Don’t Open The Briefcase
As a winter draught of new releases freezes our consoles, we’re all turning to the stuff we missed last year to keep our blog-hoppers full. For example, two writers revisited Braid last week: the inimitable L. B. Jeffries thoughtfully analyzed its writing, while over at Gamers With Jobs, Julian Murdoch quoted Borges and Nabokov by way of explaining that Jonathan Blow was neither, and argued that because he didn’t “get” it, there’s probably nothing to “get.” E.g.:
By the end of my Braid experience, I felt like Blow had specifically constructed something that would generate emails and forum posts begging him to please tell us “what it all means.” … It takes what could have been a convincing “games-as-art” showpiece and instead turns it into a pompous, self-absorbed and too-clever-by-half attempt to create conversation about the artist and his process, rather than the work itself. Jonathan Blow sits demon-like on my shoulder, shouting, “This means something!” and I can’t help but keep asking, “Who cares?” instead of “What?”
Never mind that Blow has said exactly the opposite.
Here’s the problem. Blow told us that Braid has a point. He won’t spell out, in Prima Guide detail, what. But it is clear - from his comments, and just from the care and rigor that went into the construction of each technique, each world, and each section of text - that there’s something in here to poke at.
That was a mistake. Because if Blow had said it’s a silly game about a guy jumping through time, with a few symbols that hey, maybe mean something? Maybe not? We would smile and slobber.
Take Gravity Bone.
I’ve been doing my own indie game catching-up, and it brought me to Brendon Chung’s delightful little first-person-spy game, which you can get here for free. Give it a try; you’ll be done in a coffee break.
Now, before I make my argument, I want to say very clearly that I liked Gravity Bone. I had fun with it. I enjoyed it for what it was. But what is it?
Gravity Bone is a wonderful pastiche of the hip and the semi-obscure: numbers stations, ’50s cocktails, a dashing spy, a deadly redhead. It plays the theme to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil - though Cheung meant it as a nod to Wong Kar Wai; fair enough - and the finale of the first mission mentions tracking somebody from outer space, although that’s the only alien reference I caught, and it could mean nothing. It also tweaks gameplay expectations - if there’s a weapon for the “3″ slot, I didn’t find it - plus it’s just kind of odd, because why are the bomb birds hiding behind the sign for a rocket launcher?
Bloggers ask what it means. But nobody’s seriously reached for an answer, and I doubt anyone expects there is one. Gravity Bone works simply because it’s a pastiche. It’s satisfying for the way it plays the familiar off the surprising: we recognize what we see, but are startled by how it’s used. The first level and a half are nothing but the set-up for a fantastic punchline. Right when you think you’re done with your mission, a femme fatale catches you off-guard and leads you on a dash through scenes and scenery you barely have time to register, until the finale, where the protagonist’s life flashes before his eyes as he dreamily falls to his death. The scenes he sees don’t have to mean anything: this isn’t a game about a message, but about a style and an attitude.
In other words, Chung doesn’t open the briefcase. If you’ve seen Pulp Fiction, you’ll remember that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are chasing after a briefcase. Inside is something glowing and priceless - but while the characters get a look at it, we never discover what’s in there. We can make our own guesses, but the truth doesn’t really matter. Take too the trunk in Repo Man: that film goes so far as to tell us that alien corpses are in there, but how they work and what they look like again, does not matter.
Pulp Fiction and Repo Man are not films about assembling the clues to reach a solution: they’re about quoting the culture and using it against itself to trigger a sense of rebelliousness similar to the moment when you first dig into your parent’s record collection and steal all their good albums and laugh at all their bad ones. Gravity Bone soars the same way.
But like I said: Chung doesn’t open the briefcase. Asked by Tom Chick to explain the significance of the sitcom character names on the office directory, or the bomb birds, or anything else, he either declines or downplays it. To take one quote:
I just wanted to create a universe where stuff like this is normal, where stuff like this isn’t strange like we think it is. “Oh, sure, I’m on a mission to take a picture of a bird and they’re willing to pay me top dollar for that.” It’s perfectly normal espionage work for the people in this world.
Or more to the point:
TC: Can you say anything, just because it’s so mysterious, about the final image of a woman wearing the number 99 winning a foot race?
BC: [laughs] Uh. [laughs again] Umm, yeah. That was…Well, that was… [laughs] No I can’t really say anything about that. It’ll just have to be a mystery.
A mystery - that noone needs to, or is ever going to solve. Unless, to take a wild guess, you were on the same junior varsity track and field team as Cheung.
By contrast, Jonathan Blow tackles specific ideas in his game. They’re ideas that are best explored through the game itself. That means you have to play the game and think about them. And many gamers hate that. Folks like Julian Murdoch are acting exactly like the kid who’s facing a jump that’s ten pixels higher than he can reach, and screams and blames the designer, instead of sticking with it and figuring out another way through the level. Murdoch’s unnecessary invocations of Barthes and Danielewski are equivalent to saying, “WTF? I beat Contra. It’s not my fault!”
Gravity Bone is a delight - but Braid is more ambitious, more rigorous, and ultimately more enriching. And we frag him for it. We just want the Braid that Soulja Boy played. (And I’m not going to be the 99th person to link to that clip; find it yourself). So If I were him? I’d just post on the Internet: “The answer is: It’s Tim’s soul. They pulled it out of him from the back of his neck. Now fuck off.”
17/01/2009 at 8:20 am Permalink
Some of this is surely a matter of taste. I prefer an inventive, absurdist view of a chaotic world to staring at the Master Plan of the Lone Artist. My reaction to Braid was very similar to Julian Murdoch’s: I ate it up on the first play-through, and then got mad. To be fair, a lot of this is me getting mad at Blow–I don’t want that to affect my view of his game, but it does. I’m left now wishing we just had the art, the score, the design–but that pretty much every word had been scoured from the game.
To compare a game that’s just dripping in smug satisfaction to one that’s quirky, light, and doesn’t actually try to club you over the head every chance it gets with its Artful Message should not be fair. Gravity Bone vs. Braid? Really?
The reason the comparison seems apt to me is that Braid’s weakest point was how seriously it took itself and the heavy-handedness of the writing. (It was like reading a cryptic, prose version of the Faerie Queene–except without the structural digs at allegory as a vehicle for meaning. Also: a smidge shorter.) What you need after playing Braid is a game isn’t so obnoxiously overdetermined. (What’s a good characteristic in puzzle design doesn’t play as well when it comes to writing.) So we fall back on light, clever games that don’t Fill Us With Rage.
I found World of Goo to be the perfect palate cleanser after Braid. You can probably guess which I’ve returned to more consistently, and appreciate more.
17/01/2009 at 10:39 pm Permalink
Oh wow, that was strange. I thought we were completely on the same page right until the very end.
“A mystery - that noone needs to, or is ever going to solve.”
To me, that’s way, way more interesting than anything I’ve read about what Blow has done (Full Disclosure: I’ve still not played Braid) with his game. I find that often the most appealing works are the ambiguous ones, and while the whole idea that there are “specific ideas” that Blow is trying to address in his game is fine, I guess it seems so much more reflective of the thinking of an engineer than the thinking of an artist.
18/01/2009 at 12:55 am Permalink
Disclosure: I had to dictionary “pastiche” … which made me feel stupid. now i’ve confessed my ignorance … which makes me feel even stupider. however, i’ve also just used pastiche in my very own sentence … so suck it!
Braid was cute and fun, and not like anything else I played last year. How can one call it “self-absorbed” without being guilty of the same crime? It’s a fucking GAME … so even if it’s snobbish … you still get to have fun playing the game. Hard to see a similar redeeming virtue in smug, self-absorbed commentary.
i do understand what JL means though needing to palate cleans with World of Goo … sometimes after i eat a bunch of crackers, i need to cleans my palate with some nice soft toast.
18/01/2009 at 6:57 pm Permalink
John - Thanks for chiming in. You made me think, in contrast to Braid, Goo gives you endless ways to solve each puzzle; I wonder if that’s one of the things that irks Braid’s critics.
Ben - Isn’t the point that Blow is an engineer? As for ambiguity, it works for me in proportion to how much is at stake. The unknowables in Picnic at Hanging Rock send shivers down my spine. The end sequence of Gravity Bone, on the other hand, won’t keep me awake.
Caustic - Protip: word-a-day toilet paper is your friend.
19/01/2009 at 4:36 pm Permalink
@PixelVixen - That might be what irked the critics. It wouldn’t really be fair–like being mad at Professor Layton & the Curious Village because there was exactly one solution to each logic puzzle. (Damn those matchsticks.) It’s just endemic to the genre.
As a self-appointed Braid critic (again–moderately against my will, since I enjoyed it when I played through), I can report that I’m down with most aspects of the design. It’s the One Interpretation that rubs me the wrong way. I’m with Ben: ambiguity is compelling. Which is what makes Braid initially so interesting, it seems to have that. You can engage with it. You get responses like the one from Feministe, which I thought was a perfectly reasonable writeup. In fact, a little generous–the gender politics of the game are creepy on the surface, and get increasingly so the more you look for it. Which, fine: I called it a Lolita approach and moved on. (The Feministe writeup is surprisingly light on the feminist critique. Not that it’s against it, just that it’s more a review than anything else.)
Then you get Blow’s response
As I said before, I don’t want statements like that to influence how I feel about a game. (It’s like finding out one of your favorite musicians is a jerk–it doesn’t change the music you loved, and yet….) Viewed in the light of “I put a finite series of concepts into the game and your interpretations can be called correct or incorrect,” Braid starts to look… well, overdetermined. It turns out that what I thought to be ambiguity was actually obfuscation. The prose that seemed densely layered? Yeah, kinda overwrought. The “woman as untouchable object of desire and conquest, or, worse, a suitable metaphor of the same”? If the generous feminist reading isn’t “what I put into the game,” that all starts to look downright misogynistic.
Good god, how did this soapbox appear beneath me? It’s… so comfortable… it makes… makes me type so much more than I’d intended….