Overview
Jonathan Blow has been one of the more vocal developers tackling the value of video gaming as an expressive medium. He likens the loops built by games like World of Warcraft to a type of drug that exploits short-term loops that are little more than a series of tasks towards an end “victory” state. To make a game have artistic value instead of just fast food-esque entertainment value, it has to challenge the player into choices and problems that are fundamentally novel.
Background
Blow is a serious developer, not just a game designer. He’s highly opinionated and dedicated towards software development, driving his own language called Jai and criticizing the over-engineering and over-complexity of modern engineering through a long career of talks, think pieces, and courses.
He’s a pioneer in building a brand around indie games through a public persona. The community of single developers was much smaller than it is now in an era where Steam dumpster diving with friends can be a lot more fun (and makes for better content) than a single playthrough of AAA games. Developers like Blow proved that indie games could not just be made by single people but also distributed through online platforms rather than physical retailers like Walmart. Braid and The Witness.
That all being said, Blow has had a bit of a reputation online for being pretentious and attention-seeking, encapsulated best by the satirical meme: Jonathan Blow Crying in a Dark Room about Soulja Boy misunderstanding Braid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWqnz-7iQbY. He has a lot of opinions some would consider curmudgeonly, though he’s still regarded as a skilled engineer.
That’s about the kindest this section gets, because Blow became very politically controversial after 2018, to say the least. There’s an all-too-common pattern among skilled engineers who assume that their system design skills within the umbrella of technical domains is cleanly transferable to all systems. Politics and society are especially easy for non-experts to comment on and build a following around, so an echo chamber can quickly lead to unhinged spirals from otherwise talented people. Here are some highlights:
December 2017: “Interest is not the same as ability. I believe it is likely that the sexes have different interests on average, and that biological factors play a large part in this. This is NOT REMOTELY a controversial opinion except on Weird Far Left Twitter 2017.”
October 2021: “There’s a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have. If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone’s fault… that’s just abusive?”
In response to SpaceX criticism from April 2024: “Reading this, I knew you had pronouns in bio before looking.”
From November 2024: “This is true, the gaming press is super left-wing, but on the other hand they have almost no impact now. I would say that the social pressure keeping ‘indies’ in line mostly comes from them being socially fearful in the normal way. (It doesn’t help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks).”
In reference to President Trump from February 2025: “Are you kidding? He is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It’s a miracle. I just hope it doesn’t abruptly go bad.”