The Break Room Interviews: Jonathan Blow

Hats off to Tom Mcshea for such a great interview!!! 

Love these break room interviews, laid back, raw and unedited. Awesome discussion.

I agree with him on what you want out of games changing as you age.  These days with both TV and games I want to play something that leaves me feeling that it was worthwhile and challenged me in some way (either that or has very well realised characterisations that can play to my emotional intelligence).

These days I find it really hard to get behind a game unless it has that deeper hook or in Japanese (so I can focus on my language learning)...but nowadays just having the latter doesn't do it for me.  A lot of the games I play suddenly seem big and dumb...and I don't mean the obvious ones like explosion-filled action games; there is something contrived about many games in general as the actions characters take in games for instance are often the result of game-logic rather than something any person would do in the situations they found.  When you step back and look at what the characters are doing (and why) it suddenly seems really bizarre. 

He's a very interesting man.... to say the least.

Well we will have to wait and see.It does though sounds very interesting and the interview is very well done congrats

Braid was awesome, definitely looking forward to this.

whatever restaurant they're in played passion pit for like the whole interview

Great interview! Thanks! This sounds like it could be interesting. I'm a big Myst fan.

Elevating the cultural significance of games is no more difficult than raising the bar on quality, including in basic concept and development, and disowning trash media and content from what should be an otherwise-respectable artform...OF COURSE I am referring to content and rating, EVERYTHING ELSE by comparison is irrelevant when discussing trash games, not when we really want to make games respectable.

i don't understand why anything he is saying is considered controversial. it's all extremely obvious. even tom was too embarrassed to tell jonathon that gamespot gave red dead redemption game of the year (unlike journey). everybody knows that game publishers, like movie producers, won't take large risks and game critics can only compare games to other games. anything with a little story that makes sense seems deeper, even when it isn't. the takeaway is the developer's like jonathon and journalists like tom are trying very hard to push things in what they believe is the right direction... which is happening, albeit very slowly.

It's strange; I like his GAME, I'm looking forward to 'The Witness', and I agree with most of what he has to say, but I hate HIM.  He seems to be putting on this tortured artist/fragile genius mask, and that's all that kind of attitude is, just a show for the person doing it.  

What a great porno name.

Good interview. Relaxed, insightful and very well articulated. A nice way to begin a Sunday morning.

Awesome!

This is a great show Tom, thanks!

Jonathan blows goats.

The problem is industry and prestige, Game Publishers don't care about the artform, its the nature of their business to care about quarterly statements but the developers that do care about art need the publishers to make the game, so most AAA's end up in a stalemate of interests. The counter to this is prestige which movies have in the form of Oscars/Baftas/Sundance/Cannes etc... Until we have more developers/publishers that chase a prestige rather than survival through money it will be very hard to gain cultural significance. Also to move into a higher realm of art, Game Fans need to accept change, without change things can't move forward but without the fans they can't keep doing what their doing (another stalemate of interest) in the end... its hopeless really lol 

A new game? Can't wait to cry, ponder my existence and talk about my feelings.

The Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson wrote:

Obviously, if there is in a substance anything that is act, it is not the matter, it is the form.  The form then is the very act whereby a substance is what it is, and, if a being is primarily or, as Aristotle himself says, almost exclusively what it is, each being is primarily and almost exclusively its form.  The distinctive character of a truly Aristotelian metaphysics of being...lies in the fact that it knows of no act superior to form, not even existence.  There is nothing above being; there is nothing above the form, and this means that the form of a given being is an act of which there is no act.

This is why games are the most significant cultural form in a world that offers such limited possibilities for so many.  You can exist via games in a world that is virtually without possibilities beyond selling your labour for long periods of every day and being continuously assessed while being denied access to anything (the other main experience of people).  

Chico86 - took the words out of my mouth. The discourse was deep, meaningful, and insightful.  They touched on a number of issues that I have been struggling for many years to put a face and name to.  I especially like the comparison to film, literature, and other art forms.  Well done!

Hands down the best gaming interview I've ever seen in my life, right here! Thanks Jonathan and Tom, truly.

I wonder if he could sell his last name for $15,000 per kilo.

I wondered a bit about the life of those goomba/lion head guys in Braid. They get shot out of a cannon often right into a deadly situation like a pit of flaming spikes or whatever. Do they not have an existence until they are shot out of the cannon? That's a cruel life. Do they have a family of little lion heads that they are being taken from? I don't know which one is worse. 

The less than enthusiastic "ouch" noises always make me smile though. You have terrible little lives. Show it, furry Camus.

Jonathan's face at 35:20 when the interviewer mentions angry birds, priceless

I like his critique of BioShock. I had the same take away from it. Its message was hidden behind the game play.

There's a growing problem I've been thinking about for awhile and it comes out a lot in this video.  Elitism, and Tom is LOVING it :), he's the perfect choice for this interview.  Game journalists, which in the gaming industry are also reviewers, are losing touch with the actual gaming public.  It's part of why indie gaming is so hyped now, and yes I believe it is hype, many indie games are shallow and have nothing innovative in them, they just use simple graphics and claim it's some unique art style.  And before you flame me with examples, I said MOST not ALL :).

Personally, for me maybe not everyone, story is not a big problem in games today.  What turns me off from many of today's games is simple gameplay mechanics, things like quick time events and heavily scripted sequences that give the damned cinematic experience everyone talks about now, at the expense of gameplay.  Shooting guys in the face can be a great game, I just prefer to do it in a game where I need to make good use of tactics to succeed at it.  

There's nothing wrong with shooters you know, just like there's nothing wrong with other genres.  As an example, Call of Duty, the game everyone loves to hate now.  I haven't really played it since it left WWII, and I don't care for it much, I actually think it's too simple, too run and gun.  But, I cannot deny that it has to be doing something right to be so popular and enjoyed by so many people.  I'm looking forward to a game called Takedown because it's supposedly going to be all tactical and more realistic.  Still, I don't feel the need to call the CoD fans stupid idiots for liking their game that might be considered more simple and less difficult.  Hey, even if the tactics are very simple, being fast enough to make a shot in a so called twitch shooter takes skill, it's just a different type of skill than other games.

Ah, my comments are kind of disjointed but I'm just getting tired of this subtle (sometimes not so much) condescending undertone I keep getting from many of today's gaming journalists.

I wonder how Jonathan feels about Antechamber.

so what games was he talking about on twitter..I checked but didn't really find out

I think right now there will be happening the same thing in video games that happened in the Hollywood-movie scene in the sixties. At that time the Hollywood had run out of ideas and the whole industry was in a sort of depression. The cinema scope and 3d techniques didn´t seem that fresh anymore and the market was dominated by musicals and family-entertainment movies. A new bold and intellectual generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America. They were inspired by European filmmakers (especially French New Wave), which at that time were much more daring than the stale Hollywood-studio based economy, because they were individualists-filmmakers. Film makers like Jean Luc Godart and Michalangelo Antonioni.

I think the same thing might happen in the video game scene. In fact it is already happening. The industry is in a crisis right now, because the market and the content has become stale. The content of most games repeats and often than not it involves juvenile tones and unnecessary violence. In an attempt of saving the market they try to make the games more entertaining and add many bells and whistles to make them appealing. The core structure remains stale (same thing Hollywood tried desperately to do in the lat fifties). Now since some years there has been  indie game-scene. They have the same role as the French New Wave had for the movie industry in the sixties.

The gaming industry will use this ideas and capitalize on them to create a new branch of video games that are AAA but indie at heart (hopefully).

We saw that in journey. I wouldn´t call it exactly indie, because Sony had a deal for a lot of money with the creators. But in heart it is.

What i am trying to say, is that game like journey will be the equivalent to movies like Melancholia from Lars van Trier. It is a movie that isn´t exactly independent but i wouldn´t call it a blockbuster either.

 I think right now there will be happening the same thing in video games that happened in the Hollywood-movie scene in the sixties. At that time the Hollywood had run out of ideas and the whole industry was in a sort of depression. The cinema scope and 3d techniques didn´t seem that fresh anymore and the market was dominated by musicals and family-entertainment movies. A new bold and intellectual generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America. They were inspired by European filmmakers (especially French New Wave), which at that time were much more daring than the stale Hollywood-studio based economy, because they were individualists-filmmakers. Film makers like Jean Luc Godart and Michalangelo Antonioni.

I think the same thing might happen in the video game scene. In fact it is already happening. The industry is in a crisis right now, because the market and the content has become stale. The content of most games repeats and often than not it involves juvenile tones and unnecessary violence. In an attempt of saving the market they try to make the games more entertaining and add many bells and whistles to make them appealing. The core structure remains stale (same thing Hollywood tried desperately to do in the lat fifties). Now since some years there has been  indie game-scene. They have the same role as the French New Wave had for the movie industry in the sixties.

The gaming industry will use this ideas and capitalize on them to create a new branch of video games that are AAA but indie at heart (hopefully).

We saw that in journey. I wouldn´t call it exactly indie, because Sony had a deal for a lot of money with the creators. But in heart it is.

What i am trying to say, is that game like journey will be the equivalent to movies like Melancholia from Lars van Trier. It is a movie that isn´t exactly independent but i wouldn´t call it a blockbuster either.

I'm hesitant to admit this because I loved Braid and I think the guy has some great ideas but ever since I saw Indie game: the movie, to me he just seems to be one of the biggest douches I've ever seen.  Some of the comments he made about gamers "not getting his game" in that documentary came off as arrogant, douchy and overall makes him look like a guy with a horrible case of ridiculous hubris.