Playing Braid made me think back to the discussion we had about Jason Nelson’s works, and the way that storytelling and gaming can intersect. Like Jason Nelson’s “games,” Braid is frustrating in its simplicity: almost everything “gamey” about Braid is modeled after the classic platformer game Super Mario Bros., one of the most straightforward and “playable” video games (outside of casual games), requiring little-to-no experience with videogaming for a user to successfully play. And like Mario, Braid also attempts to tell a story; in fact, Blow makes little attempt to hide his homage to the seminal platformer–he even has a level in Braid called “Jumpman,” Mario’s original name when he first appeared in Donkey Kong. The level is modeled after the iconic level in Donkey Kong where gameplayers met Jumpman for the very first time. If we acknowledge the ways that Blow incorporates elements from the most classic of classic videogames, this emphasizes the ways in which Braid vastly differs from gaming tradition–and the ways that it slips into storytelling mode.
While Braid attempts to straddle between storytelling and gaming, I believe that it actually demonstrates how difficult it is to merge the two modes. Many gamers will talk about Braid with a tone of frustration–they appreciate the artistry, but believe that Blow fails to create a successful “game” because of his heavy reliance on storytelling via blocks of text. While gamers delighted in the puzzles and experimentation with controlling new elements of the game such as time, many of them wished that Blow had found better ways of incorporating the textual storytelling into the gameplay itself. However, for the purpose of exploring post-print fiction, should we instead view the text as the main focus of Braid, and the gaming as simply a way to reveal the text in a new and interesting way? Further, it seems to me that the gameplay aspects of Braid allow us to think even deeper about the thematic elements that the text wishes to emphasize. Mainly, while the text itself refers constantly to the limitations and constraints of time, the gameplay allows us to interact with these ideas firsthand, instead of simply thinking about them abstractly.
There are plenty of texts which play with time and its constraints–Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Slaughterhouse Five, and even Back to the Future are a few that come to mind. However, these texts all exist in comfortable little worlds where the reader themselves is free from the burden of having to manipulate time–instead, the author creates his or her own rules for controlling time and invents characters who can use this control to their advantage, or sometimes disadvantage. What the readers are left with is an impression that the ability to manipulate time can be easy or straightforward, and useful if it is done properly. While the textual elements of Braid are reminiscent of this, the gameplay immerses the “reader” into an entirely new position where he or she is forced to take on the role of manipulating time. Further, Blow succeeds in showing us how cumbersome altering the mechanics of time can be, leaving the reader longing for a more straight-forward exploration like in Mario or Donkey Kong, which represents the way chronological way that we experience time in real life. Blow couldn’t make this argument without incorporating the gaming elements into his story–otherwise, we’d just be “taking his word for it” that manipulating time can be frustrating, ineffective, and hardly worth the effort it takes to make things work out advantageously. Because Blow uses the gameplay to further emphasize the point he is trying to make in the story, it works effectively as a complementary, immersive layer to the text. However, if Blow was simply using a basic platformer where the player beats repetitive bosses or solves puzzles to unveil a text, Braid would pitfall into the frustrating realm of “too much text for a game” or “too much game for a text.”