“The majority of games are basically porn”
The Witness, Thekla, Inc., 2015
From Vanity Fair:
“A lot of games today are only interested in making players feel smart, rather than have players actually be smart. A game that is just trying to make you feel smart all the time runs the danger of being like a Potemkin village: you may feel like you’ve had this sequence of cool experiences, but when you look at them more closely, you find that most of them are empty. I feel like ‘try to make players feel smart’ is a shallow motivation and I hold some kind of mild contempt for it. Rather than making some relatively surface experience where people feel smart—the implication being that they’re not actually that smart, we’re just helping them feel that way—game designers should believe that people are intrinsically smart and give them a chance to exercise those muscles and become better at it.”
It’s true that few puzzle games push boundaries when it comes to what actually constitutes a puzzle. Take the puzzle-game cliché: the locked door. If you happen upon a locked door in a game, chances are the key/code/password will be lying around somewhere close by—graffitied on the adjacent wall, perhaps, or scribbled on that painfully obvious piece of scrap paper sticking out of the trash can. Finding the code and opening the door doesn’t require any deductive reasoning or logic. It’s not really putting one’s “little gray cells” to use. Blow doesn’t like games that feed players’ egos with these continual yet ultimately insignificant triumphs. He believes a puzzle game can do much more.
Blow is preparing to release The Witness in the wake of last year’s “Gamergate” controversy—which began as a cry for more transparency in video-game reporting and devolved into serial harassment of female video-game journalists and developers. The entire affair greatly harmed the public perception of video games and the people who play them. Even at a time when games about cancer or immigration no longer feel like oddities alongside Call of Duty or Halo, people who had previously cared little about games were suddenly flooded with evidence of the video-game community as a poisonous and unwelcoming place. For someone already predisposed to think of video games as immature or free of artistic merit, Gamergate only served to strengthen that conviction.
More egregious is the impact on the next generation of game developers trying to drive the medium forward. If the video-game industry once hoped to find mainstream acceptance as a viable art form through games like Braid, Gamergate has made the task that much harder. For designers like Blow, the only way forward is to continue making thought-provoking work. There have been plenty of examples in the last few months alone, from Life is Strange, an episodic adventure game by Dontnod Entertainment about a teenage girl who returns to her hometown, to the upcoming Firewatch, about a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness whose only human contact is through a handheld radio.
