The 8000-word profile of Jonathan Blow that appears in this month’s Atlantic Magazine reveals a game designer behaving as dissident artists have behaved for centuries: defiantly rejecting popular paradigms, brashly challenging his contemporaries, thoroughly consumed with exploring the nature and function of his art.

The article’s author, Taylor Clark, portrays Blow as a “difficult and spiky“ man absorbed in his self-expressive work, with ”no patience for coddling or bullshit," committed to producing something better, richer, deeper…and worthy of him.

Principled violence
For many, it’s a bit much. Artists like Blow are regarded as arrogant or overbearing because they’re spurred, at least partially, by contempt for the prevailing mediocrity they see around them - ‘mediocrity’ produced by lots of hard-working, talented people.

Dissident artists can seem bloated with certainty, dismissing opposing views as propping up the status quo. They come off as uncompromising reformists or, worse, self-absorbed zealots. Creators like Blow point at something on the distant horizon and warn us that if we don’t head in that direction, something we care about will die. Actually, it’s probably dead already. And good riddance.

Predictably, some find Blow’s truculence off-putting, but there is a bright and galvanizing upside. Vexed artists are vital to the evolution of art, and they always have been. The apostate doesn’t merely dismiss; he renounces. There is principled violence in this act. It is unavoidable.

Artist as bushwhacker
The Société des Artistes Indépendants’ motto “No jury, no awards!” was a middle finger thrust at the staid Royal Academy painters. Astruc’s ‘direct cinéma’ denounced the “tyranny of the narrative.” The Clash’s “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones” was a manifesto decree that the old must be destroyed for the new to emerge. Artist as insurgent. Artist as bushwhacker. Outrage pricks the side of intent.

A few months ago I interviewed Jon Blow on my podcast and found him to be thoughtful, personable, and refreshingly self-critical. He didn’t shy away from sharing his opinions, positive or negative, but he was reluctant to paint in broad general strokes. We spoke longer than the length of the podcast indicates, and I found it a thoroughly positive experience.

I don’t know Jon Blow well enough to draw conclusions about his motivations, so I’m hesitant to do it. But I’ve worked in the arts nearly all my life, writing and staging theater, and teaching film and dramatic literature. I’ve closely observed, first-hand, the work of uncompromising creators like Andrei Serban, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Sam Shepard. I’m a working artist myself, and I believe I understand a few true things about how and why many artists behave as they do.

Jon Blow expresses contempt for mainstream games and the industry producing them (“The de facto reference for a video game is a shitty action movie…”), because reinforcing torpid conventions is antithetical to his existence. When Blow says, ”I think the mainstream game industry is a fucked-up den of mediocrity," he feels it as much as he thinks it, and the resultant indignation fuels his drive to make something better.

That’s what progressive artists do. They get worked up. They express outrage. They see great untapped potential suffocating in a toxic cloud of derivative convention. Their determination to move the art/medium/industry forward carries with it a kind of messianic zeal that some perceive as presumptuous. But it comes from a principled fervent place. An artist must love a thing before he can hate it enough to want to save it.

Feeling it
It’s a cliche to say artists feel more than the rest of us, but they do often respond more forcefully because every creative idea they encounter is a new shred of evidence verifying or challenging their own hard-wrought aesthetic claims. For an artist driven to innovate, it’s a war of ideas and methodologies out there, and you can’t enter that fray indifferent or semi-motivated. Jon Blow is all in because he doesn’t know any other way to be.

Do video games need to be saved? Why should a guy like Jon Blow take it upon himself to do the job? If he hates games so much, why doesn’t he do something else? These are the wrong questions. Are Blow’s assertions about the current state of games valid? What can we learn from the work he produces? These are questions worth pursuing.

Blow is a theorist, but only to a point. Ultimately, he is a builder. Whatever else we might say about him, he is fully invested, literally and figuratively, in creating a game that embodies his ideas and aesthetic principles. Nobody needs to tell Jon Blow to put up or shut up. He’s on it. Let’s let him do his thing.

I have more to say about the Atlantic piece and its author’s characterization of games as “brain-dead digital toys” in my next post. I hope you’ll stick around.

The Brainy Gamer podcast is back!

In this edition I talk with Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of Kotaku, one of the most influential blogs websites devoted to video games in the world.

Stephen and I discuss video game journalism, the changes he's implementing at Kotaku, why "you can't escape the numbers," why Rock Paper Shotgun rocks, and why we actually need 24/7 games news....among many other topics.

Thanks for your patience while I took some time off from the show, and, as always, thanks for listening!

• Listen to any episode of the podcast directly from this page by clicking the yellow "Listen Now" button on the right.

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Mapping out a sky.
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky.
       -Stephen Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat" 

In my previous post I tried to explain why I see thatgamecompany’s Journey as rooted in the Seven Principles of Enlightenment. This type of comparative analysis is inviting because it allows a critic like me to interrogate his experience with a game and account for why it resonates.

But it’s possible to see an imaginative game like Journey through other analytical lenses, and in this post I contend that the seeds for Journey were planted in 2006 when Creative Director Jenova Chen submitted his Master’s thesis at USC. To understand how and why Journey succeeds as game design, it’s useful to examine how it functions as an expression of Flow.*

What is Flow?
Flow is often equated with the catch-all “immersion,” but that term fails to account for the specificity Chen applies to the experience he wants to provoke. A better way to describe Flow is a feeling of deep, energized focus on a task, delivering a high degree of pleasure and fulfillment.1  Gamers know this feeling of being “in the zone,” thoroughly wrapped up in the experience of play.

Games that strike a perfect dynamic balance between their challenges and the abilities of the player are most likely to evoke the sensation of Flow. In his thesis, Chen argues this requires three core design elements:

1. As a premise, the game is intrinsically rewarding, and the player is up to play the game. 
2. The game offers right amount of challenges to match with the player’s ability, which allows him/her to delve deeply into the game.
3. The player needs to feel a sense of personal control over the game activity.

To keep a player in this pleasurable state, a game’s systems must maintain a “flow state” that rewards players of various skill levels. According to Chen, “To expand a game’s Flow Zone coverage, the design needs to offer a wide variety of gameplay experiences. From extremely simple tasks to complex problem solving, different players should always be able to find the right amount of challenges to engage during the Flow experience."

Flow, Not Flow
So how does Journey deliver on these design aspirations? Interestingly, Chen acknowledges in his thesis that “Game Content” is “the soul of a video game,” but he focuses nearly all his efforts on “Game System,” or what he calls “the “body of a video game” - mechanics, interactions, puzzles, the stuff we generally call “gameplay.”

Journey’s systems beautifully convey a sense of kinetic flow, textured by the game’s natural elements. Wind, sand, and snow each alter the player’s movements, and the game’s keen sense of verticality keeps the player looking up. Journey builds on Flower’s subtle pathfinding system, offering visual clues that gently suggest, without insisting, where to go. You quickly learn what must be done. Simple things. Reach a high plateau. Liberate the magic carpets thingies. Follow the light. On a systems level, Journey makes it easy to do necessary things and more difficult do optional things - a design approach Mario has understood for years.

But Chen’s thesis suggests he may not have properly understood the overwhelming power of place, ambience, and atmosphere in 2006. Tracking the evolution of his work from Flow (a game design demonstration of Flow theory) through Flower to Journey, one can easily see environment grow in significance, communicating meaning through a subtle composite of lush visual texture, landscape design, and abstraction.

Thatgamecompany’s games grow exponentially as visual landscapes for exploration as they remain purposefully simple to play. I like Ian Bogost’s characterization of the studio’s signature: “Its games are about the feeling of being somewhere, not about the feeling of solving something.”

Journey certainly gives the player more things to do - and the addition of co-op play adds an essential dimension to the experience - but even more than in its previous games, thatgamecompany builds an enthralling place for us to be, and, surprisingly, that’s enough.

Reversing the formula
So is Journey a demonstration of Flow theory? I say yes, but not because of its dynamic challenge system. Journey’s “flow zone” accommodates all of us, not because it flexes to various skill levels, but because it essentially ignores the question of “skill.”

Journey presents a vibrant world in which mechanics serve aesthetics. Most “artsy” games (e.g. Limbo or Bastion) succeed by reversing that formula. Journey is very much a game, but it moves much further than Flow or Flower in the direction of “interactive experience,” with a significantly more cinematic visual style.

It’s always fun to watch artists evolve, adapt, and incorporate new ideas. Jenova Chen’s trek from Masters thesis to Journey suggests an expanding creative mind and a refining aesthetic. Regardless of one’s reaction to his work, we can praise an industry and a community of gamers that values unconventional work and embraces artists who give us more to see.

* The concept of Flow was first theorized by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whom Chen amply credits in his thesis.

You’ll be on your way up! 
You’ll be seeing great sights! 
You’ll join the high fliers 
Who soar to high heights. 
                           –Dr. Seuss

The best games are travelogues. Returning home, we regale our friends with tales of the things we did and places we saw. We battled five rows of eleven aliens for thirty minutes on one quarter! We joined the IRIS network. We commanded the Normandy. We fought. We puzzled. We explored. We ascended.

Was there ever a game more aptly named than Journey? Two years ago at IndieCade, I heard thatgamecompany’s Robin Hunicke share the studio’s aspirations for its new game: “A sense of wonder about the unknown. A sense of awe about an environment. Somewhere you feel very small.”

Journey delivers on those aspirations, but other creators (Fumito Ueda, in particular) have charted similar territory. What makes Journey special? 

Journey goes to a transcendent place. It trusts the player to mine meaning from a set of experiences facilitated, but not determined by the game. Journey revels in purposeful ambiguity, but the game is far from a blank slate. It would be wrong to suggest, as Ian Bogost does in his must-read analysis of Journey, that Jenova Chen and company have built an arid, see-what-you-will space. Bogost puts it this way:

On the one hand…Journey gives no ground: the player must bring something to the table. On the other hand, the careful player may find the result as barren as it is receptive… [Journey’s story] could be a coming of age, or a metaphor for life, or an allegory of love or friendship or work or overcoming sickness or sloughing off madness. It could mean anything at all.

While I certainly agree that Journey refuses to communicate a facile moral lesson or adhere to a pat narrative structure - this game is not an interactive retelling of the “Hero’s Journey” - the game does embrace and communicate values that align with philosophical and ethical systems. Perhaps Bogost is right when he contends "surely every sect and creed will be able to read their favorite meaning onto the game.”

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. We find that after years of struggle we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. –John Steinbeck

Thematic ambiguity invites interpretation, but when I play Journey, I see specificity. From where I sit, Journey is the most vivid and succinct expression of dharma and its underlying philosophy of liberation that I’ve encountered in popular culture. More specifically, Journey elegantly conveys sapta bodhyanga, or the Seven Factors of Enlightenment in Buddhist philosophy:

• Mindfulness
• Investigation
• Energy
• Joy or rapture
• Relaxation or tranquility
• Concentration
• Equanimity (the ability to face life’s challenges with a tranquil and dispassionate mind)

These align with, and are expressed within, Journey’s seven main chapters (I’m purposely omitting the opening “tutorial-ish” chapter). I don’t mean to suggest these alignments are hard-wired, and multiple factors function simultaneously in certain chapters. But my experience playing Journey maps the sapta bodhyanga this way:

• The Bridge - Relaxation/Tranquility 
• The Desert - Mindfulness 
• The Descent - Energy 
• The Tunnels - Investigation 
• The Temple - Concentration 
• The Mountain - Equanimity 
• The Summit - Joy/Rapture

Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. –Grantland Rice

Journey is about ascending. Journey is about seeking Enlightenment. At nearly every turn, the game establishes a beacon-like light, visible in the distance, glowing atop a mountain or seeping through a crevice. The player spends nearly every moment of Journey trying to reach that light.

Each trial tests one's resolve, but Herculean effort or force don’t work here. In this game you proceed mostly by letting go; sliding, gliding, floating, drifting - your movements reflect the values of this world. You will not be spared saṃsāra (suffering, decay, death), but you will also experience transcendent joy. Both are equally valuable, each adding meaning to the other. Both must be embraced.

Throughout the journey, we’re reminded of the interdependence of all things. The wind, the sand, the rocks, the water, the snow. Each hinders and facilitates. The environment itself is your awe-inspiring collaborator and your soul-crushing enemy. Working together with another player empowers both and can bring joyful communion, but in the end you make this journey alone.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time. –David Bowie

Games fire our imaginations in ways we’ve yet to fully understand, but gifted designers see a palette of colorful experiences richer than the ones we know. With Journey, Jenova Chen and his collaborators have given us a magic carpet ride that resonates deep in the consciousness of players willing to let go and take that ride.

In my next post, I’ll leave spiritual philosophy behind to consider Chen’s design philosophy, the architecture of FLOW, and “optimal experience.” As always, your comments are most welcome.

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” –Joan Didion

It’s no fun being predictable. Writers savor the chance to stake out an unoccupied point of view, set up camp there, and launch word-flares into the air for all to see. It’s fun to bring people with you to a place they’ve never seen.

Journey makes that nearly impossible for me. I’m supposed to like Journey, and I do, just as you’d expect. I admire the game for predictable reasons. It’s artsy and beautiful and evocative. It has vision. It reaches up. To no one’s surprise, Journey is my cup of tea.

I loved Journey’s precursor, Flower, too and wrote evangelized about it. I interviewed Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago on my podcast, and I covered Chen’s presentation on his design philosophy two years ago at IndieCade. Now here I am waving my arms about Journey and urging all my friends to play it. I’m about as predicable as Bowser in a castle with a princess.

Lots have people have written glowingly about Journey; others, not so much. What’s left to say? Can I offer anything new?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’ll take a shot at writing about Journey (several shots this week, actually) because I have no choice. I’m compelled to write about Journey because I’m compelled to think hard about my experience playing it, and those activities have become inseparable to me, mainly because of this blog.

A few years ago I posted as often as I could to build an audience and, as they say, keep the blog monster fed. These days I primarily write when a game (or a designer, or an idea) occupies my mind so forcefully that I must write my way out of that place. A game like Journey disables me from considering any other experience until I clear my mental deck by figuring out how to fathom and articulate what just happened to me. It's like I need to get a game off me. Does that make sense?

I must write about Journey for a different reason too. I feel a powerful debt to the game and its creators. I can’t help it. I find this sensation of gratitude overwhelming. Have you ever watched an extraordinary performer exit the stage and felt an overwhelming need to say thank you? Have you ever just wanted to touch that artist, even for a second?

Do we compromise our critical credentials when we surrender so thoroughly to a game? Perhaps, but I say dispassion may not always serve best. Why should we not express humane sentiments when a game designed by humans (who devoted years of their lives to building it) genuinely evokes them? Maybe on rare occasions it’s good to bridge our critical distance when that distance separates us from our marrow of our experience.

So, this week, I’ll offer a post a short series of essays devoted to Journey. If I can manage to string together a few pertinent thoughts about the game, maybe I can more fully discern why I responded so powerfully to it. Maybe those reflections will shed light or connect me to others who may see more or see differently. Maybe I can produce something analytical that also functions like gratitude. I guess we’ll see. I'm hope you'll let me know.

As always, your thoughts are most welcome, including naysayers. For what it’s worth, most of my students shake their heads in dismay when I talk about Journey. They’ve seen or tried the game and just don’t see the point. I’m not prepared to dismiss them. Maybe I’m writing about Journey this week for them too. It seems we never reach the end of making the case.

Recently we've heard game designers, critics, and educators proclaim the limitless potential of games to do all sorts of wonderful things. They can make us smarter. They can teach our kids. They can help us better understand social and geopolitical issues.

Margaret Robertson (development director at Hide&Seek) has her doubts. This is worth noting because in previous GDC appearances Robertson has spoken forcefully, encouraging designers to summon their best selves and build games that challenge us to think harder, deeper, and more broadly. She consistently delivers among the most penetrating talks at GDC, and this year was no exception.

A funny thing happened to Robertson on her way to making the very kind of game she had always hoped to make. She failed. In her own blunt assessment, "I've been talking about the potential of games to deal with things of weight, important things. I thought this [project] was a great idea. It wasn't."

So, why did she fail, and what does this failure say about games and their capacity for addressing "things of weight?" This was the subject of Robertson's talk: "The Gamification of Death: How the Hardest Game Design Challenge Ever Demonstrates the Limits of Gaming." She promised "the bleakest GDC session ever," and she may have delivered it.

Robertson and her team at Hide&Seek were tasked with building a game to function as an online companion piece to "Dreams of a Life," a documentary about a woman named Joyce Vincent who died in her flat and lay unnoticed there for three years, her television still on.

"We were trying to make something real into a real game, a game about death," Robertson noted. "Games have a lot of death in them. We ought to be very good at it... This wasn't really a project about death, but about 'a death,' which is a much harder thing."

It was a challenging assignment from the beginning, and Robertson identified several factors that made the project especially difficult:

• Aesthetics - The game was meant to accompany a serious documentary. "Is it going to feel right?" she wondered. How can a game help illuminate a sad and deeply disturbing true story? It was difficult, Robertson observed, to identify an aesthetic approach that didn't trivialize Joyce's story.

• Timing - Robertson and her team needed to work in tandem with the film as it was being made, syncing with its production and release schedules. They had limited access to the creative team making the documentary, which was a passion project made by a small production company with no time to produce a film and collaborate with game designers.

• Joyce - The documentary deals with the woman at the center of the story. "For us to present our own version of that story seemed unnecessary and substantially impertinent," Robertson noted. "Although you want to start there, it becomes a very difficult place to be." Producer Film4 initially suggested creating an explorable version of Joyce's flat, which Robertson considered "incredibly macabre" and inappropriate. Although Joyce was the starting point for the documentary, "we realized she couldn't be for us."

• Budget - The projected game was never intended to be a AAA title, so Robertson and team had to work within serious budget constraints.

• Compliance - Joyce's story touches on issues of suicide, domestic violence, and people who go missing. "We tried to be sensitive to these things, and these are very sobering issues," Robertson noted. But there were legal issues too. "When you deal with real people and raise questions of negligence," issues of libel may arise. "We were navigating in a very complicated space."

• Not being an asshole - Joyce's story made Robertson consider how we make - or often fail to make - connections with people. If the game was to explore such connections by "digitally scraping sources" (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to explore how people connect, how often they connect, etc. "you soon realize you're starting to interfere with people's private lives," Robertson observed. This may "take you places you may have no right to go." Sometimes people disconnect or go off alone simply because they want to. The game couldn't comfortably exist in this domain.

• Mission - Joyce was found by accident. "This terrible thing that happened, we just don't understand it." There was no 'mission' or discernible system to ascribe to Joyce's story. There was no 'goal objective.' Making a game to "save Joyce" or "get to her in time" "felt totally and thematically wrong" to Robertson. Such a game would be everything the film wasn't about.

"At this point we began to get scared," Robertson noted. "If we don't use Joyce's narrative, and if we don't have a mission structure, what do we have?"

Robertson began thinking about systems and how she might identify something concrete upon which to build a game. "How can we boil this down to elements we can deal with that form structures?" The problem, which reflects the dominant theme of the film, is that Joyce's story is a lesson "that all sorts of systems failed. There was no system here, and that's the real story of Joyce's demise."

Studying the events that led to Joyce's death , says Robertson, reveals "imperceptible, longitudinal, tiny details" that add up to Joyce's story. When you try to apply a playable system to this, you impose a reductive structure to something that resists it. "You diminish it in insulting ways," says Robertson.

"A game about Joyce that can't be about Joyce" provoked Robertson to consider other options. She explored the possibility of putting the player in the position of navigating a series of rooms, solving puzzles to reunite people, reconcile differences, or make connections among important things. For example, the player could make a series of choices that cumulatively locate her on a matrix of Physical-Digital / Crowded-Alone, suggesting how our decisions and behaviors socialize or isolate us in the world.

Unfortunately, this design approach "failed to produce an experience that revealed anything worth digging to find." The moment a player senses his progress is being gated or monitored, he begins to second-guess the game. "You become self-conscious, and your choices don't really say anything true about you," observed Robertson. Role-playing games exploit this playfully, but such a system seemed ill-suited to illuminating Joyce's story or situation. More often than not, "players won't tell you what they think. In a game they tell you what they think you want them to think."

In the end, Robertson decided she couldn't make a game about the Joyce Vincent story. "So we made a thing that isn't a game. And it worked!" The interactive website "prompts responses to questions on society, friendship, love and loneliness...played against the backdrop of beautiful and haunting time-lapse imagery."

"We were able to photographically represent what we wanted to show and say. It is an interactive experience, but it isn't a game," said Robertson. "I really wanted to find a resolution, but couldn't. Maybe it's impossible to make a game with so many constraints."

Finally, Robertson asks "So what does all this prove?" She posits three "things that might be true":

1. I might just be rubbish at this.
2. It might be really hard.
3. It might be a contradiction in terms.

"The minute you bolt game structures onto things that are real and important, there is a tension created," Robertson noted. Minimizing, trivializing, oversimplifying, being insulting - all these negative outcomes must be addressed.

Robertson's original view that "games can go anywhere! Games are unstoppable!!" have gradually evolved. "Now I have a more subtle conception of games." Games can't necessariy go everywhere, but Robertson doesn't believe that should frustrate us. When we begin to bump into the boundaries of what games can do, it may help us "better define what games are actually good at."

More importantly, it may also encourage us to find other solutions and to talk with each other about how we can work together to expand the reach of games. Her own failure may turn out to be the impetus for another designer's big idea.