For those who don't recognize the name, Jonathan Blow is the creator of two of some of the most acclaimed indie games of their time,
Braid and
The Witness. While I think opinions on Braid have lowered a bit over the years (Mario but Sad), I still see The Witness being held up as a marvel of immersive puzzle game design years after the fact.
Mr. Blow is also a piece of shit, a fact that I feel gets glossed over a bit because of the high praise for the previously mentioned titles. People start to realize this any time they hear him speak after a while, considering the only tone he seems to know is condescending, but this is underscored by
the time he tried to argue women were biologically less interested in tech than men,
equated anti-fascism with terrorism, and currently noted by him
tweeting COVID19 conspiracy theories.
Mr. Blow is having a bit of a moment right now as he has decided that, despite barely making any appearance at conferences in recent years, he has decided he will no longer appear at any conference that succumbs to "cancel culture style pressure" to remove participants.
While he doesn't spell out exactly what set him off on this course in his twitter thread, a bit of likely background behind why:
Programmer and
noted police-apologist Uncle Bob Martin was apparently invited to speak at some dev conference in Chicago this month, but was disinvited when it was brought to the attention of the organizers that Uncle Bob has a tendency to post racist stuff, like posting negatively about BLM or black people in general, excusing police actions against the protests (only ever referred to as riots by him), retweeting Fox News, and unironically posting about 1984 and "wrong think" (and also pulls out the "debate me" card) when people try to challenge him on anything.
Apparently this didn't sit well with Jon, who feels that "cancel culture" is being driven by people getting over-offended at
small differences of opinion and risks destroying the ability for "engineers" to solve all of the world's problems, because apparently we're too busy cancelling the smart people who will fix everything because they're racist to actually solve things ourselves.
However, before the arbiters of cancel culture were able to come for him for all the "small differences of opinion" he's shared over the years, he has decided to preemptively cancel himself in order to claim the moral high ground, framing it as proof of his conviction of his beliefs against cancel culture. He's just, you know, also
calling for a collective of people to do the same in order to pressure conferences to change, which by the way is totally different from cancel culture.
I'm almost a little saddened to see just how far this guy has fallen, considering I have quite fond memories of Braid and it being part of that initial wave of "indie" that got me more interested in the game dev side of the industry, but I don't see how I could ever support any project with some tangible connection to Blow anymore. Dude is just actively a piece of shit now.
Edit: I see I was a few minutes slow on the draw on my thread, but yeah, dude is just trying to preempt the day "cancel culture" comes for him when people put together all the absolute trash he's spouted over the years.
