If playing the first three zones in Braid has taught me anything so far, it’s that time and the human mind are a lot like oil and water — they don’t mix. Sure, I can solve the temporal puzzles being thrown at me…but when it comes to interpreting these in a meaningful, narrative fashion, there’s some very real disconnect.

Maybe it’s developer Jonathan Blow’s voice that’s the problem. By coloring the experience with textual meditations prior to each level, he’s throwing words around like some kind of ventriloquist. His dummy text becomes the center of critical attention, where what we should really be examining is his artful designer’s puppeteering. Of course, Braid’s mechanics HAVE received a lot of acclaim quite apart from the game’s writing. I just think these design aspects are more than capable of speaking for themselves without the assist.

And what they’re saying is a lot about regret, hope, and, well, precision. This last bit seems particularly strange and intriguing to me: few people treat time as a serious, concrete thing. We have very little reason to measure it with such a high degree of exactitude as demanded by this game. But in Braid, time is a switchboard, a coil, a gadget to be fiddled with. It just won’t do much of anything special unless you’re extremely careful to manage it.

Hopefully I’ll master this task soon so I can better evaluate what kind of statement this element makes in the broader context of the game. Perhaps in the end Blow’s ambling text will end up being a perfect complement to Braid’s demanding machinations.

I realise I’m a bit late to the party with this one, but I just finished Braid. The game came to PC in April, and I didn’t play it for a couple of reasons. Mostly because Jonathan Blow has always struck me as being a little self-important, and given to writing awful poetry. So, I wasn’t really interested, despite the colossal amount of praise Braid had received.

This was probably a bit silly. The other reason, of course, was  lack of money, for which I feel I can be forgiven. Anyway, it recently appeared in a Steam sale, so I bought it, and finished it in an evening.

Even without playing it, I knew Braid was an incredibly important videogame. It introduced a lot of Xbox players (not exactly famed for their sophistication) to the validity of independant games, games as art, and in many cases the importance of 2d games. That’s quite an achievement. So I knew Braid was important, but I didn’t realise how good it was.

It’s good! There are, as I see it, two competing schools of thought when it comes to this kind of puzzle game. On one hand there’s things like that other great game from 2008, World of Goo, in which you figure out the general solution extremely quickly, but things act unpredictably, so you have to correct as you go. On the other hand, there are games that run like clockwork. Braid runs like clockwork, and is incredibly frustrating for it. Almost every five minutes I would come across a puzzle that I was sure was impossible. You have to solve every puzzle to beat the game, so it would turn into an excercise of throwing myself against the rocks over and over until I stopped for a moment and thought, and I saw the solution, and for that moment I was the cleverest person in the world. So Braid is frustrating, but gratifying. So gratifying.

The game is beautiful as well, of course, and has an amazing soundtrack. It’s something that reaffirms my belief (just like World of Goo, actually) that mainstream videogames abandoned 2D games far too quickly, and that perhaps 2D games are just a little bit too obsessed with 8-bit graphics and sound. A little more variation, please.

And the story! Oh, the story! I didn’t like the story. Does this make me a bad person? I should say, I didn’t dislike it for its pretensions. I see absolutely nothing wrong with aspiring to art. My problem was that I didn’t think it was very good, not that it was rising above its station, or something. A central theme is the idea of “learning from one’s mistakes without having to live with them”. This isn’t deep, and what little prose there is in the game is just badly written, in my opinion. I have no problem with the rest of the storytelling. Gameplay and story are melded beautifully. The problem is, the story is something I might have written three or four years ago, and I should point out that I am a 6th form student. It’s immature, and uninsightful, and boring. It’s like a Coldplay song.

So Braid isn’t quite fine art, but it’s an amazing puzzle game. That’s fine too.

You can find Braid for PC on Steam, Greenhouse, and Impulse, and the Xbox version on the Xbox 360 shop thing. If you disagree with any parts of the mostly non-italicised bit at the top, that’s cool, it’s entirely subjective, are you stupid.

! – SPOILER WARNING: I’ll be going into some detail about the ending of Braid. If you’ve not completed it yet then don’t read. If you’ve not bought it yet then why not go do that instead? – !

This guy missed the point of Braid:

There’s plenty of discussion that can be had around the numerous interpretations of Braid’s main story. Let’s not have that discussion; it’s been done a million times and ultimately, with the exception of the stunning World 1-1, it just didn’t interest me. What did interest me was, what I at least, perceived as the meta-narrative. Braid breaks through the fourth wall, or monitor as PC users might call it, to speak to the player directly. It has a message to impart and, unlike the bulk of the story, it chooses to impart it through gameplay elements instead of text. The game builds obsession, then presents sacrifice and finally leaves the player to choose their path.

Whatever the literal meaning behind Braid’s story it is essentially about obsession. Tim’s obsession with finding the princess is the driving factor that propels the game forward. The game wants to build a sense of obsession within the player as well. From a gameplay perspective this is done rather simply: the player must find every puzzle piece if they want to progress to the final world. Also, and less simply achieved, the game is really fucking good.

Then there’s the theme of sacrifice. At the end of the game Tim is shown to sacrifice parts of his life in order to chase ‘the Princess’. This is not shown to be a noble or, in any way, a good thing. Braid has a much more convoluted way of presenting a sacrificial choice to the player. In the first world of the game (actually called World 2) there is a puzzle piece that can only be obtained through a bizarre puzzle mechanic that is never hinted at before and never used again.

It involves the puzzle board that is used to assemble the puzzle pieces on. Assemble the right pieces and you create an extra platform that can be used to get up to the piece. It appears to be bad puzzle design… To be honest it is bad puzzle design. As far as I remember it is the only piece that can’t be reached when you first come across it and it could have been implemented in a much more intuitive way. It is a necessary addition though, after all you have to collect the pieces to progress to the final world. It plants the idea that constructing the puzzles may lead to rewards. On top of this there’s an achievement for completing each world’s puzzle. I’d be amazed if the majority of people didn’t get to World 1 without having constructed all five jigsaws.

So you’ve completed the game and you’ve heard that their are 8 stars that can be collected, probably through looking at discussions of the game on some forum or other. The sacrifice? Well that comes in at the 3:20 mark of the video above. If you’ve constructed the puzzle of World 3 you cannot get that star unless you delete your save and start again. The game is asking those who were caught up in their very gamer-centric obsession of collecting and seeing everything possible in a particular game to choose whether or not they are prepared to sacrifice their progress to continue their obsession. Whether or not they want to sacrifice parts of their life to chase ‘the Princess’.

As one commenter to the above post put it:

Today I found out that I had to start over. I like the game, but I JUST solved all of the puzzles, and now you want me to do it all again, Braid, just because of one stupid game mechanic?

No, Braid does not want you to do this. The video above shows you how to get half of the 8 stars and each method is clearly ridiculous. Some will take one look and decide it’s not worth the effort.

Others will miss the point of Braid.

Braid

All Braid fans rejoice! All of you who wanted to play this great, indie game of the year worthy, side scrolling game now can, without having to own the Xbox 360! The game was released yesterday and is up for grabs right now. This platformer is up for grabs for  the very cheap price of $14.95 and able to be downloaded digitally on Windows PCs by the Greenhouse, Impulse and Gamersgate services.

Today, it will be up on Valve’s service, so get started on those Steam Achievements. This game is a really great platformer, anyone who likes retro games or platforming games, they need to try this game out. It won’t disappoint, it’s one of the best indie platformers available. The demo is also available, so try that if you’re in doubt.

On 1UP.com’s 1 September 2008 1UP FM podcast (with Jonathan Blow, Shawn Elliott, David Hellman, Rod Humble, and Nick Suttner), Rod Humble claims that:

…games are uniquely qualified to address MANY important human issues. More so than other art forms. Listeners, my pretentious meter’s going to go off the dial here, so — go grab a beer. But, the — to me, the greatest philosopher is Socrates, and the most important message that he sent throughout history was that he didn’t write anything. And why? It wasn’t that he couldn’t be bothered, it was he explicitly did not trust any kind of message that you didn’t have a dialogue in. It is — there is something — untrue about anything where, I can’t just probe it — and say, “But wait! I’m talking to you about this,” and you get to respond.

…with games, we can do that by setting up an environment and allowing that dialogue to happen with interactivity.

Shortly thereafter, Johnathan Blow challenges this notion:

…a game inherently…chooses the subject of the dialogue. And as propagandists know, that’s like 90% of the battle.  Like if you can choose what the question is, then you almost don’t care what — answers people come up with…

…I do see that there is that value in two-way communication, it’s still, to me does seem kind of one-way.

The whole thing makes for a fascinating listen.  It’s undoubtedly the best podcast I’ve heard all year.

Lately, many games writers have been striving to define what Brainy Gamer Michael Abbott terms “the design and direction of narrative video games.” Abbott characterizes this fruitful convergence of minds as an emerging collective manifesto. The various points of view that he profiles are wildly exciting, and I’ve been thinking about each of them for what feels like quite some time. More recently, I’ve considered Mitch Krpata’s excellent piece, “Give me good writing,” in which Krpata laments the fact that “thoughtful, incisive” video game journalism is rarely “accessible to a general audience.” Surprisingly, all these ruminations finally came to a head last night when my wife handed me an article from the August 2008 issue of American Libraries. It paired acute observations on game stories with a highly approachable style. Needless to say, I was more than a little impressed — in fact, it pretty much blew my mind.

Now, before I start quoting the guy, a couple quick disclaimers:

1. As someone who’s interested in thinking critically about play, you’ve no doubt encountered the following ideas before. If you’re reading this blog (or The Brainy Gamer, or Krpata’s Insult Swordfighting), Scott Nicholson’s points regarding games and narrative will not seem particularly revelatory. The important thing is he’s an advocate for video gaming, and a damned fine one at that.
2. “Reframing Gaming” isn’t exactly written for a general audience; after all, it was featured in the official publication of the American Library Association. Nevertheless, Nicholson’s work exists to “refute a few commonly-held misconceptions,” and, as a result, his diction is straightforward and edifying. In other words, even folks who don’t know a thing or two about games can hitch a ride on this train.

That said, I’m (finally) going to let Nicholson speak for himself. He claims

A good storyteller will engage the listener by opening the door to another world. Through the eyes of the characters in the story, those listening can mentally engage with a different time and place, exploring decisions and roles that they would not encounter in their everyday lives. Those listening to stories in the library may or may not check out books and participate in other library services, but that was not the reason to hold storytelling programs. Storytelling creates a comfortable and inviting environment for people to enjoy spending time in the library.

Gaming is participatory storytelling. The designer of the game sets up a backstory, the world, and the rules; in playing the game, participants get to play a part of the story. Games allow us to mentally engage with a different time and place and explore decisions and roles that we would not encounter in our everyday lives.

Unlike with a fixed story, games allow players to create the story as they go along, creating a much more engaging experience. In addition, many games allow players to interact with each other as characters in the story, and many times these interactions improve the relationship between players outside the game, even crossing traditional social boundaries.

Uplifting stuff, right? Which makes this is an especially helpful starting point for explaining gaming to someone who just doesn’t get it. Nicholson’s plain language is penetrating. He explains an essential component of the activity by likening it to something most people are familiar with.

Personally, I find small talk about games extremely difficult. Unlike Nicholson, my preoccupation with conflicted design and non-linear reactive stories sometimes overshadows topics more easily digestible for interested friends and relatives. I’m mired in all sorts of chatter most folks haven’t even considered! Reading a piece like this puts those big conversations into perspective while reminding me that, if I could just step off from time to time, I’d be better equipped to explain my passion. Besides, attempts at “reframing gaming” might one day yield new approaches for examining the medium. As 1UP’s Shawn Elliott (quoting Eurogamer Dan Whitehead’s Braid review) points out, “You must look back to go forwards.” I think we’d all do well to remember that.