Corvus Elrod contacted me to ask if he could jump into our conversation about Braid. Seeing as how Corvus has been at this "games blog" racket longer than nearly all of us; and considering he's the closest thing to a blogger mentor I'll ever have, I said yes.
I'll return later today with one more round between Iroquois and me, and then I expect I'll leave Braid behind and move on to...oh, I don't know. Madden?
Hey guys, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation about
Braid. Hope I'm not stepping on any toes by sticking my nose
in and adding a few thoughts of my own. I'm going to try and remain
objective, because it's not enough for me to simply say, "I hated it."
Instead, I want to get at why we might have found it unsatisfying and
why, perhaps, so many others didn't.
Braid promises a lot. Some of those promises appear to have
been made by Jonathan Blow himself. His excellent talks over the last
two years, his advocacy for independent games and games as narrative
have been a shining point in an industry that often seems overly
focused on polygons and profit margins. The other promises are less
explicit and consist of the game's lovely artwork and music. Thanks to
these combined elements, I expected a thoughtful and moving game
experience.
What we got instead, however, was a brittle platformer with dreams of
being much more. Dreams, I feel, that have gone mostly unrealized.
Now, I must confess that I've never been a big fan of the platformer.
In fact, I have yet to really enjoy a Mario game. I find them to be a
futile exercise in frustration. What Braid does do is remove
the futility--you're playing to uncover a story, you're exploring the
psyche of the main character. What Braid does not do is
remove the frustration. In fact, it seems to increase it dramatically.
There are a great many levels in the game that require you to perform
in precisely the manner intended by the designer. If you do not
somehow intuit his intent, the level breaks. This is what I mean by
brittle. If you don't play Braid "correctly" your experience,
your potential enjoyment, is shattered. So, rather than presenting a
compelling storyscape to experience, the game becomes a "learn how the
designer thinks" style of game. Hardly the meditative experience
promised by the opening hub level. I didn't like that approach to game
design when I played Hitman, I don't like it here.
Michael, I know you and I share a similar expectation of video games
as a storytelling medium. This is likely due to our common theatrical
background and understanding of the importance of an audience. What
brought me to video games as a medium (I'm not adverse to that term,
by the way. It's one commonly understood by a great many people and
clearly communicates a lot of information) is the power of
storytelling experience where the audience has quite a lot of agency.
Braid takes this agency and uses it in a punative
fashion--explore outside the exact path intended by the narrative and
you're "doing it wrong." To my mind, this dramatically reduces the
power of a video game's storytelling potential.
When I cannot finish a novel, I do not read the Cliff's Notes, or go
to the internet to learn the ending. Usually, if I care about the
ending enough, I wade through the impenetrable text. The strongest
literary correlation to Braid I can think of at the moment
was Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It was difficult to
read, difficult to process, and difficult to discuss. But it's a book
that contains passages that still haunt me to this day, some five
years after reading it. It's also a book I still struggle to untangle
in my mind. That is an extremely flattering comparison, even though I
feel Braid fell far, far short of Ishiguro's mark. Why does
it fall far short? Primarily because The Unconsoled does not
require you to unlock the author's exact intent in order to draw
meaning from it, while Braid most certainly does.
The point of mentioning this is that I will not rely on walkthroughs
to finish Braid. I will continue to load the game every few
days and try my hand at one of the levels I've not finished. I managed
to grab several extra pieces this weekend relatively easily after
taking a bit of a break. At some point, I will eventually have either
finished the game or, unlike The Unconsoled, Braid
will have lost what small measure of interest it still holds for me.
I'm not sure if I'm honoring Jonathan Blow's wishes by this bit of
stubbornness, or throwing his failure to reach me back in his face.
Perhaps the true reason contains a bit of both attitudes.
I want to conclude by making another favorable, and perhaps more
familiar, comparison. Like Tim Schafer's Psychonauts,
Braid seeks to elevate the experience of a traditional video
game genre into something more powerful, something with depth and
meaning, something worth being passionate over, something worth
talking about, worth arguing about, worth being angry about. And that,
regardless of how you feel about the game itself, is to be respected
and supported.
While I do not care for Braid in the least, I find that I
must congratulate its creator. Not just because the game is doing well
on Live Arcade, or that it's raising awareness of indie game
development, or inspiring such in-depth conversation across the web,
but because the game itself has challenged me to question my own
assumptions about video games as a storytelling medium.
So well done, Mr. Blow (I see you at the next table, listening in). I
must say that I look forward to seeing the next game you put your hand
to. Who knows? By the time it's done, I may have even finished your
first.
First of all, I'm not sure if "commenter" is actually a word. I use it fairly often around here, assuming it's legit, but it seems certain dictionaries disagree with me. "Commentator" appears to be the accepted term, but its usage in this context doesn't quite work for me. So I'm sticking with "commenter," Merriam-Webster or no.
