Unbraiding and a Tangential Knot

Today’s discussion of the techno-scientific reading/playing of Braid was very inspiring for me, so I’d like to use this post to develop some of those thoughts a little further. From what I gathered in class (and from watching other commentaried playthroughs of World 1’s final stage), it seems that after reaching the “end” of that level at the princess’s balcony, once the player rewinds to the moment when the princess awakens, the player/Tim no longer has any control over time reversal. What does this mean? It certainly seems a very charged and intentional moment for the system/logic of the game to assert itself, for the first time, without and even against the hitherto consistently willing participation/complicity of Tim/the player. For me, it read less like a persuasive realization of Braid’s procedural rhetoric, which was more or less exceptionally executed throughout the rest of the game, and more like a pronounced, overly deterministic assertion of Blow’s own authorial intent. Why does Tim lose his miraculous agency right at this crucial juncture, the supposed beginning and end of the entire saga? Does this mean mankind (and here I do place deliberate emphasis on the man prefix) is doomed to repeat this cycle of misinterpretation, amnesia, and adventure over and over again, in a cycle that is both willful and somehow ultimately against his will? I am not (and do not really want to be) very convinced by my own interpretation, so I would really appreciate any other conjectures on the matter.

Second point: Although each of the worlds in Braid was exquisitely and painstakingly crafted, the one that immediately and irresistibly struck me was World 4, in which Tim/the player’s horizontal movement directly dictates the temporal progression (un-enchanted objects, creatures, and music included) of each level. As with the other worlds, this logic is meticulously and thoroughly systematized and also corresponds with the text preface about Tim’s self-centered optimism about progression. But the special thing I think this specific procedural rhetoric does is that it not only executes a conceptual idea (e.g. reversing time ó flirting with death/the atom bomb), but is also extra (or maybe most overtly — Braid as whole is so meta it might be unpersuasive to argue that any part of it could be even more meta than the others) meta in that it comments on the experience of gameplay itself. By this, I mean that the one-to-one and explicit correlation between player movement and diegetic “progress” both exaggerates and exposes the egocentric in-person experience and (still player-egocentric) set-up design of games, where the game world seems to and (at least in my admittedly limited experience of coding 2D platformers) literally does only “emerge/solidify” out of a series of “immaterial” if-then code statements when activated by the presence of the player. Unlike a painting where the paint is materially present even without a viewer (I guess arguments could be made against this, but I think they are too esoteric and persnickety for the purposes of this discussion), a game’s rules/system cannot be materially present — it cannot “run” — without a player.

Third point: They seem to have been put apart in class, but I do not think the feminist and techno-scientific readings of Braid need to be separate. I do think that historically, scientific inquiry has consistently been allegorized into the quest of a female figure who is at best bashfully withdrawn but is usually just outright fleeing the male scientist’s advances. For example, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein relates his creation of the eponymous “monster” as: “the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.” So Braid’s conflation of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of objectified women seems less like an active instrumentalization of women on Blow’s part and more a restaging and commentary on an instrumentalization that has already taken place. Mother nature itself is a weird term.

Finally, a point that I would like to end my discussion of Braid on is: What does it mean when the player does not actually get engaged by the game’s mechanics when they are so crucial to the intentions of the gamemaker? From personal example: after World 4, I quickly became exasperated by the intensive puzzle-solving demanded by Braid, simply charged through the rest of the world without solving any puzzles or collecting any of the pieces, and watched the ending on Youtube. (Sorry.) When the game draws so many mechanical metaphors between its aforementioned critique of scientific inquiry and the player’s actual absorption and engagement with the game, what does that mean for a player who becomes, well, unabsorbed and unengaged? Does that mean they are less implicated or complicit in the logic the game restages and critiques?

(Almost done.) This last point leads into a more general reservation I have about what I sense as a kind of utopian envisioning of games and their interactivity. I would like to press against the idea that games are interactive without parallel, which seems to be a view implicit in both the Tale of Tale’s Realtime Art Manifesto mentioned by Ian Bogost (http://www.tale-of-tales.com/tales/RAM.html) and Patrick’s interview of Jason Rohrer (mentioned in the Slack discussion channel). For example, Rohrer seems to condense the valuable essence of games to interactivity when he states, “I think of the idea of ‘narrative’ as being directly opposed to the idea of ‘interactive,’ so I feel that narratives have no place in games.” He later argues, “What better way to explore sticky trade-offs than to build a game that has sticky trade-offs in it? How can a linear medium, which can at best only depict decisions being made, really compete?” So the realization of such mechanical metaphors seems to rely on (games’) interactivity, but I think that interactivity is less important than critical engagement for the purposes of artful/thoughtful games. And games are by no means the most engaging medium for everyone, even if they do seem to be somewhat universal. Perhaps this is overly relativist or maybe I am misunderstanding the definition of interactivity/have been biased by Braid’s heavy emphasis on puzzles, but I do not think that games are necessarily or unanimously the most interactive medium. For example, there are plenty of visual artists who would be engaged by, and even see and follow an aesthetic or haptic logic in, a painting or sculpture much more readily than by a game.

(And lastly, puns since I have nowhere else to share them! — 1. Tim ignores the fallout of his actions. 2. Playing Braid right after Hair Nah — syllabic slip or pilose pun?)