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Braid, Games As Art, and Interpretation
Zonk points out an opinion piece at Gamers With Jobs about Braid, an independent platformer that received high praise when it was released a few months ago. It's often held up as an example of "games as art," and in this article, Julian Murdoch comments on the act of interpreting such art. He takes Braid's creator, Johnathan Blow, to task for the effect his comments have on the game and its players: "My frustration with Braid is multiplied because it would seem to have been designed with me specifically in mind. I am a student of the obscure. I am pathologically drawn to books, movies, games, and passages of scripture that are dense, difficult, and which hide (and thus reveal) meaning behind layers of art and artifice. Games lend themselves to this layering more than any other medium. The casual player of Oblivion, System Shock 2, Fallout 3 or Bioshock can have an extraordinarily story-light experience if they simply 'play' the games. One layer deeper, a close reading of the environments informs deeper levels of story. Deeper still, evidence in the form of written texts and audio tracks provides footnotes, side-plots and appendices to a central story. ... by the end of my Braid experience, I felt like Blow had specifically constructed something that would generate emails and forum posts begging him to please tell us 'what it all means.'" There is some interesting discussion in the comments, including a response from Blow himself.
Good job, Blow!
*puts on hard hat*
You just got troll'd!
You are not a casual player anymore.
Why can't games just be games? I pretty much lost respect for "art" when an unmade bed was up for the Turner.
I think Barthes's Death of the author pretty much destroys the idea of cannon at all - so the question "is it art?" is irrelevant. It both is, and is not art, at the same time. It's how you choose to interprit it that's important.
The author of the article here uses Barthes, but then ignores him, becuase Blow's voice is too omnipresent. He wants to deconstruct the game to find his meaning, but is distracted by trying to find the difference between the character's voice and Blow's voice - both in the game and online.
There is no One True Meaning - you can only pull each thread of narrative as you find them attractive and see where it leads, using your own experiences to make connections with other works of art, or other moments in your existence.
The moment anything is created, the author loses control over it - they cannot choose how anyone will interprit anything, as they are different from you.
I haven't played, but everything I've heard about Braid, including Blow's post linked here, leads me to believe it's one of those 'create a bunch of mostly-random things that don't mean anything and force people to try to make it mean something' art pieces.
I really hate those because they sacrifice a potentially good story for some pseudo-intellectual crap. If people want to make up stories from random stuff, they don't need your help.
He consistently says 'It doesn't mean any 1 thing, it's whatever you want it to mean', etc. That's such bullshit that I don't even know where to start with it. That's a cop-out, pure and simple.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The underlying question here is, I think, whether Braid was Important. Games are rarely seen that way - most of them are debated on the basis of whether or not they are "fun", but not on whether or not they somehow embody something larger and more fundamental than just being entertainment.
One possible approach (quoting from The Hip Gamer) is to distinguish between the game's implementation (the "system") and it's ambition (the "game world"). I find that game systems are usually best evaluated formally, where one can look to a review to comment on things such as depth, elegance, and replayability; game worlds are more subjective, where one reads reviews for more information on a world's theme, concepts, and morality when considering them.
What Braid does well is the latter; the world is clearly well thought out and considered, and the non-gameplay pieces (the story books between levels, the artwork, the music, etc.) all advance that world's realization. The game system is solid if not astounding: it's a platformer with a time-control element, with some clever puzzles. Does that make Braid "Important"? Perhaps -- there are a dearth of so-called casual games that meet those criteria. However, in the larger scope of gaming, I don't know that I'd put Braid on the same level as, say, the original Half Life, or Space Invaders, or Planescape: Torment. Gaming itself is unlikely to be altered by Braid's existence, even if playing through it is enjoyable.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
"In theory, Marge, communism works. IN THEORY." - Homer Simpson
The "arty" is irrelevant. The backgrounds and music are spot on, but ignore the texts and you still have a mindblowingly-cool puzzle-platformer. And I mean MINDBLOWINGLY cool.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Ayn Rand was an idiot idealogue who never worked an honest job in her life.
The Master of the Five Rings now there is some real intellectual stimulation.
Read Stanislaw Lem's review of Gigamesh in "A Perfect Vacuum" and you will understand more about the whole genre of "hard works" than any amount of ordinary criticism will ever teach you.
"Gigamesh" is the perfect example of how to ruin a perfectly good book with too in-depth reviews, though in my opinion the whole damn book is really good. There's a copy up on books.google, translated by Michael Kandel - as far as a native speaker of Polish (with an upcoming BA in english. Wish me luck!) can tell you, a pretty faithful translation. There's also a small article up on Wikipedia.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
It's funny ... I was listening to an interview with Billy Collins (famous poet) and the topic wandered into the use of obscurity as a device. His take on it was that a lot of bad poets used obscurity because the meaning of their work was really just banal. I felt Braid was the same way. It was interesting trying to put the pieces together of the story until the very end whereby Blow vomited all over everything. It seems like he was bending backwards to dazzle the player instead of imparting something of interest. Mind you, I'm not against using obscurity ... I love reading stories whereby each layer is peeled off like the skin of an onion with something deeper and meaningful underneath. Blow was all smoke and mirrors. Mind you, I enjoyed the trip, but it was like eating the perfect pizza ... it may look great and taste wonderful, but when I was done eating it, I was none the different as if it never happened. In other words, a typical video game. Mind you, the music was wonderful and the artwork was great, but Blow only gets credit for his good taste with his selection of artists.
I really liked the little "flavortexts", as Emo as they were... they were really well done.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
In the response linked in the summary, the author says,
I philosophically support the campaign of Pol Pot
which is incorrigible. I've heard good things about the game, but Pol Pot? Seriously?
A story about a game that isn't on The Pirate Bay. I'm disappointed in someone, just not sure who yet.