"What a ridiculously insulting article" in The Atlantic.

Says a commenter on "The Most Dangerous Gamer":

The profile of [Jonathan] Blow is interesting; what isn't is the facile presentation of [video] games as a artless wasteland, with Blow as the only artist and savior of the medium. I really liked Braid and the video description in this article managed to make me hate it a little. Subject does not make something artistic (be it violence or plumbers or an island of puzzles), a contemplative tone does not make something artistic, referencing other artists does not make something artistic, aping the "classy" bits of other mediums (classical music, painterly aesthetics) does not make something artistic.

Art is the skillful application of technique toward personal expression, and there are plenty of games that fall into that category--yes, even a few in the mainstream, like Bioshock, Heavy Rain, and LA Noire. And there's a world of independent artistic games out there that does not begin and end with Blow. To use a film analogy, you've written the equivalent of an article about 1970s Cassavetes while ignoring or denigrating both his contemporaries (Coppola, Roeg, Scorcese [sic], Kubrick) and his predecessors.

It's doubly unfortunate that your simplistic and (although I hate to see the word thrown around) pretentious dismissal of the entire non-Blow video game output to date appears to have been written for people who have never played or heard of a video game before, because you've told those people why they shouldn't ever bother.

There are important discussions to be had about the nature and state of the medium, but boiling them down into "games are guns/sex/juvenile, except for Blow" does nothing but stifle discussion and close minds.

Ha ha. I generally avoid video games, but this (bizarrely long) article really set off my bullshit detector. What is wrong with The Atlantic?!