Extra Lives (13 page)

Many game designers discuss their work fully aware they have leased their souls to one devil or another and almost manage to convince you that their capitulation, however regrettable, was necessary. Talking to Blow was not like this. For years, Blow had been accused of being too idealistic and possessing interesting ideas that had no commercial application. While working on his “strong idea,” he told me, and the game it eventually became, many people “said things to me about what I should do to make it sell, but I said no. That’s the common wisdom: You can’t just
make
the thing.” The thing he finally made was a downloadable game for the Xbox 360 called
Braid
, into which he sank $200,000 of his own and borrowed money. Blow created
Braid
in open defiance of many commercial orthodoxies—and it made him wealthy enough
that, when I asked for some ballpark idea of how well the game had done, he requested that I turn off my tape recorder.

Big, dumb, loud action games can be highly sophisticated as games, though their stories—the thing they are trying to use as vehicles for meaning—probably will not be. The so-called art game, of which Blow is now a leading proponent and
Braid
a source text, has risen up in response to this. Many art games are abstract or purposefully old school. They work off a few basic assumptions: Games have rules, rules have meaning, and gameplay is the process by which those rules are tested and explored. In many art games, it is gameplay and not story that serves as the vehicle for meaning.

The language of gameplay is driven by sensation rather than words. Like music, it can have themes and motifs, however distantly apprehended. What Blow did with
Braid
was, yes, braid gameplay with themes and motifs. The theme in question is time, which the gameplay forces the gamer to literally and conceptually play with and subvert. Unusually,
Braid
does this in the form of the platformer, a venerable but severely limited genre, even though the platformer is what many nongamers imagine games to be, largely because a number of the form’s most famous characters were raised in its nursery: Donkey Kong, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog. Founded upon running along planes, climbing ladders, leaping over enemies and across chasms, the platformer is among the most childlike genres in that it provides worlds stylized for pure play, but many platformers are known for their fearsome difficulty. Mastering a platformer such as
Donkey Kong
is not play; it is a psychically crushing process of memorization and reflex mastery.

Those who imagine all video games to be a variation on the platformer formula are, in some ways, more correct than not.
Conceptually speaking, the platformer may be the most archetypal video-game genre. A role-playing video game takes its core inspiration from tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons, while the first-and third-person viewpoint of many other games comes straight from the language of film. A platformer, on the other hand, has very few traceable antecedents, and those it does have—the static, sideways storytelling of Egyptian hieroglyphics, say—feel very distant indeed.
Donkey Kong
and
Super Mario Bros
. are designed with ant-farm intricacy, and the objects that govern their worlds—cheerful industrial jetsam such as impractically tiny elevators and glowingly magical hammers; Venus-flytrap-inhabited pipes and small sinister turtles fishing off clouds—have an overwhelming aura of not being able to exist elsewhere, in any other world, real or imagined. The platformer world is one of bright, dynamic, interrelated flatnesses, and when I am playing a great platformer I sometimes feel as though I am making my way through some strange, nonverbal poem.

Like a poem, a great platformer does not disguise the fact that it is designed, contains things you cannot immediately see, and rewards those willing to return to them again and again. One of the greatest and strangest platformers in this respect is Nintendo’s
Metroid
, which stymied a friend and me for weeks when we were boys. (Some may object to calling
Metroid
a platformer, despite its many platforming elements. I would argue that
Metroid
is, in fact, the first open-world, nonlinear platformer.) My friend and I dutifully explored
Metroid
’s every interplanetary cranny until, finally, there seemed nowhere else to go. The gameworld simply ran out, and, needless to say, we had no Internet to turn to. One day my friend and I were playing
Metroid
in a desultory, pointless way, rolling ourselves into a morph ball and laying bundles of explosives charges because we liked the way the bombs launched us
harmlessly into the air. But we made a strange discovery when, in an obscure part of the
Metroid
world, our bombs went off and part of the floor disappeared. This revealed a secret chute through which to fall and an entirely new part of the gameworld to explore. My friend and I were so happy we embraced. (Actually, I may have cried.)

Because no other genre is quite so content to risk gamer frustration as the platformer, no other genre provides quite the same feeling of satisfaction when that frustration is overcome. I know that when I play superb modern platformers such as Nintendo’s
Super Mario Galaxy
or
LittleBigPlanet
with my nieces, and work with them to solve puzzles or figure out ways around seemingly insurmountable spatial puzzles, the joy that comes with having done so has nothing to do with story or character or dramatic meaning but rather feeling your mind identify some mystical, vaguely mathematical outline. Platformers like
Super Mario Galaxy
and
LittleBigPlanet
make the world feel newly, complicatedly strange but also conquerable, and thus remind me of what was actually
fun
about being a child.

In designing
Braid
, Blow opted for the platformer to evoke this very “childhood” feeling. A platformer, he told me, “because it has this simplicity, was the simplest kind of world that I could think of that had a small number of rules and a small number of interactions, and where you, as a player, could have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen a few seconds into the future. I wanted to take that and make it not simple.”

Braid
’s player-controlled character is a young unnamed boy, though Blow refers to him as “the dude.” With his floppy hair and vaguely Etonian schoolboy tie, the dude looks a bit like Hugh Grant in bantam cartoon form. He is also searching for a princess, and
Braid
begins with the reliable conceit of opening a door into
another world. The first thing to be said is that the world of
Braid
(which was created by the gifted artist David Hellman) is beautifully aglow—an arcadia of chuggingly locomotive clouds, heartbreaking dusk, small scurrying creatures, and lustrous flora. The second thing to be said is that it sounds like no other game, and certainly no other platformers, which typically plug into the gamer a sonic IV of bouncily reassuring and sometimes tormentingly repetitive music.
Braid
’s sound track—which was licensed rather than written explicitly for the game—is slow, string-heavy, and celestially lovely. Half of the pleasure of
Braid
, at least initially, is simply to stand there, look, and listen. The combination of the visually beautiful and the music’s plangent lushness is part of what makes
Braid
look so happy but feel so sad. This was, Blow told me, purposeful. He wanted the gamer to think,
“This isn’t as happy a place as I thought or hoped it would be.”

In many ways, a video game can be viewed as a pure text in the same manner one views a film or work of literature. There is, however, at least one important difference. Films and works of literature are composed of signs and signifiers that share some basic similarities with their counterparts in the observable world. In many early video games
(Tempest, Pac-Man)
, the signs and signifiers are rarely connectable to the observable world in any rational way. Only God or possibly Timothy Leary knows what
Tempest
’s wall-crawling light spiders are supposed to depict. But it does not matter. All that matters is what the light spiders of
Tempest
signify within the world of
Tempest
. By this analysis, early video games such as
Pong
and
Spacewar!
are, developmentally speaking, cave paintings, whereas
Tempest
and
Pac-Man
are something like modernism, albeit a modernism of necessity. Within the evolution of video games, no naturalistic stage between the primitivism of
Pong
and the modernism of
Tempest
was possible due to the technological
limitations to which game designers were subject. When naturalism did come to video games in the early 1990s—the enabling of true, in-game, three-dimensional movement was as climacteric a development for the medium as the discovery of perspective was for painting—it was so breathtaking that many forgot that naturalism is not the pinnacle but rather a stage of representation. With
Braid
, a considered, impressionistic subversion of the “realistic” has at last arrived, and Blow may be as spiritually close to a Seurat or Monet as the form is likely to get.

Braid
does not allow the dude to die. Instead, when the dude runs afoul of one of the gameworld’s strange little creatures or is beaned by a cannonball or falls into a molten fire pit, the game simply stops. You then rewind the game to a point of safety and try again. What initially feels like a clever gimmick (one that, admittedly, other games had employed before) eventually comes to have considerable emotional power: The dude is searching for someone he lost but who may not be recoverable, even with the subvention of time travel. Many of
Braid
’s puzzles require the gamer to experiment with this time-travel mechanic—dropping into a hole to retrieve a key and rewinding to be sucked back up to the precipice with the key safely in hand—and later levels present some truly fascinating temporal riddles. In one example, rushing the dude forward results in backward time travel for everything else on the screen (including the music), much of it into a place that appears to prevent further exploration. During such moments
Braid
becomes a moving spatial crossword puzzle—a game in four dimensions.

Braid
is also implausibly difficult. A friend and I completed it, but only with the aid of chronic YouTube consultations. In his GDC speech, Blow argued that challenge is, too often, squandered
in games, too many of which hold out “faux challenges” and over-reward the player for having surmounted them. “A game doesn’t need to be difficult,” Blow has said, “it just has to be interesting. It has to convince the player that their actions matter.” This is among the most compelling achievements of
Braid
. While I occasionally despaired of my ability to solve certain puzzles, the game never frustrated me. Its difficulty is interesting because it is not arbitrarily difficult. It is meaningfully difficult, because, again, it forces you to think about what subverting time really means and does—and what it cannot mean, and cannot do.

Blow filled the world of
Braid
with scaffolds of sneaky autobiography, which may be what provide it with its unusual melancholy and corresponding emotional significance. It feels as though the person who created it was trying to communicate something, however nameless and complicated. It feels like a statement, and an admission. It feels, in other words, a lot like art. While Blow disputes the oft-floated claim that the game was his response to a breakup, the time control had its origins in an abandoned billiards game of Blow’s design in which the player was able to see exactly where his or her shots would come to rest. It was a simple idea—so simple, in fact, that Blow found it unworkable—but it was his fascination with foreseen consequence, born of a mind sick of failure, that inspired the backward march to the platformer. Once again, the game’s meaning recombines: For Blow, creating
Braid
was aesthetic time travel.

Another convention of the platformer is the ability to jump on and bounce off enemy characters, sending them tumbling into the offscreen afterlife. In most platformers, a successful landing upon an enemy results in a happy
boing
of victory. The creatures of
Braid
, however, make a disappointed, almost booing sound. “That guy didn’t want to get jumped on,” Blow told me when I asked
about this, and while the enemy creatures of
Braid
are, in his words, “certainly subhuman,” Blow insisted on giving them expressive, vaguely human faces. “I wanted it to feel like, ‘Yes, there are things you are supposed to be doing, but they have consequences.’” In Blow’s analysis, most video games are “all about
not
introducing doubt about what you’re doing: ‘Hey, the enemy soldiers captured the hostages, and I’m running up and shooting the enemy soldiers and I’m rescuing the hostages.’” Blow referred to this style of gameplay as one that puts the player in an “animal-reaction mode,” which “can’t matter to me on an intellectual, emotional level the way a lot of good art does.”

When I asked Blow if he was categorically opposed to games that involved gratuitous amounts of combat, he surprised me by saying that he admired many things about
Grand Theft Auto III
and
Gears of War
. “But,” he said, “I am against the entire industry making only that. When we only make that, what does that mean about us and our ability to approach subjects about humanity on the whole?”

One of the bugbears of the sharper video-game blogs is why cultural validity and respect persist in eluding the reach of the video game. This question tends to bedevil gamers rather than game designers, most of whom it is difficult to imagine sitting down in a game’s planning stage and asking themselves if what they are making will be art. I do not fault gamers for asking the question; all of us want the reassurance that we are not spending absurd amounts of time on something without merit. I asked Blow what he thought about the question. “It’s a prerequisite,” he said, “that to be respected as somebody who is saying important things, you have to have important things to say. We’re not really trying to have important things to say right now. Or even interesting things to say. People want to have an interesting story,
but what they mean by that is this weird thing that comes out of copying these industrial Hollywood processes. The game developer’s idea of a great story is copying an action story.” He shook his head. “Isn’t it a little obvious that that’s never going to go anywhere?”