Braid challenges the player to figure out how to play, and why. A friend of mine, who is much more of a gamer than I’ve ever been, reacted to his first hour playing Braid by saying, “The game seems interesting, but I found it very frustrating due to the lack of explanations. The instructions are incomplete; commands such as Shift + arrow key combinations are not explained, and I don’t understand why not everything is affected by turning back time. I think the game creators were trying too hard to be clever, and took too many shortcuts; this is laziness disguised as creativity.” In his defense, I must point out that my friend is not an English major, and I asked him to judge Braid simply in comparison to the games he normally plays.
I explained to my friend that you must read the text carefully, and think about it, in order to understand why the game works the way it does. For example, the player reads the theory of turning back time at the beginning of World 2: “What if our world worked differently? … We could remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience.” In terms of the game play, we can undo the damage caused by colliding with a cannonball, yet still hold onto the golden key we had just grasped when the cannonball hit us. The cannonball still moves toward us when we resume normal time, however, so we must learn to evade it.
I believe this concept of being able to acquire wisdom through experience while undoing damage provides a thoughtful foundation for a work of fiction. It could be applied to a host of other works, from fairy tales to historical dramas. It is interesting to ask whether Jonathan Blow could have told this story as effectively using another technology, rather than a video game. While it is possible to play with time in traditional writing and film, it is difficult to imagine doing what Blow does with time in Braid quite as coherently using any other format. The author doesn’t just tell a story; he also creates a universe.
According to an interview with Jonathan Blow by Chris Dahlen, posted on The A.V. Club Blog in 2008, the creator of Braid stated, “You know, in college, I never got either degree, but I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about.”
Judging by the comments on that web page below the interview, many English majors felt a need to defend their discipline from Blow’s characterization. He was speaking in the context of his reaction to attempts to interpret the meaning of his game in ways other than he intended. Based on Blow’s comments, the interviewer states that “Braid isn’t a subjective work of creativity: it’s a system, meticulously designed to convey a meaning that really isn’t up to broad interpretation.” That is certainly Jonathan Blow’s position, but one could imagine our old friend Roland Barthes responding with, “the birth of the reader (or player) must be at the cost of the death of the Author,” to quote the final words of his famous essay. Blow has created a universe worth exploring, but each player will come away with their own interpretation, regardless of the author’s wishes.