I wish I hadn't been The Witness to Jonathan Blow being a COVID truther. Or pro-Blue Lives Matter. Or anti-'cancel culture'. Or an advocate of political horseshoe theory. Or his belief that women aren't genetically suited to tech jobs.
In most cases I can forgive and forget the machinations of a creator's mind and create some mental separation between art and artist. However, The Witness is so inextricable from Blow's self-aggrandizing bullshit that it's impossible here. The notion that the search for truth is an everlasting but uncompletable journey is noble in theory and when not spouted by a QAnon nutter. This isn't even me imposing some sort of negativity onto Blow and his work with seven years of retrospect; Blow ousted himself as a misogynist loon in late 2017, only a few months after The Witness released on iOS. Should we even be surprised at this though? As Leigh Alexander put it, "he's that guy who made the Mario about women running away from him right"?
Blow's masturbatory belief in his own superiority, as a man, as a white man, as a right-wing white man, as a right-wing white male programmer taints his messaging to the point of it becoming an insurmountable task to read certain moments of The Witness as anything but Blow blowing himself. Good on him for making puzzles inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, how great for Blow that he wasted at minimum an hour of many people's lives as they traced that fucking moon across a screen. Wow, after playing The Witness I see patterns in everything just like the creator, bra-fucking-vo. And it's a shame because the puzzles are fine and most of the game is serviceable. Everything surrounding it coalesces though and you realise it, well, blows.
At least its better than that game Soulja Boy laughed at.
In most cases I can forgive and forget the machinations of a creator's mind and create some mental separation between art and artist. However, The Witness is so inextricable from Blow's self-aggrandizing bullshit that it's impossible here. The notion that the search for truth is an everlasting but uncompletable journey is noble in theory and when not spouted by a QAnon nutter. This isn't even me imposing some sort of negativity onto Blow and his work with seven years of retrospect; Blow ousted himself as a misogynist loon in late 2017, only a few months after The Witness released on iOS. Should we even be surprised at this though? As Leigh Alexander put it, "he's that guy who made the Mario about women running away from him right"?
Blow's masturbatory belief in his own superiority, as a man, as a white man, as a right-wing white man, as a right-wing white male programmer taints his messaging to the point of it becoming an insurmountable task to read certain moments of The Witness as anything but Blow blowing himself. Good on him for making puzzles inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, how great for Blow that he wasted at minimum an hour of many people's lives as they traced that fucking moon across a screen. Wow, after playing The Witness I see patterns in everything just like the creator, bra-fucking-vo. And it's a shame because the puzzles are fine and most of the game is serviceable. Everything surrounding it coalesces though and you realise it, well, blows.
At least its better than that game Soulja Boy laughed at.
2 Comments
Can we fucking... talk about how like 80-90% of the audio logs in this game are quotes from white dudes? How literally all six of the videos are of whites? How even when Blow tries to talk about, like, zen buddhism for example, he still quotes a white guy? This game worships whiteness and white masculinity at every turn, & when combined with its emphasis on like "rational inquiry" or whatever, the confluence, that whites epitomize rational thought, is the literal text of white supremacy.
The Whiteness, is that anything? But yes I agree that there's a pervasiveness to it. I don't know how much of it is intentional (if any of it is) but it certainly feels insidious how singular the perspectives are in The Witness. Ironic since the main crux is meant to be the importance of other perspectives.
celozzip
1 year ago