Calm Down Dear, It's Just a Video Game

2008-12-20

Braid is a curious game. It has divided critics, it's difficult to read, and playing it is something of a conflicting experience. It perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise to me, then, that it has met with both opprobrium and acclaim from my friends.

Taking advantage of the spirit of the season, I recently forced four of my friends to play Braid. I did this for a number of reasons. Part of me wanted Braid to be some kind of ultra-accessible, artsy wunderkind. Mostly, though, I think it's just the most interesting game of 2008. It's short, too, meaning that I could watch over my friends' progress without tiring. Whatever my reasons were, I'm glad I engaged in this little experiment, because my friends' reactions have been very interesting. I want to talk to you about the reactions of three of them to the game, and then give some thoughts on why they are important.

Of these four friends, only one regularly plays games. This friend skipped the written exposition of every chapter and seemed determined to play the game as though it was a conventional platforming game. Presented with puzzle pieces which he couldn't jump to, he would ask me when he could expect to get the double-jump power up. He didn't look at the game in terms of expanding his mind. In fact, he didn't give deep thought a single thought. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was not charmed by Braid. He seemed to feel that playing was an unrewarding experience.

The second friend owns a Wii, but doesn't really take games seriously. I'd shown her Beautiful Katamari, and she'd liked it, so she was open to playing Braid if it was going to be as colourful and anywhere near as enjoyable. I was shocked to find how much she enjoyed Braid and how she stuck with it. She, too, skipped the exposition in every chapter, but she worked hard at the puzzles and seemed to come to recognise the hints Braid flashes the player, which none of my other friends did. For all of the others, I had to point out that some objects flashed green or pink. This girl methodically worked out the limits of the mechanics which had been granted her. I was pleased. It seemed that Braid was managing to communicate its system of rules effectively, by promoting trial and error.

The friend I had over yesterday is particularly receptive to the idea of games as art. More literary than any of the others, he was eager to stop and think about each chapter's exposition. He thought carefully about the puzzles, and tried to stay on top of the games' mechanics. Even after all of this, though, Braid remained a struggle for him. He needed some help identifying the game's highlighted objects, and stumbled with the game's requirement that the player plan ahead. He quickly made the connection between the game's philosophical treatise and its introduction of new mechanics, but, for all that he enjoyed playing it, Braid remained very frustrating for him.

There are a few thoughts which I want to take away from the experience of my friends playing Braid:

Written text should be seen as a last-resort method of communication in games. No-one wants to sit and read a text about what they're about to play. They want to play! Isn't that the point of these games? To dive in, to test the waters and maybe look for some fish?

Braid, in general, is just not a user-friendly experience. I understand that thinking hard is important, and that it's central in Braid, but the game just isn't intuitive. The game doesn't speed the player on their way. Instead, it blindfolds them and locks them in a room with a key in the corner. They're forced to stumble around either until they throw in the towel or found out what they're meant to do by simply brute forcing the solution. In my mind, this inaccessibility is a stain on Braid's record.

The problem is, I feel, that Braid takes itself too seriously. I believe that it was Iroquois Pliskin who called Blow truly avant-garde, in that he was doing something entirely different to everyone else in the industry. I think that there's some truth in that, and, personally and intellectually, I have a lot of time for Blow's ideas. The problem is that Braid really seems to rub them in your face. Braid knows that players start with all of these expectations for a game, and it belittles you for trying to apply them to it. It doesn't ease the player into a new way of thinking. Instead, it shows the player their goal, and laughs sarcastically when they fail to reach it by conventional means.

I think that this last point is why my first player lost interest. The game did not respond well to the way he was used to playing, but neither did it stop and say, "that's not how we do it here." When Richard Dawkins compares creationism to evolution, he frequently compares the idea of leaping up to the top of a sheer cliff and that of crawling up a much easier incline in order to reach the summit more slowly and deliberately. Braid makes a lot of challenging claims about games, and that's wonderful. But it demeans the player for not having thought of them themselves, and ritually humiliates them in order to initiate them into a new mindset. N

Comments are closed. Selected responses to this article are archived below.

Daniel Golding
Absolutely agreed, on all points. You've clearly illustrated all of my problems with the game. For the record, I'm definitely that last player of yours; open to Braid, wanting it to be great, but ultimately frustrated by the whole experience.

I sensed that you and I were on the same page on this one. I know a lot of us felt frustrated by the final product, but engaged by the message.

LB's comment on your article was enlightening. He asserts that "Blow, like Mintner and other indie auteurs, has that strange ethic that if they tell you any of this they are ruining part of the game experience. I wish someone would remind that sometimes being too clever for anyone to understand is no different than being too dumb."

He uses the phrase "if they tell you this," which is problematic, I think. I mean, if Braid came with the disclaimer THIS GAME IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FROM ALL OF THE ONES YOU'VE PLAYED BEFORE, then that would ruin the message. Braid is a game. Even where games aren't ostensibly educational, they are learning systems. This one is just too oppressive. Its oppressive self-interest is where we're getting all of these Brechtian and New Wave analogies from.

SR
I have to disagree with your assessment that the game isn't, or doesn't try to be, user-friendly.

Each world begins with a fairly trivial level that introduces new game mechanics to the mix in a very straightforward way. Each subsequent level in that world stretches that mechanic a little further, forcing you to think harder about what new abilities that mechanic opens up, in combination with all you've learned from previous worlds.

Blow doesn't make it easy; Braid is a puzzle game disguised as a simple platformer, and puzzle games that are too easy are rather pointless. (See: every "hidden object" casual game ever released.) Yes, it throws you into the deep end of the pool, but you can't say it didn't first teach you how to swim.

(Now, the hidden stars are something else entirely, but I discussed my feelings about them in a comment on your earlier Braid post.)

I also disagree that Braid is "fundamentally different" from all other games i've played before. It's part of a rare breed to be sure, but I've played a fair amount of games over the years where figuring out the rules of the game were part of the game itself.

Cliff Johnson's Fool's Errand from the '80s is one I still remember quite fondly, as is Andrew Plotkin's System's Twilight from the '90s. Admittedly, you seldom see these kinds of games on consoles, but I think that's changing now that consoles are no longer seen as merely for kids.

Jorge Albor
I adore Braid, but I agree with you for the most part. The game is avanta-garde and completely find with that fact, as am I. If the narrative segments had not been text, say it had been audio for example, it would not have had the same effect. It wouldn't be as easy for players to go back and reexamine their narrative expectations or to try to piece the story together the best they could. So when you say "no one wants to sit and read text", I just have to voice a small dissent to say, if that's what it takes, then I do want to sit and read text. Of course it doesn't fit for most games, so I do not disagree on any major point. Also, I'm no developer, so maybe it could have been incorporated better.

I think it is interesting that the text segments are can be easily skipped and players can often "tour" a level, without getting the puzzle piece, and go to the next one. The game was not meant to be quickly understood or traversed. So though the game may not train players well enough, I don't think its adequate to say it locks them in a room (It does blindfold them though). Braid takes people, especially gamers with existing expectations, outside their comfort zone. Which may be crucial in keeping the medium fresh and self-reflexive.

Chris Dahlen
Spencer, another great post - really interested in your second friend and her experience. I have a non-gamer friend who had a similar experience with Portal: he hates games and had trouble with some of the platforming, but Portal intrigued him enough that he really paid attention and learned how to work through it.

But I mainly stopped by to apologize: in the Brainy Gamer confab this week, we were talking about Braid, and I brought up your earlier post - but 1. I forgot the name of your blog and 2. I said you were Australian (specifically, one of the "OzBloggers" I dig reading).

I'm really enjoying your work. I just have a poor way of showing it.

Adam Greenbrier
I've spent a couple days trying to formulate a response to your post to little success. I wanted to disagree with you about Braid's accessibility and user-friendliness based on personal experience: I didn't find the game's mechanics to be difficult to follow and found the puzzles to be quite intuitive; I felt that the game introduced new concepts gradually and did a very good job of introducing each world's new mechanic in its opening chapters; etc., etc. I'm beginning to suspect that one person's user-friendliness is not another's.

What I would like to know is this: why is it important to you that Braid be user-friendly and accessible? You say that its perceived lack of user-friendliness is a stain, but I don't understand why that would be. You mentioned in the comments that not everyone views consoles as being platforms for adult games; is this why the game needs to be accessible: because it is appearing on a platform that players expect to be accessible?

I don't believe that works of art are obligated to be accessible or to meet an audience's expectations. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is not an accessible book by any means, and it hardly fulfills the average reader's expectations for how a story should progress and resolve, but I wouldn't consider these things to be a stain on the novel. It is a difficult work that expects you to meet it on its own terms in order to fully experience what it has to offer. This is an accepted approach for books, music, and movies. Why should a video game like Braid be treated any differently?

SR
I think if you gave your "more accessible = better art" theory a little more time in the woodshed, you might see some problems with it. Implicit in it, I think, is a democratization of values that I don't think is valid outside of a purely capitalistic metric.

Artistic expression is inherently personal. If an artist "dumbs down" or even merely modifies her work to reach a broader audience, a trade-off is made. Your theory suggests that the trade-off is always for the better; I think that's not always the case, and in fact is often for the worse.

Would a more accessible Braid be as intellectually challenging? If not, why would accessibility be the greater virtue, except in terms of units sold?

Some audiences abhor ambiguity and contradiction, some cherish them. I don't see why the former group should be privileged over the latter, especially as there are likely 1000 games for that group for every one Braid that comes along.

Tom Armitage
But Braid isn't a game for beginners.

I don't mean that in the sense of "oh, you need to be super-leet to play it" or anything. I meant that you need to play games already.

So much of it assumes a familiarity with the medium. The close referencing to a long history of platformers - notably, the early Mario games - is a very important aspect of it. It's a work designed for an audience already familiar with the terrain.

And so most of what the player is required to do is not parse the game as a whole, but parse it through its differences to other games. It expects that the first thing the player will be working out as regards the mechanics is what is going on - and that they'll be doing that based on a volume of knowledge.

It's an advanced text, for advanced readers, if you like, and the fact it's available for pocket-money prices to anyone who's got a 360 is great but shouldn't be mistaken for the idea that anyone who can afford a 360 and 1200points can just go and play it and get it. The accessibility of the product really, really shouldn't be confused with the accessibility of the artwork. (Ulysses can be had for a similar price from any half-reputable bookshop on the high street, and it doesn't offer up its charms easily).

This is a great big problem with games criticism: the medium, by and large (especially within the work of the tradtional industry) tends to assume that it is addressing a broad, somewhat homogenous whole; its games must cater both for new players, with a careful, hand-holding tutorial, and advanced players with higher difficulty levels and achievements for impressive play.

Braid turns that notion on its head: all players are given the same abilities, the same toolset, and the same game to play. The difficulty curve of the mechanics is hard, though well balanced - but the "difficulty curve" (a stupid phrase to describe this) of the narrative, of the meaning is Jonathan Smith's classic springy path: it gives you back what you put in.

And therein lies the confusion: we wouldn't necessarily mind if that was in Interactive Fiction or niche art-gaming, but here we have it seeping into something that was listed next to Bankshot Billiards, and "why the hell isn't it as accessible as that game"?

I think that's where the confusion arises. Les Gommes is not the same kind of thriller as Lee Child's books, but I enjoy both loads - one required more thought, and delivered much greater results. I wouldn't ever ask for a tutorial for Robbe-Grillet. Why should Blow give me a tutorial for his game, just because other things that describe themselves as games do?

I guess I'm being partly rhetorical here - after all, the difference between games and other things is that games are games. And sometimes, that means they have to be fun. I think Braid is fun, but it was fun in loads of different ways beyond getting from A to B and getting the Achievements.

(And, just to point out the springy path - the thing that annoys me most about discussion of Braid, to the point of making me want to tear my head off, is arguing about what it means. Why does it have to mean one thing? Why does there have to be a right answer? Most 20th century criticism is built around interpretation and analysis and backing that up with evidence, and criticism is as subjective an act as any, and there's nothing wrong with that. I find it frustrating when Blow tells people that they've "got it" or they "haven't got it"; I think he's far more interesting - and faithful to the ideals of criticism - when he explains that whatever you get out of the act of playing, the experience of playing, is possibly the most important thing).

So I have no real conclusion, other than to prolong the discussion and the questions, but I do think your notion of "accessibility" needs some examination. It's not a case that the best art is the most accessible, but much of it has an easy on-ramp - the act of reading, the act of looking. The best art differs as you keep pushing, keep delving, keep criticising it - that's where the nature of the masterpiece emerges.