What Jonathan Blow Taught Me About Art

Oct 08, 2012

Jonathan Blow is one of the video game industry’s few bona fide auteurs. He pretty much single-handedly created Braid, the hugely successful 2008 indie game, which is often considered a herald of the indie game golden era that dawned soon after.

Braid is a clever game that does more than most video games to tell a story using its mechanics. By mechanics, I mean the rules that govern your interaction with the game world. These rules are a unique feature of video games as an artistic medium, so it’s interesting when they are used to full effect, though of course games also tell stories through writing, music, and visual presentation. If you don’t think you’ll ever play Braid and don’t mind spoiling it for yourself, then check out the final level of Braid to see what I mean. In Braid you can reverse time, and Blow manages to use that mechanic to create what amounts to nothing less than a classical anagnorisis. I think that’s pretty creative.

So maybe you will understand why I was rather alarmed to hear Blow say this in an interview with Edge Magazine:

You know, in college, I never got either degree, but I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about.

As a History major with many friends who are studying science or engineering, I’ll let you know that we humanities people can get awfully sore about this kind of thing. It hits us where we’re vulnerable. When I compare the work I’m doing to the work of, say, the guy sitting next to me studying physics, I certainly feel like I have much more latitude to get things wrong than he does. I could always argue my way out of a stupid answer; if he writes on his midterm that light travels through the luminiferous ether, his answer is just plain wrong. If there’s no right answer, what exactly am I learning?

Well, we humanities people take solace in the confident belief that we’re being trained to do things that science won’t prepare you to do. One would assume, for example, that we’d be better prepared to talk about art. Little these days seems to escape the purview of science, but if anything can be said to be exclusively “our” domain, then surely it is art.

Yet Blow goes on to say that not one of the critics who wrote about his game understood it. They all came up with wildly different interpretations, and in their criticism Blow says he found “too much of the English major and not enough of the Computer Science major.” According to him, the professional video game journalists—the people who get paid to write about games—never got any closer to understanding Braid than the average forum poster on Gamespot.com.

Now Braid is not exactly unambiguous about what it’s trying to say. There’s a little regret in there, a dash of obsession, a failed relationship—and also something about the making of the atomic bomb. Even Blow admits, somewhat self-aggrandizingly, that Braid is “a very complicated text.” But he won’t forgive those critics that he says didn’t pay attention to his game, especially those that he thinks approached Braid with their own “agenda”. In response to them, he trots out this final, sweeping indictment:

You can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you’re clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next—the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you’re writing down is total bullshit.

That hit me like a train. It forced me to think back to every high school English essay I’d ever written—all those times I’d confidently claimed to know exactly what The Catcher in the Rye was about, or what Shakespeare intended to accomplish when he wrote Hamlet—and reevaluate this skill I was supposed to have learned. Because Blow is right: In a way, all writing about the arts is bullshit. It seems predicated on a kind of clairvoyance, as if with enough effort and a few Greek literary terms (like “anagnorisis,” incidentally) one can divine from a text the thoughts of its author. Experience has shown me that this is rarely possible, and in fact what seems to happen most often is that people will ascribe layer after layer of meaning to a work until its author appears to have been a perfect genius. I remember a film screening I once went to where the director was available for questions afterwards; half of his answers were, “you know, I really didn’t think about that.”

If all arts criticism is just grasping in the dark, then what’s the point? It’s a frightening question, at least for me. On a visceral level, I just know that it’s essential to write about The Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, and even Braid. But hearing an artist vent his frustration with everyone’s inability to understand his game makes me wonder: If there is no right answer—if everyone can just make up their own interpretation as they go along—isn’t the whole endeavor undermined?

But this isn’t all I’ve heard from Mr. Blow on the subject of art. In his rather wonderfully inspiring 2008 lecture on game design, he says something else that I found equally thought-provoking:

We need to abandon the Message Model of Meaning.

What is the Message Model of Meaning? It’s treating art like a puzzle. It’s creating a game, or a painting, or a play, to convey only one very specific idea. It’s interpreting a game, or a painting, or a play, as if it conveyed only one very specific idea. It imagines that understanding art is as simple as “getting it”, and it conceives of arts criticism as nothing more than a struggle to “unlock” each work. In other words it reduces art—that medium in which we paint with only the broadest of brushstrokes—to some kind of secret code. As Blow points out, quite rightly, if art is about conveying simple messages like “war is wrong” or “love is hard,” why go through all the extra trouble?

Art is not a puzzle. The ideas art articulates are broader and less definite than any we can otherwise communicate, which is probably why art exists in the first place. Actually, I think art has very little to do with communication at all—art is more about empathy. It’s about expressing how you experience the world so that others can share in that experience with you. You don’t need to “get” what a work of art is about. You just have to be conscious of what it makes you think and feel.

Where does that leave us, then? It would seem nowhere very useful. On the one hand we have Blow telling us that arts critics rarely understand the work they write about, and on the other we’ve decided that a work of art is really a nebulous thing anyway. Perhaps there’s a right answer and we can’t find it, or maybe there simply isn’t one in the first place. So why the wasted millions of words written about art? If Blow is right about all this, why does anyone bother writing about video games?

Well, I think Blow contradicts himself when he says that nobody “gets” his game. Braid is so multi-layered and ambiguous that for Blow to come along and define exactly what he meant to say is not only slightly absurd, but also contrary to his own express desire to dismantle the Message Model of Meaning. There’s a big debate, as I understand it, about the extent of authorial control over something once it’s “out there”—and I think I come down on the side of those who believe that the artist’s interpretation is just one among many. If a work of art makes you empathize with someone, even an imagined someone as opposed to the actual artist, and in that way it manages to change how you experience life, then your reading of that work is just as valid.

So maybe Blow would call this more English major bullshit. He’s definitely awakened me to some of the failings of arts criticism: Most interpretations probably have nothing to do with what the artist intended, and it’s time we abandoned the Message Model of Meaning anyway. But I think we can still write about art, and even do it well. Perhaps writing about art is less about divining the intention of the author than about sharing your own unique response to whatever you’re writing about. Sure, we’ll each have our own interpretations, and maybe English and the other humanities don’t offer us the same kind of absolute knowledge that Computer Science does. But maybe that’s exactly why they’re so important.