to me. In his game every little detail matters and is relevant to solving the larger metagame. If you try to apply this thought process to actual reality you end up drawing all sorts of spurious connections between unrelated events and tying your brain into knots.
He's one of those people who just has to stand apart and take the alternative viewpoint because he thinks it makes him look smarter.
Blow makes puzzle games that are less informed by his shitty political views than Rowling's work which has always been deeply political. Which isn't to say there isn't anything problematic at all in there, but the point of that comic you posted is that we should recognize that.We're well four years since Blow showed his ass by saying women are genetically less likely to take computer science as a career path, I think we can do better than just brushing off that a product we like was made by a shit as a valid way to go about things.
Obligatory:
Let's not forget the man literally made a game about going to extreme measures to connect the dots between arbitrary objects.
The aha moment in The Witness is seeing hidden connections in the world and feel like a genius for finding them. It's basically QAnon as a game mechanic.
The aha moment in The Witness is seeing hidden connections in the world and feel like a genius for finding them. It's basically QAnon as a game mechanic.
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And that type seems VERY susceptible to the conspiracy theorist's high of thinking they know more than everyone else. The notion that Blow gets off on believing he knows a "truth" that nobody else understands or can perceive is so fucking on brand it might as well be the plot of The Witness 2.
Yeah, that seems about right.
I doubt he ever has an opinion he feels unqualified to assert.
Goddamn
I love Braid and The Witness was a moment in time for me and my brother to do the puzzles together during lockdown, and I'll always love the game for that.
That said, fuck Blow. He made a few good games and now he thinks he's this genius auteur who no one gets. Id be content if he fucked off and never made another game.
I love Braid and The Witness was a moment in time for me and my brother to do the puzzles together during lockdown, and I'll always love the game for that.
That said, fuck Blow. He made a few good games and now he thinks he's this genius auteur who no one gets. Id be content if he fucked off and never made another game.
Jonathan Who?
Anyway. Space is extremely cool. It has given us not just Minecraft, but also Braid and The Witness.
Anyway. Space is extremely cool. It has given us not just Minecraft, but also Braid and The Witness.
Has anyone, in the history of time, been more up their own ass than Jonathan Blow? Honestly, this dude is a fucking nightmare. Can you imagine living with this guy? What a disaster.
I hate that I enjoyed The Witness as much as I did.
Well I've lost the capacity to be surprised by him I guess.
Yeah... no. Believe it or not you can admit that something is good even if it is made by a total pillock. Whether you should buy it/play it/recommend it is another question.
Yeah... no. Believe it or not you can admit that something is good even if it is made by a total pillock. Whether you should buy it/play it/recommend it is another question.
Literally, two hours of video logs, shaped by his viewpoint.
If anything I would say he's more baldfaced in his viewpoint than Rowling has ever been.
Phil Fish and Johnathan Blow: The most overrated indie developers in the history of gaming.
Like Phil, I wish Blow would have deleted his Twitter account a long time ago.
Like Phil, I wish Blow would have deleted his Twitter account a long time ago.
thats just silly. The puzzles are not about connecting random things, instead you have to analyse the actual patterns and rules that each puzzle area is about.
that's not to excuse what blow is talking about here but this connection to QAnon is really really silly.
It's... kind of weird that instead of criticising Blow's dangerous bullshit on Twitter... some are instead seeing this as an opportunity to attack his games as if an objectionable person could only produce objectionable work. Admitting that his games are good or great doesn't limit your ability to criticise other things he does.
Could you elaborate...?
Aside from the fact that the videos and audio logs in The Witness are clearly not imperative, is there really something concerning about the interview with Richard Feynmann, or the documentary with James Burke, or the excerpt from Nostalghia, or the recording of an old GDC talk, etc?
Could you elaborate...?
Aside from the fact that the videos and audio logs in The Witness are clearly not imperative, is there really something concerning about the interview with Richard Feynmann, or the documentary with James Burke, or the excerpt from Nostalghia, or the recording of an old GDC talk, etc?
I was apparently blocked by him back when he did this trash OP for replying, "Nothing of value would be lost." Remains very accurate.
I think the Witness is a wonderful game. I just think it's interesting to that his ideology leaked into his game design.
I'm not talking about the explicit puzzles in The Witness. I'm talking about the environmental ones. They're literally about seeing patterns hidden within the game world and drawing a line between them. The Witness isn't a QAnon game but one of the mechanics is about finding patterns in the environment which most people will not see (I believe you can complete the game without finding an environmental connection) and feeling good about it.
i swear to god there are so many people on resetera who think exactly like this and its so baffling to me. as soon as you get any insight into what you perceive as someone's politics, something as basic as connecting two dots together as the basis of a puzzle suddenly becomes qanon truther proof.
he hates women in tech and think they're biologically pre-disposed to be less-interested in it, thats well documented and something he has actually said. leave the weird, wild accusations of him being a qanon truther out of it lol
Aside from anything else has Blow expressed support for QAnon? Perhaps he has, but I'm not aware of it. Regardless, noticing patterns in the real world is hardly unique to a conspiracy theorists, it's a fundamental part of science and mathematics. Also, to be frank, while you could finish the game without ever finding one, the game gives you a massive nudge at a certain point.
Phil and Blow are two entirely different scenarios. And honestly, I wish back then Blow had been the one to be pushed out the industry.
Phil was a talented developer who was extremely vocal about a lot of things he didn't like in the industry. He would probably be shitting on Blow right now with the rest of us if he still had public social media, given the many times he stood up for the right thing at the expense of getting targeted by the GG lot (defending women in games, etc) at a time when Blow's biggest concern was journalists blacklisting GG supporters.
People's insistence on throwing Phil and Blow together as if they are one and the same always confuses me, given that when games are not the topic of discussion they seem to be completely opposite people.
The point isn't a comparative evaluation of the badness of the respective artists. Notch is the worst of all of them, by far. The point is that even if the Harry Potter series were written by Hatsune Miku, any remotely critical reading of it reveals that Rowling's bigotry is pervasive in the text itself, making any discussion of separating the art from the artist impossible.
Nah, sorry, don't see a connection. That QAnon stuff is an ever deeper well of madness people fall into. Pattern matching is a pretty fundamental thing that our brain does, and the core element behind any puzzle game. These weird conspiracy cults (like QAnon, and flat eartherism before it, and 9/11 truthers, and so on) are about making pattern matching into a magical tool that can explain, in and of itself, everything, without needing to make logical sense.
Those environmental puzzles are just optional side activities that fit naturally in a puzzle game. You are reaching hard here.
And again, I'm not defending Blow and his bullshit takes. Guy's a complete moron outside of game design.
I don't see the connection either, the environmental puzzles were a natural evolution to the puzzle design.
Just like liberals always turn Republican when they get too rich.
100% agree with his second tweet, tbh.
First word is key, though. *if* that's what was happening, yeah, but it ain't. Like, at all. Holy cow. Man's brains are just scrambled eggs
His opinion that they're hiding side effects comes from a fucking opinion piece at TheHill.
Within 30 seconds he blocked me. I feel pretty good.
The Witness seemed pretty self-aware, at least as I understood it, about the line between trying to find patterns to understand the world and get closer to Truth, and getting so consumed by a search for some underlying Big Answer that you lose perspective completely. I felt like the FMV that serves as one of the game's endings was one way of acknowledging that (the "player character" emerging from the virtual world of The Witness and staggering around looking for the game's patterns, which outside of that world are totally pointless). Similarly, The Secret of Psalm 46 GDC lecture that's in the game (the environmental puzzle that requires you to listen to the whole thing is an all-time great stupid gaming moment, and it ties into this very idea) is largely about how people get carried away by the hunt for Easter eggs and hidden puzzles, whether that's the truth of Shakespeare's identity or codes hidden in the Bible or conspiracy theories.
Drawing lines or creating patterns can be very fun, but it's not necessarily good for you all the time.