Patrick’s discussion on Tuesday of Braid’s critical relation to completionism—the goal of achieving every objective in a game—made me think about how forms of completionism inflect interpretation. Literary criticism and theory try to connect parts to wholes, particulars to the universal. When this kind of interpretation takes the singular narrative work as its object, the episode is an exemplary unit of analysis: a part in relation to a whole. But the episode is only usable as such if we’ve completed the work, read or watched it through to its conclusion. I want to explore the meaning of several moments in Braid not from the completionist perspective of having finished the game and discovered its overarching allegory (the game’s self-knowledge), but rather from the more phenomenological perspective of what I’ll call “intermediate allegory:” the sense a game makes while we, the player, are in the thick of it. I want to eventually delve more deeply into the implications of this methodological approach, particularly in relation to Braid’s implicit critique of completionism and other such instrumental ideologies of gaming culture, but for now I’ll let this method remain performative rather than self-reflexive and critical. So, this blog post—which is perhaps best thought of as a thought experiment, the extrapolation of a misrecognition—will run through a brief formal account of Braid’s game mechanics; into an account of the game’s content; and then, in a kind of doubling-back move, into a reading of what I’ll call the game’s intermediate allegory. Sorry if some of this is tough to follow!
The ludic processes in Braid stage a disconnect between action and consequence. With the ability to rewind our actions, the choices we make to navigate Braid’s obstacles are not binding. At any given moment we are able to edit the syntactic chain of commands that move our avatar through the game’s platformer environment. Mistakes may be immediately deleted and replaced with commands that overcome obstacles and move us toward the completion of problems. Ultimately, Braid’s rewind function allows us to reassemble the consequentiality of our actions, and it is in this way that the game is able to stage—as an interactive process or what Ian Bogost calls a procedural representation—a scene of working-through memories to make sense of the present. Central to this scene of retrospection is the depiction of Tim’s house as a space saturated with memory. As Patrick notes in his reading of Braid, the images that we assemble on Tim’s walls by collecting puzzle pieces in each of the game’s worlds stand “less as an oneiric labyrinth than a paramnesiac confabulation,” that is, an imaginative and necessarily speculative piecing-together of a distorted and confusing past (Jagoda 2013, 756). We don’t discover the content of this past until Braid’s final world when a nuclear wall of fire threatens to engulf us as we chase the Princess. Just after this in a playable epilogue, we learn that the game is a meditation on the technoscientific monomania that lead to the invention of the atom bomb. Tim is a scientist and the Princess a capacious figure for his instrumental desires. Patrick has offered us an extensive and compelling interpretation of how Braid’s formal meditation on the decoupling of action and consequence, inflected through a find-the-Princess allegory on the ethical dangers of technoscience, critically situates itself and computer gaming more broadly within a genealogy of the military industrial complex’s determination of U.S. cyberculture from the Cold War to present.
Reading Braid in this way requires that we interpret its procedural representation from a position of completion. In literary studies we often take the completion of a text to be a prerequisite for interpretation. You have to finish the work before you can begin to argue for its meaning! Of course, this is an exaggeration on multiple levels. But it raises the question: How transposable is this “completionist” axiom of interpretation between the study of the codex and the study of the computer game—that is, between narrative and ludic/ergodic forms? While I’ll leave this question open, I want to begin to explore its ramifications by turning back to Braid and zooming in on what I’ll call its “intermediate allegory.” This is the allegorical meaning of Braid that crystalizes prior to the epilogue’s revelation of its “actual” meaning: an allegorical scheme of nuclear warfare and the affective/ideological continuities between computer gaming and the Cold War military industrial complex. Intermediate allegory is, in a way, a phenomenological category: it’s the fleeting sense that a game makes while we, the player, are in the thick of it. With Braid as a clear example, it seems that intermediate allegory’s condition of possibility is a game’s concerted deferral of its overarching allegory—that is, a game’s structure of thematic suspense that makes us ask “What is this game about?” An intermediate allegory is a misrecognized synecdoche of a work’s overarching allegory—a glimpse of the whole in a part that’s mistaken as the whole itself.
I want to suggest that Braid’s intermediate allegory is about paramnesiac alcoholism. This allegory is clearest in the paramnesiac images that we assemble throughout Tim’s house. Our completion of worlds two, three, and five provides us with three images of drinking. In each of these levels, our use of the rewind function is complicated in a systematic way that allegorizes an alcoholic’s process of sifting through and reassembling memories distorted by alcohol use. To begin with, in world two, “Time and Forgiveness,” our rewind function is extensive across the entire world—our avatar, the world around us, everything runs back in time when we want it to. However, in world three, “Time and Mystery,” objects with a green glow appear that are not affected by our rewind function. These objects introduce a mysterious parallel space-time that impinges on our avatar’s environment. We might think of this “Mystery” as the introduction of alter-diegetic layer insofar as the primary diegetic layer is constituted by the space-time we can affect with our rewind function. Everything we can rewind is part of our diegesis—our chain of consequentiality or syntactic commands that we can reassemble at will—and objects with a green glow are part of an alter-diegesis, a consequentiality we can’t control. If each world in Braid is a gesture of remembering, piecing together a puzzle of the past, the introduction of the alter-diegetic layer is the discovery of a recalcitrant kernel in Tim’s past, something beyond his recollection (rewinding) that effects a split in his subjectivity. The images we piece together in these first two worlds (pictured below in the top left) seem to specify that this subjective split is between sober Tim and drunk Tim, self knowledge and mystery.
In world three, “Time and Place,” this splitting of diegetic layers is blurred out. In fact, diegesis seems to implode as a concept. A more involved reading of this world’s mechanics is certainly necessary but for now it suffices to note that as we piece together a memory of Tim’s return to his childhood home, time becomes place. This transformation seems to express the affect of returning to a childhood home and feeling pulled out of the stream of one’s life at present and into an eddy. In “Time and Decision,” however, the intermediate allegory of paramnesiac alcoholism returns as Tim’s subjective split materializes convincingly. A purple glow appears that identifies objects which straddle or mediate between the primary and alter-diegatic layers. Whenever we rewind time a double of our avatar Tim appears as an afterimage or residue of the rescinded time. This shadow avatar takes on the form of a memory, and formally accentuates how our our diegesis—defined by the extent of our rewind function—is a diegesis of remembering, of piecing-together a past. Or, more precisely, we can think of this shadow avatar as existing not within the rescinded time of our diegesis but within the time of the alter-diegetic layer—the time we can’t rescind. This doubling of our avatar across split diegetic layers is a braiding-together, a synthetic move that assimilates the recalcitrant kernel of mystery in Tim’s memory—the alter-diegesis—into the legible realm of his diegesis. Tim is remembering, reconciling with the consequences of his drunk self in the past with his sober self at present. In the “Time and Decision” world we play out the consequentiality of drunk Tim because this world’s procedural representation requires that we do so to overcome its obstacles. When drunk Tim hurts, we hurt—we remember. Ouch.
In worlds six and seven, “Hesitance” and “1,” the split between diegetic layers produced by objects with a green glow remains in play, but the purple glow and its braiding together of diegetic layers is gone. The game mechanics in world six and seven—localized time warping and a reversed flow of time—are not reasonably assimilable to an allegory of paramnesiac alcoholism. Also gone are direct references to alcohol in the images assembled after the completion of each world.The progressive merging of diegetic layers from world two through world five is interrupted, and the allegory of paramnesiac alcoholism expressed by this progression of the game’s mechanics is thereby circumscribed and rendered intermediate, not extensive across the entire game. Clearly, the structure of paramnesiac alcoholism is resonant with the Braid’s broader interest representing a process of remembering and accounting for technoscientific monomania. This is why, with Braid as my example, I describe intermediate allegory as a synecdoche of a work’s broader allegory. Alcoholic paramnesia is a part that can stand for the whole of a complex of monomaniacal ideologies embedded in the Cold War military-industrial complex and, concomitantly, computer gaming. Braid attempts to critique this complex of ideologies by taking them apart; the game stages a procedural representation of their re-membering and dis-membering. This is Braid's ideology critique. But if a monomaniacal subject’s neurotic desire is absolute condensation—to assimilate all parts into a unified whole—what does it mean to refuse the monomania of allegorically interpreting the whole of Braid in order to grasp this project of ideology critique and to instead extract an intermediate allegory? In other words, what does it mean to appropriate the method of your object as your method? I think I've begun to do something like this here.