Everyone has a favorite genius. Mine is Ludwig Wittgenstein, the early 20th-century Austrian philoso­pher who restruc­tured entire dis­ci­plines of phi­los­o­phy despite the fact that he only pub­lished one book dur­ing his life­time. That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is a small yet impos­si­bly dense text writ­ten in the struc­ture of a math­e­mat­i­cal proof. Its first line (after a gen­er­ous and famous­ly inac­cu­rate intro­duc­tion by Bertrand Russell) is “1. The world is all that is the case,” no setup, no intro, no noth­ing, just pure hyper-analytic, con­fus­ing def­i­n­i­tions. In his life­time, Wittgenstein: fought in the First World War, where he vol­un­teered for the most dan­ger­ous jobs; designed a house; lived like a her­mit in Norway; and taught phi­los­o­phy at Cambridge. After he died, his friend (and impor­tant philoso­pher in her own right) Elizabeth Anscombe trans­lat­ed and pub­lished his note­books under the title The Philosophical Investigations, and Wittgenstein restruc­tured whole dis­ci­plines of phi­los­o­phy again while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly refut­ing near­ly every­thing he’d writ­ten the first time.

There are a mil­lion great sto­ries about Wittgenstein, and I like to think I know all of them. There are a lot of peo­ple who inspire sim­i­lar devo­tion: fans of Albert Einstein know all about the weird things he said to his wife and the rudi­men­ta­ry infor­ma­tion he refused to mem­o­rize. Devotees of clas­si­cal music know that the last thing Ludwig van Beethoven did before he died was shake his fist defi­ant­ly at a thun­der­storm. And so it is with a mil­lion brilliant-yet-troubled artists, musi­cians, thinkers and inven­tors that are hailed as “genius­es.” People talk this way about Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, David Foster Wallace, Vincent Van Gogh, Nikola Tesla, John Nash, James Joyce, &c &c &c.

If you’re a tech writer for a general-focus pub­li­ca­tion, your favorite genius is like­ly to be Jon Blow, the name behind 2008’s Braid and 2016’s The Witness, released ear­li­er this week. Blow has had a great deal of pop­u­lar atten­tion, but I want to draw spe­cial atten­tion to two arti­cles: first, Taylor Clark’s 2012 exal­ta­tion for The Atlantic, called “The Most Dangerous Gamer,” and sec­ond, Calum Marsh’s piece for The Guardian from just a few days ago. Both of these pieces are less focused on Blow’s work and more on Blow him­self, and are glow­ing reviews of Blow-as-genius aimed at the non-game-playing crowd.

You see, Blow (at least as described by Marsh and Clark), checks all the “genius” boxes. He makes respect­ed art (Braid won basi­cal­ly every award in 2008, and The Witness has been gar­ner­ing ecsta­t­ic reviews). He is eccen­tric to the point of being acer­bic (Clark cites Blow’s friends call­ing him “dif­fi­cult” and “spiky,” and show­cas­es sev­er­al such inter­ac­tions in his piece). His art is “dif­fi­cult,” and thus not read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son (Braid and The Witness are both puz­zle games, and reviews of The Witness boast about its 80-hour play time, most of which is spent star­ing in con­fu­sion at your screen). He is point­ed­ly at-odds with the estab­lish­ment (Blow spends a lot of time pub­licly lam­bast­ing the games indus­try, say­ing in the Marsh inter­view that he tries to “talk to other design­ers and […] feel[s] like [he’s] talk­ing to aliens”). He is obses­sive­ly ded­i­cat­ed to his craft to the point where he will ignore ordi­nary human activ­i­ties to work on it (About a week ago, Blow tweet­ed a pic­ture of what appeared to be a home­made catheter, say­ing that the whatever-it-was helped him fin­ish The Witness). He does most of his art as an auteur, not as part of some big team or cre­ative group. (To be fair to him, he did fre­quent­ly tweet to remind jour­nal­ists that The Witness has other peo­ple on the team who were very impor­tant.) Also, and I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, he’s a white guy, which seems to help with pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of genius­es.

The nar­ra­tive is thus: games are juve­nile non­sense, but here comes Jon Blow, the TRUE ARTISTE, descend­ing from the heav­ens on his char­i­ot to res­cue us from medi­oc­rity. Clark says that “video games, with very few excep­tions, are dumb,” and that “in games, nuance and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment sim­ply do not exist.” This was an amaz­ing­ly silly thing to say, even in 2012. People have been mak­ing intel­li­gent, com­pli­cat­ed, and nuanced videogames since about five min­utes after peo­ple start­ed mak­ing videogames. Hell, Blow’s The Witness absolute­ly would not exist with­out Myst, which came out twenty-three years ago. Marsh, anal­o­gous­ly, says that “devel­op­ers seem more inter­est­ed in machine guns and rock­et ships than in emo­tion­al nuance and psy­cho­log­i­cal shad­ing,” as if there were some­thing mutu­al­ly exclu­sive about rock­et ships and emo­tion­al nuance.

Yes, many videogames are dumb, par­tic­u­lar­ly AAA videogames. But con­sid­er­ing that the last twen­ty years have also given us True Blood, the Transformers movies, Marvel’s Civil War sto­ry­line, the Fantastic Four movies, The Bachelor, Twilight, and the work of Iggy Azalea, I don’t think it makes any sense to say videogames are unique­ly dumb. Sturgeon’s Law applies to videogames just as it applies to every other medi­um. There is cool art in lit­er­al­ly every videogame scene, from games made in dorm rooms for neg­a­tive money to mid-range indie stuff like Braid all the way up to stuff that costs almost as much as send­ing a man to the moon. There always has been, and say­ing oth­er­wise makes you will­ful­ly igno­rant.

Regardless, the argu­ment goes, Braid and now The Witness are True Art, the vision of the Solitary Man of Genius, sit­ting alone in his stu­dio as he ignores the world around him to pur­sue his artis­tic vision at the cost of his rela­tion­ships and his own per­son­al health. So, why do so many of us do this? I think we exalt Jon Blow because we think we need a genius in order to be taken seri­ous­ly.

Videogames as a medi­um aren’t taken as seri­ous­ly as more estab­lished art forms like film or lit­er­ary fic­tion. No one knows this more than I do: if you don’t believe me, try explain­ing to seri­ous law firms why your expe­ri­ence curat­ing a videogame blog makes you an attrac­tive can­di­date some­day. And the sort of peo­ple that write tech columns for The Guardian and the Atlantic would real­ly like to be taken seri­ous­ly by the peo­ple who read those pub­li­ca­tions. So, what’s an easy angle to intro­duce the con­cept of videogames as an art form? Introduce the non-game-playing pub­lic to a genius game devel­op­er, a man who fits the same mold as the Van Goghs and DFWs of the world, and hope they are suit­ably impressed.

The sil­li­est (and most Twitter-mocked) line in the Marsh inter­view is when Blow says he wants “to make games for peo­ple who read Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s no acci­dent that Blow chose a 40-year-old novel writ­ten by a reclu­sive eccen­tric that has become syn­ony­mous with difficult-yet-intellectually-rewarding fic­tion. Gravity’s Rainbow is a main­stay of the estab­lished, main­stream intel­li­gentsia: it’s obscure enough that the plebes haven’t heard of it but famous enough that many col­lege grad­u­ates have; weird enough to make read­ing it feel like an accom­plish­ment; respect­ed enough by the main­stream to gar­ner the National Book Award, but with enough scan­dal (it did­n’t win the Pulitzer because it offend­ed some pan­elists, after all) to still make you feel a lit­tle rock-and-roll. Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those books that peo­ple like me intend to “get around to some­day.” Most of the peo­ple who read Gravity’s Rainbow now are English majors.

Blow could have cho­sen any of a dozen ref­er­ents if all he was try­ing to say was that he wants to make games for peo­ple who read com­pli­cat­ed fic­tion. But he chose Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d wager that the over­lap between “peo­ple who have read Gravity’s Rainbow” and “peo­ple who habit­u­al­ly play videogames” is rel­a­tive­ly small. By say­ing he wants to make games for the Pynchon crowd, he real­ly means he wants to make games for the estab­lished intel­li­gentsia. He wants to make games that are dis­cussed at Yale cock­tail par­ties, games that Serious People feel guilty for not hav­ing played yet.

It isn’t real­ly fair of me to pick this much on Jon Blow for what was prob­a­bly a one-off com­ment made to his 15th inter­view­er of the week. Blow makes it super tempt­ing to make fun of him, though: in his inter­view with Clark, Blow talks about “how fic­tion­al money is,” and how “the only rea­son that [he’s] rich is because some­body typed a num­ber into [his] account,” which is the sort of silly thing a fresh­man phi­los­o­phy major says in between bong hits. But I can’t real­ly blame Jon Blow for let­ting peo­ple paint him as a bril­liant eccen­tric. If some­one came to my house and vol­un­teered to write a lengthy exal­ta­tion of me that cast all my flaws as the quirks of trou­bled genius, I’m pret­ty sure I’d let them, too.

I should also be clear that I haven’t read Gravity’s Rainbow, and I haven’t played The Witness. I’m not like­ly to do either of those things in the near future, because I am in law school, and a game of “seem­ing­ly end­less per­plex­ing puz­zles” describes a week or two of my class sched­ule about as well as it describes The Witness. And I’ve never met Jon Blow, who may be a per­fect­ly won­der­ful per­son, when you actu­al­ly talk to him. We’ve all said silly things on the Internet before.

The real prob­lem is, well, let me try to illus­trate by way of anal­o­gy. My favorite genius, Wittgenstein, came from a fam­i­ly of genius­es: pianists, entre­pre­neurs, and philoso­phers. All of his eight sib­lings were pre­pos­ter­ous­ly gift­ed, many of them left last­ing marks on the world, and a third of them killed them­selves.

Geniuses tend to be either lousy peo­ple, very unhealthy, or some com­bi­na­tion of the two. When Wittgenstein taught at Cambridge, he was woe­ful­ly unhelp­ful, meet­ing stu­dents in his paja­mas and stop­ping mid-sentence to stare idly into space for hours at a time. Einstein cheat­ed (a bunch!) on both of his wives. Steve Jobs believed, for a time, that if he only ate fruit he would­n’t have to show­er any­more. Gauguin aban­doned his wife and his five chil­dren to have sex with 13-year-olds in Tahiti. Jimi Hendrix did so many drugs that he died.

But we tol­er­ate all of that, telling sto­ries of their ter­ri­ble­ness or deep men­tal health prob­lems, because they con­tributed some­thing cool to the art form or indus­try. We call this stuff the Price of Genius, despite the fact that many peo­ple who weren’t either ass­holes or deeply men­tal­ly ill have con­tributed a world of things to art and sci­ence.

If Jon Blow is real­ly using a makeshift catheter instead of just stop­ping for twen­ty sec­onds to go to the restroom, he needs to either sort out his pri­or­i­ties or, and I’m not being snide about this, go seek some treat­ment for some­thing. Mental ill­ness is a seri­ous thing, and by glo­ri­fy­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness as signs of genius, we dis­cour­age peo­ple from seek­ing treat­ment or oth­er­wise deal­ing with it. “I’m not sick,” I think, “I’m inter­est­ing.” As for being an ass­hole, well, many if not most of the world’s prob­lems can be traced to peo­ple think­ing that what­ev­er they’re doing over­rides the require­ment for basic human decen­cy.

But we need a genius to feel respectable at par­ties, so we draft Jon Blow to be that genius, even though there are oodles of other cool peo­ple mak­ing videogames, many of whom pre­date Blow. There are even plen­ty of other peo­ple who would qual­i­fy as “genius­es” with the eccen­tric­i­ty that demands. I don’t real­ly care for Metal Gear Solid, but if any one per­son has to be her­ald­ed as the First Great Artist of Videogames, I’d pre­fer it be Hideo Kojima over Jon Blow.

But what we real­ly ought to do is quit wor­ry­ing what the Ivy League cock­tail party crew is think­ing and just talk about cool videogames and the cool peo­ple who make them. Jon Blow is one of these cool peo­ple: Braid isn’t my favorite thing ever, but it’s full of great ideas. It uses ideas from both Super Mario Bros. and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to do some legit­i­mate­ly excel­lent things. I haven’t played The Witness yet, but a lot of very smart peo­ple I respect seem to think it’s a real­ly note­wor­thy piece of art, and I have no rea­son to dis­be­lieve them.

But by exalt­ing Blow as the “genius,” and tout­ing him as the only game devel­op­er mak­ing art in a sea of mediocre, cor­po­rate sell­outs, we do both him and the art form a dis­ser­vice. We turn him into a fig­ure­head instead of a per­son, and we dis­count the efforts of the hun­dreds if not thou­sands of other game devel­op­ers, from indie to AAA, that are try­ing and suc­ceed­ing to make cool art. And worst of all? I don’t think the intel­lec­tu­al estab­lish­ment is impressed by our floun­der­ing.