Controlling Time, Controlling the Narrative (Ramblings About My Experience with Braid)

Reading Bogost and Sharp for Monday’s class, I was immediately taken back to a quote from Jagoda’s paper, “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games”. The quote was, “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts…concepts are constructed assemblages: acts of thinking that address problems, resist the present, and create the world anew” (Jagoda 130). The video games that Bogost and Sharp talk about in their respective papers are doing just that. They allow for concepts to take on a world of their own and allow the player to think “what if” and “how”. What if you could control time and space? What if the meaning of life is something totally different from what you thought it was? What if your perception events are different from how they happened? How is your life altered if these experiences? All of the games that Bogost and Sharp reference cause the player to go deep in thought about how the world works or how it could work if the game was real life. Whether these thoughts are advantageous or not is for the player to decide. However, I want to talk about a game that both authors talk about in-depth and that left a lasting mark on me—Jonathan Blow’s Braid.

Playing Braid for me, and I assume for most people, was a surreal experience. Growing up playing video games, I have always thought about how if I could go back just two seconds I could’ve avoided death or even beat the game a little earlier. So, when I started playing Braid it was like the dream of my 10-year-old self had come true. Finally, a game where I could rewind time so every mistake, every miscalculation in judgment would be forgotten and I could act like they never happened in the first place! However, the more I played this game and the more I used this mechanic, it started to become clear to me that as much as this feature was helpful it was also just as much of a hindrance. If I didn’t stop rewinding time at just the right moment the game got a lot harder than when you first started (at least for me anyway). There were also objects in the game that weren’t affected when I rewound time and, on some levels, simply even moving caused a time fluctuation thereby adding more difficulty to the game. Throughout all of this, I started to think about what it would be for someone to be able to control time in real life and I realized that was a dangerous thought.

Time, like a lot of things in life, is something that humanity has no control over. Whether you’re thinking about it or not, time is slowly ticking by bringing us closer and closer to some inevitable end. Yet, time is not always so dreary. With time comes growth and understanding of the world around us. With time comes a deeper appreciation, but what happens when someone can manipulate the flow of time. The possibilities are endless, but the biggest one that comes to mind, and the one that I believe is very evident in Braid, is the ability to control perception. Being able to control time is being able to go back and make yourself look like a hero. Controlling time is the ability to go back and make yourself into this perfect and omniscient being that can do no wrong—basically a god. This is exactly what happens when you play Braid. You start out with the classic protagonist, Tim, who has to save a princess from her abductor. You rush to save this princess and start to realize that everything is not what it seems leading to this big reveal that the hero of this game is, in fact, the villain. Tim has now transformed from this chivalric man to this creepy and obsessed individual and, at least for me, the whole story up until this point has become unreliable.

Time and memory are intimately linked. As time progresses, memories are made to remember what has occurred for better or for worse. But, if someone can control time, these memories become unreliable. The story that these memories make can no longer be trusted because you aren’t sure if that’s what actually happened or not. In Braid, the journey to save the princess becomes the journey to return her to Tim’s control. Only at the end is the player able to realize that there is a viewpoint that has been erased from this game—the princess. Tim’s perception controls this game and only when he is absent from the screen does the player get a glimpse of the other side. Another indication that Tim’s role in this story is darker and more twisted than what we formerly thought. Finding out this truth, I felt betrayed in a way. I trusted Tim. I trusted the fact that he was the hero without question and by the end of the game I had to grapple with the fact that he wasn’t and as a player, I helped him get this far. It was disturbing, to say the least, but also enlightening. It showed me how controlling time, while a nifty idea, can become a weapon in the wrong hands. It’s a power that allows for the bad to look good and the evil to look benevolent. It’s the power to change perception into someone else’s favor.