by Tom Bissell
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?”
SEVEN
Godforsaken is often used to describe the world’s woebegone landscapes. But to say that God has forsaken something, there must be some corresponding indication that God had ever shown any interest in it, and, in the case of Edmonton, Alberta, this was not immediately apparent. On the evening of my arrival, at least, the temperature was close to the magic intersection at which Celsius and Fahrenheit achieve subzero parity. I was in Edmonton to see Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of BioWare’s Mass Effect, a science-fiction role-playing game that some have held up as one of the best-written console video games of all time.
There is a nontrivial divide separating the relative achievements of console and PC games in any number of areas, but how “well written” console games are when compared with PC games, which have historically been more text-heavy, is especially contentious. Among the PC gamers of my acquaintance, Black Isle Studios’ RPG Planescape: Torment is often cited as being more thought provoking and literarily satisfying than any console game. In this respect, BioWare’s console games have an instantly recognizable style: that of seeming like PC games (a famously persnickety and piracy-plagued market that BioWare, unlike many developers, has not abandoned). What distinguishes the BioWare style is an unshakable reliance on dialogue and narratives with all manner of bureaucratic complication. What also distinguishes the BioWare style is gameplay longevity: I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games.
All of BioWare’s titles have been RPGs of one stripe or another, with an early concentration on the dungeon fantasia, an RPG subgenre that is extremely difficult to do well and virtually impossible to sell beyond its niche audience. The first BioWare title to move beyond the cleric-and-dwarf sodality was 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (known, in vaguely Neanderthal vernacular, as KotOR), which is set four thousand years before the events lamentably depicted in The Phantom Menace. With KotOR, BioWare was in danger of simply swapping one shut-in constituency for another, but it was a game of such narrative super-bity that even non–Star Wars fans took note. While the care the game lavished on the Star Wars universe was considerable, the way KotOR handled dialogue indicated a solidifying methodology. Here, as in the later Mass Effect, almost every conversation and encounter initiated by the gamer can lead to multiple and often drastically different outcomes, some of which bring you in line with the Force, some of which tempt you down the path of the dark side of the Force. The game changes—as does your character’s appearance—depending on where he or she falls along a spectrum of in-game morality. Although open-ended conversation may sound like a relatively simple game mechanic, when it is done well that is most assuredly not the case. The technology BioWare uses to manage in-game dialogue is closely minded, and parts of it are patented. No one, then, makes more conversationally driven console games than BioWare. When these games are played in proper solitude, the marathonic dialogue rarely becomes an issue. To watch someone else play a BioWare game, however, is to ponder the boredom-curing upshot of punching oneself in the face.
For gamers with dreamier turns of mind, the somewhat draggy narratives of games centered upon the unpredictability of conversation and encounter provides half of the enjoyment. The dynamism of combat or movement has never been the strength of the RPG and never will be. Indeed, the notion that involved narrative has any place in video games at all begins in the RPG—a fact I have heard more than a few game designers lament. While most game genres have ransacked the devices of film, the RPG has in many ways drawn from the well of the literary. This is the source of many game designers’ suspicions. Why construct an entire genre upon the very foundations (character, plot, theme) that have given games such trouble?
The man I had been seated next to on the plane into Edmonton, a KotOR fan from way back, underwent a spontaneous volubility transfusion when I explained the purpose of my visit. The woman manning the booth at immigration control gave my passport a hard, prideful stamp when I revealed the name of the local company I would soon be seeing. My Lebanese cabdriver, while making his way along an icy highway at speeds approaching fifteen miles an hour, nearly lost control of his sedan when I revealed my destination. “Big company,” he said. “Powerful company!” He then asked if BioWare’s physician founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, were still practicing medicine. (BioWare’s name derives from its origins, long jettisoned, as a medical technology company.) I didn’t think so, I said. “That’s very sad,” the driver said. “The world needs doctors.” Apparently, he was not a KotOR fan.
BioWare’s offices take up the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors of a tiered, charmlessly concrete office building on the south side of Edmonton. Once inside, I submitted to the required processes of game-studio entry: shaking the hand of the extremely pleasant PR person (who would be sitting in on my meeting with Karpyshyn to monitor “the messaging he’s putting out”), scrawling my name across the nondisclosure agreement, gladly agreeing to a quick tour.
At my request, the tour momentarily paused when we came to eight tall cabinets filled to capacity with books and old board games. That BioWare would have a large library was not surprising: Its games are noted for the vastidity of their worlds, all of which must be designed and populated and inhabited. Along with all the expected stuff (pop novels like Jurassic Park, old Dungeons & Dragons reference guides, an inordinate number of books whose titles included either realm or lance), BioWare’s library went beyond Advanced Nerd Studies: The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs; Architecture of North America; Giants of the Sea; Chinese Grammar; Guns, Germs, and Steel; The Celtic Book of the Dead; and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions. At this last I looked over at my handler. “We have to come up with a lot of lore,” she said with a shrug.
In the common area, five youthful BioWare employees were gathered around a massive flatscreen television and playing Street Fighter IV, which had just been released for the Xbox 360. That is, two were playing while the other three watched. From their total emotionlessness I gathered that this somehow qualified as working. Although none of these young men appeared old enough to rent a car, I was told that the average age of BioWare’s employees was, in fact, thirty. Compared with the rest of the industry, this practically qualified BioWare as an assisted-living provider.
The tour concluded with a meeting room that illustrated the degree of fan loyalty inspired by BioWare’s games. Hung on the walls of this room were nineteen painstakingly detailed woodcut plaques that bore the design-specific titles of every game BioWare has released. The artist responsible had sent the woodcuts to BioWare at no cost in order to show his “appreciation for years of great gaming.” I tried to imagine someone, anyone, doing such a thing for Paramount or Random House. This was quite impossible.
Drew Karpyshyn was a large, tree-trunk-solid man, his buzzed-down hair bringing to mind a soldier a few years clear of active duty. His face, however, bore few traces of its thirty-seven years, and I wondered if there was something about a lifelong commitment to sci-fi and fantasy (Karpyshyn is also a science-fiction novelist) that kept one boyish. As we sat down, I told Karpyshyn that, having now visited Edmonton, I believed I understood why BioWare made such long, involved, complicated games. He laughed and admitted that there was something to this. “There’s a huge amount of video-game talent in Edmonton,” he said. “Sixteen hours of darkness? What else are you going to do but play games?” Born and raised in Edmonton himself (though his ancestral heritage is Ukrainian), Karpyshyn had recently decided to relocate to BioWare’s Austin, Texas, office. “I’m done with Canadian winters.”
When I confessed to having spent around eighty hours playing Mass Effect, I could tell from Karpyshyn’s pop-eyed reaction that even he considered this excessive. Among video-game genres, only the RPG was capable of subjecting me to such a lengthy enslavement. What was it, I asked him, about the RPG? If play is freedom wi
th structure, do not rule-bound genres like the RPG simply add another and possibly unnecessary layer of structure over the structure of video-game play? Why do so many people respond to that? I certainly respond to it, I told him, but I was not always certain I wanted to.
“Story has been more important in RPGs than it has been in other types of games,” he said. “That’s one thing that appeals to me, as a writer. Now that’s starting to change. You’re seeing story propagate across the different genres. A lot of games out there have a very interesting story, but it doesn’t really matter what you do. With RPGs, the fact that you can actually influence the story, and control it in some way, and have a different experience—a personal and individualized experience—is very important.”
Even more significant, he told me, was the RPG’s defining characteristic: the player’s ability to create his or her own character. In Mass Effect you are presented with a name: Shepard. Almost everything else is open to alteration. Mass Effect’s catalog of physical features is not as large or varied as some games with character-creation options (you have your pick of a dozen or so noses, two dozen hairstyles, an array of facial scars, and so on), but the game provides an additional interesting measure of psychological customization. Shepard can be the sole survivor of a long-ago massacre, a storied war hero, an erstwhile criminal, and so on. (The specific past and hang-ups with which your Shepard is saddled will be reflected within the game’s narrative and often determine the kind of people you will meet in the gameworld.) “I don’t really identify with a premade character,” Karpyshyn said. “When I make a character—even if I don’t make the character look like me—that is the character I’m inhabiting through the game. Even if it’s a female character or not even a human character—it doesn’t matter. I feel connected.”