An Interpretation of Braid

**Coletta Factor: Braid spoilers below**

I'm lucky that Braid has such a long tail. I've been having to restrain my native penchant for theory-mongering for a few weeks now, since Michael Abbott and I had covered the bases pretty thoroughly and it seemed like the internet might be Braided out. But in the weeks since I left off there's been some great coverage of the game: an interview by Chris Dahlen with the game's creator, Jonathan Blow, over on the Onion A.V. Club; an epic two-hour 1up FM podcast sit-down with the game's creators and Rod Humble of EA; and even a segment on NPR about the game's success. A running theme of the coverage has been the internet's (mostly) unsuccessful attempt to discern what Braid is about. I reckon it's time to throw another crackpot theory on the pile.

One of the reasons for the difficulty decoding Braid, it seems to me, is that we are eager to turn its narrative into a story. That is, when we try to make sense of things after the epilogue, we are prone to thinking that we've got it figured out when we can piece together a series of events from the scattered bits of text: In 1943 Tim spills a glass of wine on a picnic blanket, thus setting in motion a breakup with his girlfriend. Despondent over the break-up, Tim becomes a thermonuclear engineer in April of 1944 and proceeds to create the A-bomb, etc. There has been a tendency to seize on one aspect of the epilogue text, and then treat it as the key to unlocking the true sequence of events. Maybe there's something to this, and it's natural anyway. But it doesn't seem like an approach that is going to make much progress in accounting for the significant elements of the game's design; and part of me thinks there just isn't a linear set of events to be gleaned from the text. Blow's avowed inspirations are Calvino and Lynch, after all, and both have shown how it's possible to tell narrative without constructing a plot.

Instead, I'm going to see if I can get further by treating the experience provided by the gameplay itself as the locus of narrative significance. I don't think you can get a story out of this approach either, but I do think otherwise-mystifying elements of the game's text begin to congeal when you consider them from the perspective of the underlying structure that governs the gameplay.

The object of Braid is to collect the puzzle pieces scattered among its levels by manipulating time, in order to save the Princess. In each level, the world you must overcome in order to achieve this goal is governed by a different set of temporal laws. And so in each level, you have to learn those rules anew in order to solve the puzzles; you must observe the behavior of the world, experiment (“will I move faster than the slab if I rewind faster?”), infer (“So, if I need there to be an enemy on that platform in order to reach that puzzle-piece, there must be some way to get him past the cannon”), and so on. I believe the immanent design-goal of Braid was to construct the puzzles such that deliberate experimental reasoning would yield a solution in every case. Even if you're not explicitly thinking about using these tools as you are move through the game and problem-solve, you're using them unconsciously all the time, because it's what the game requires of you.

I see the epilogue as a commentary on the ambiguities inherent in this unfettered mastery of time and space bought through this form of reasoning. In his essay In Praise of Knowledge, Bacon heralded the scientific method for its consummation of “the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things.” Braid is about an unhappy match between the mind of man and the nature of things. On one hand the complex thinking you do in order to solve all these puzzles leads to all these small and satisfying epiphanies that occur when you successfully intuit the laws of the various game-worlds. But on the other hand, Tim solves all these puzzles for the sake of an emotional connection, and yet his portrayal in the final chapter and epilogue makes it clear that the attitude towards the world that was necessary in order to unlock it secrets is simultaneously alienating-- destructive to meaningful relationships with other people. In the end, even a his control over time and space leaves him powerless to attain the meaningful connection with the object of his pursuit.

In Braid, the mastery of the world effected by inquiry is tinged with impulses towards violence. As Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Men pay for the increase of their power with estrangement from those over whom they use this power. The Enlightenment comports itself towards things as a dictator does towards his subjects; he knows them, insofar as he can manipulate them.” The atomic bomb and Tim's violent impulses at the candy store in the epilogue are both, in a way, emblematic of a kind of covert violence inherent in our manipulation of the world when it infects our relationships with other human beings. (This is reflected in the art style as well, whose generally serene aesthetic is tinged with surreal and disturbing elements.)

For all its undercurrents of alienation and destruction, Braid ends on a note of redemption. In place of the Princess, the protagonist builds a castle of his own. The castle is Braid itself-- fragments I have shored against my ruins. The castle is a monument to how a work of rigorous analysis can aspire to an emotionally and intellectually meaningful connection with a player. Games, as an art form, are odd and contradictory creatures; they are things born from rules, struggling towards beauty. Braid is a rich and rewarding chapter in that struggle.

I Sic Brecht on Arsenal Gear

The conventional wisdom on Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2 is that the game's conclusion is a piece of audacious but incoherent mindfuckery. Shadow government is stacked upon shadow government; we're given a 15 minute powerpoint presentation on DNA; Otacon weeps. Nobody's sure what's going on. Since I've squandered my adulthood reading philosophy, I have this tendency to slap an organizing theory on this kind of chaos. So here goes.

According to the Frankfurt School, a group of mid-20^th century Marxist cultural critics, the distinctive dynamic of modern capitalism as a social system can be found by examining a phenomenon called the “commodity fiction.” The value of commodities-- metals, money, and other arbitrary materials that are objects of exchange-- is artificial: all these things have value because we give them value. But we forget this fact and treat these objects as if they had real value in themselves apart from their roles in the market and their relationships to our human species-life as a whole.

Labor, which is the productive force that turns raw materials into products, is not a commodity, because the sweat and toil we put into making finished products is something that is intrinsically valuable for human animals. But capitalism, with its implementation of wage labor, succeeded in extending the commodity fiction to labor itself. The problem with this move is that it turned human life (a person's labor) into an object whose value was determined by the market. (So if you're Starbucks, or whoever, you can buy a person for $8.75 an hour.) Under modern capitalism, the value of labor (and by extension, human life), is not determined by human needs but by the needs of the market-- profit.

The German dramatist Bertholt Brecht devised a new theory of theater by putting elements of this theory into action. Brecht read Georg Lukacs' theory of the fetishization of commodities in History and Class Consciousness, and though he disagreed with Lukacs on several fronts, he thought that the basic logic of the commodity fiction informed cultural life in capitalist societies as well. The problem with drama, he thought, was that we treated the artificial goings-on of a theater stage as if they were real. We get drawn into the fiction, empathize with the characters, and temporarily lose our ability to distinguish the real from the fictive.

Brecht thought it necessary to create new kind of theater that would break the spell of the dramatic fiction over its audience: force them to critically respond to the work of art put on before them rather than being drawn into its sentimental charms. He said that “The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place.”; the audience must be made to remember what is real and unreal.

He invented a set of distinctive theatrical gestures that would undermine the audience's suspension of disbelief and force them to distance themselves from the action on-stage; he called this reaction the “Verfremdungseffekt, or V-Effekt for short. His characters would speak lines directly to the audience, speak their lines in a way that was obviously artificial, and so on. These and other transparent pieces of stagecraft were meant to alienate the viewer, rather than having them escape from reality by sobbing over the fate of some unlucky noblewoman. The distantiation and space for critical reflection cultivated by his plays would enable its audience to bring the same scrutiny to the other governing fictions of capitalist life.

On one hand, Metal Gear Solid 2 is an overstuffed spy drama about a solo sneaking mission to foil a terrorist seizure of an offshore oil cleanup facility in the East River. But on the other hand, it is a fable about the the player's immersion in fictional worlds and her identification with its characters. Raiden, the game's protagonist, is not a solider. He's a stand-in for the player. We learn that Raiden's scored this solo sneaking gig because he has the highest score in a series of “virtual reality” missions designed to recreate the events of the first “Metal Gear Solid” game. In other words, Raiden is just someone who played Metal Gear Solid; those are his sole qualifications. When you play Raiden you are playing yourself.

In the final sections of the game, it becomes clear that your guides through this virtual reality mission are not entirely reliable. The in-game characters who teach the player the rules of the game, give Raiden his mission objectives, and save the game-- the Colonel and Rose-- begin to behave erratically when Raiden is captured and transported into the bowels of an underwater fortress called Arsenal Gear. As Raiden escapes torture and runs nude through the fortress, Rose pops up on your codec and begins to relay bizarre messages to him: he is sitting too close to the TV, it's going to ruin your eyes. The mission is over, hit the power button on your console. When you regain your weapons and fight a group of soldiers in the next scene, a distorted version of game's “game over” screen pops up in the middle of a battle, and I spent some time wondering what the hell was going on before I realized I was still directing the battle from inside of the game over screen.

To me, these bizarre sequences represent adaptations of classical Brechtian stagecraft to video games. The way we interact with a game is different than the way we interact with a staged fiction, and by manipulating the tools specific to game-interaction-- the interface and the mission-delivery system-- Kojima delivers that sense of alienating weirdness that's the hallmark of the Verfremdungseffekt. They make you consciously reflect on the fact that you are playing a video game, and that the person you control is just a character-- he's not you, the player; he's a puppet subject to the rules of the game's designer.

These gestures makes sense within the framework of the game's overarching themes. One of the guiding narrative threads of the Metal Gear Solid series is the attempt of modern governments to transform soldiers into objects-- turn war into a business by turning soldiers into commodities bought and sold on the open market. (During the final battle the colonel taunts you by saying that Raiden is, like his namesake, just a tool to be manipulated.) And so the critical space opened up by the metafictional craziness in Arsenal Gear is not accidental-- if the function of first-person shooters, on Kojima's view, is to turn children into soldiers by making them identify with obedient and desensitized killers, then art can counteract this function by breaking the spell of the game over the player.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was the very first truly avant-garde piece of video game art I'd ever played. People think Kojima's crazy, but as far as I'm concerned he's not crazy enough: I yearn to see him set loose from the narrative shackles of the Metal Gear series and channel his anarchic tendencies-- the manipulation of the interface, the knowing metaficational allusions, the theatrical self-consciousness-- into gameplay instead of interactive cinema. Games so rarely aspire to be surreal and self-conscious in the way MGS2 is, and it's a damned shame; they don't respect the player enough to confuse the hell out of them and undermine their expectations. And until they dare to do this, they'll never be more than wonderful pieces of escapism.

I Discover what Kind of Gamer I am, and Praise the Summer's Crop of Short-Form Games

I woke up today and found two pieces of good news on the internet: Rush's Moving Pictures has been delayed, perhaps for months, and Stevie Ray Vaughn's Texas Flood is on the way. I love me some white-person blues, and this will keep me happy and my housemates amused 'till they get that Creedence Clearwater Revival Track Pack up and running.

I've been reading Mitch Krpata's excellent “New Taxonomy of Gamers” series this week (which I neglected, criminally, in January) and it's got this knack for informing me about the lineaments of my essential nature: I'm a tourist with perfectionist tendencies. I prefer singing and playing Baba O'Reilly with my friends to whaling on Through the Fire and Flames on expert. When I hit Raining Blood on Guitar Hero III's career mode I decided to stop rather than dedicate irreplacable hours of my life to beating it. I played through Ninja Gaiden II on the normal difficulty setting (this is a task for the perfectionist's masochistic streak), because I really love flipping out on voracious packs of ninja dogs, but I didn't go back and try to complete it on the hardest difficulty. I try to complete games because I want to see everything they have to offer, and once that's accomplished this I move on to the next one. Krpata had a great quote from Gabe over at Penny Arcade that captured my attitude pretty well: “I don't need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls 'new art'. I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don't play games to beat them, I play games to see them.”

Age is a big factor in this; when you're in middle school you have countless hours to sink into honing your Metroid speedruns, and because you can't afford to buy any other games that was the best way to squeeze entertainment out of your gaming habit. But once you get older you have the financial wherewithal to move onto the next new game, and non-gaming related commitments encroach on your life (read: doing your job, hopefully interacting with women). If you're lucky you have an hour or two a day to dedicate to gaming, and frittering away that hour chasing down agility orbs, or losing forty minutes of progress between save points, or watching Otacon weep piteously doesn't seem like the best way to optimize that time anymore. Your ideal is sitting down/strumming up for thirty minutes and making some progress on something and having a good time.

As Krpata argues, how you fall on the tourist/completionist/perfectionist taxonomy also has a big impact on how you feel about game length. As a tourist, I'm not always looking to squeeze 40 hours out of every game I buy. I wouldn't get to play anything else for months, because my perfectionist side doesn't like to leave things unfinished. Your completionist gamer will regard a game's 5-hour length as a deficiency, because her brain is wired into the reward-structure of the $60 retail game, but not I. For the hardcasual gamer, the limiting resource on your gaming habit is time, not money.

This is why this summer's bumper crop of top-shelf downloadable games has been so great. Braid, Geometry Wars 2, The Who's Greatest Hits, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Castle Crashers, Pixeljunk Eden: all summer, PSN and Xbox Live Arcade have housed the games most worth playing. (This includes you, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Too Human) As a hardcasual gamer, you want a game you can get something out of by playing it for less than two hours at a time. So if you can get your hands on a game that's novel and fun to play, which you can finish in 6 hours, you thank your lucky stars. I've never played the Ratchet and Clank series, though I would love them. But I don't think I would 30 hours love them. So now there's a Ratchet game I can play in 4 hours? Sign me up. So many disc-based games present innovative gameplay ideas and then proceed to dilute their impact by attempting to stretch a few good ideas into 30 hours of content (Or several sequels). We should judge games relative to how long they manage to make their basic gameplay elements arresting, and Portal and Braid show that you can craft a superior product by being compact and economical.

Come late October the gaming companies will roll out their new, horrifying enticments to the neglect of sunny days and dissertation chapters, but for now the tourist in me is grateful for the existence of a harvest of games which are lovable in 30 minute increments. Big ups to digital distribution for saving this summer from drought.

Two Kinds of Progress

As I've said before, I think the feature that differentiates video games from regular games and sports is the fact that you do not know the rules of a video game in advance. Not all video games are like this, but the thing that makes video games unique is that you are learning the rules of the game on the fly as you move through the environment and work towards surmounting all the challenges the game throws at you. I think that this dynamic gives long-form video games unique narrative possibilities relative to other, non-participatory forms of art, so I'm going to take a shot at explaining how this is so.

My basic idea is that when the player inhabits the role of a protagonist, there are two kinds of progress that are going on in the course of a game

The first is what I'll call gameplay progress. When you begin a game you usually start off with a meager set of capabilities. You usually begin by familiarizing with the basic play mechanics and controls-- how you hit A to jump and push the left thumbstick to move around and pull the right trigger to whale on a chicken.

The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, the Odyssey and Aeneid of console gaming, set the basic template for gameplay progress by tying your access to new parts of the world to your acquisition and mastery of new skills and rules. In Zelda, for example, you acquire one new skill per dungeon, and then you earn the right to move on to the next chunk of the world by using that skill to reach and defeat the dungeon's boss. (I was playing Phantom Hourglass last spring, and by the time it was over felt this formula had become too rigid and had degenerated into mannerism. Don't get me started on the last few Castlevanias.) By the time you finish, both you and your character are more capable than when you began, because you've learned a bunch of new rules. That's progress.

Alongside gameplay progress-- the narrative of your mastery of new skills and capabilities-- there is also the venerable narrative progress native to storytelling. In a story, progress consists of the way its protagonist matures as he goes through the world and is transformed by his new experiences. Literature provides the standard models for this kind of progress. Telemachus begins the Odyssey as a faint-hearted boy tormented by his mother's suitors and ends the epic by helping to vanquish them and claim his birthright. As Huck Finn goes off on his journey up the Mississippi, he becomes caught between a conscience that tells him that slavery is right, and a heart that tells him it's wrong. By making his way through the hazards of river life and becoming friends with Jim he learns which one he should listen to; the moral drama of the novel comes from watching a good heart win out over a bad conscience. These are classic forms of narrative progress: the development of character that transpires as the protagonist is transformed by experience.

Games have unique expressive capabilities because they can superimpose and juxtapose these two distinct forms of progress in the course of their narratives. Games are great at telling coming-of-age stories because the implicit logic of gameplay already tells a story about the player's development towards maturity. Zelda has a purchase on us that outstrips its narrative sophistication because our identification with Link is different from our relationship to a character in a novel: when we begin the game, we are the powerless boy on an island who must learn about the world in order to live up to our destiny. The reason Half-Life 2 is so compelling is that you begin as a faceless nobody and spend the game becoming the efficacious person-- Gordon Freeman-- that you see reflected in the other character's eyes. Bioshock (putatively) offers the player a choice between becoming powerful and becoming morally corrupt, and this choice has significance because the empowerment you are offered is uniquely your own.

I think games have only begun to exploit the narrative possibilities of the empowerment inherent in gameplay progress. In most games we become good by becoming powerful, and while there is much to love about this story there are so many other potential experiences that can be created by playing these two forms of progress against each other, like Bioshock's Faustian bargain. We've seen a many a gaming Bildungsroman that ends in triumph, but we still haven't seen gaming's The Red and The Black. Life and literature abound in stories about the perils of maturity and the ambiguities inherent in our drive to master the world around us. Games can be too.

Better Not Tell You Now

I never imagined that I would have any “back in my day” stories, but here is one. When I was in fourth grade my family moved to Vevey, Switzerland for my dad's job, and each Sunday we would bike from Vevey to neighboring Montreaux in order to procure American and UK gaming magazines from the one English-language newsstand in the area. I read Gamepro and Computer + Video Games cover-to-cover every month, even though I didn't own the majority of the systems in them. All I knew about the Amstrad, Amiga, and Spectrum was that you could play Rainbow Islands on them, and that Rainbow Islands was the shit. 1989 was a lean year of my gaming youth, and reading about games became a great substitute for playing them. It's crazy to think that at one point during my lifetime it was necessary to bike to a different city in order to obtain coverage of video games. Such were the days of print.

All this is just a roundabout way of getting to the point that I really love reading about games. One of the best things about being someone who likes games these days is that there's such a wealth of smart and entertaining commentary on games out there in the internet, some of it unpunctuated. If you're in fourth grade, and you only own a Sega Master System, and you don't mind reading about games and systems you'll never own, the pool of content is now endless. You don't even have to bike to the next town to find this content, and be forced to live the rest of your life with the memory of that one time you toppled an elderly woman on the bikepath near Lac Leman while she was bending over to clean up after her Bichon Frise.

So even though it is churlish for me to complain in the midst of such bounty, I have an issue to raise with the games press. It's the previews.

Coverage of games in the enthusiast press is about evenly split between three areas: previews, which describe games at some point in their development; reviews, which evaluate a game on release, and everything else. For me, the last two areas are golden. I want reviews, because I want to know which games are worth playing. And I want the “everything else” because it's here that people have interesting discussions about matters unrelated to camera behavior. But the proportion of games coverage given over to previews drives me insane.

First off, game development takes a really long time, and on the current model you begin to see a proliferation of articles on a title some years before it's ever released. To take an extreme example: for a title like Silicon Knights' Too Human, which was in development for ten years, you can see dozens upon dozens of articles in the enthusiast press before that game is in any shape to be objectively evaluated. If you want to know if the game is any good at all, there's really no way to tell three years out.

Take the Super Bowl. That's a really important game. They run previews of the super bowl for two weeks and the general consensus is that it's really tiresome. After three days you run out of storylines and just spend the next eleven days wildly speculating about how the game is going to turn out. Sure, you can make some intelligent predictions about what the make-or-break elements of the game are going to be, but beyond that commentators just spend a lot of time on television and websites and the radio speculating that it's going to come down to the Colts' linebacker play. The truth is you really don't know how it's going to be until the game is played.

Secondly, if a game is going to be good, you really don't want to hear a lot about it beforehand. As a general rule I think one is best off playing games with as little advance knowledge of their contents as possible. Imagine playing Bioshock for the first time if you went in cold; you just fired up your console and found yourself plunged into an underwater Randian dystopia. That game would just knock you flat on your ass. It's that unique and beautiful and atmospheric. When I finished Bioshock I wished there was a way to erase my knowledge of the whole affair and just relive that experience of seeing it for the first time. (Maybe other people have this feeling too-- you have to systematically avoid getting any foreknowledge of Fallout 3 whilst being bombarded with information about that game for months prior.) So previews also make your experience of the finished product worse.

Finally, the games industry-- by which I mean the economic interests that bankroll the creative process-- is in full control of the media access that generates the preview cycle, and this is a bad thing for journalism. Once a game is released it belongs to the world; but before then it belongs to the publisher. And because the enthusiast press is reliant on access to pre-release versions of the game to drive page views, this is a situation that is rife with temptations to the transgression professional ethics. The ability to manage access to previews gives the financial interests an unsavory degree of leverage over the press. And rest assured: the companies will not shy away from using this leverage if they can get away with it: preview coverage has this odd effect of determining which games are the “AAA,” “can't-miss” games on their release, and this status is far too valuable to be left to the untutored judgment of games journalists.

I don't agree with Too Human developer and Silicon Knights head Dennis Dyack often; when it comes to issues even tangentially related to the creative success of his products he loses what little sense of proportion he possesses. If electing a chimpanzee prime minister of Canada would move units of Too Human, rest assured he would be out on 1up.com stumping for Nim Chimpsky. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Scaling back preview coverage would leave up more room for talking about other important issues, and eliminate all the problems that come with them. I'll go half way with you, gaming press: just let me know three months out that late October is going to be amazing, and we'll be square.

I Pay Tribute to the Master Chief

A whiles back I made some hollow promises about justifying my love of for Halo 3's multiplayer. And while honoring my pledges runs contrary to my principles, I do want to extol the game's many excellences. I've been playing the game a bit on and off since I wrote that post and now that it's lost the near-shamanic command over my soul that it once had, I feel like I can discuss it in terms of appreciation rather than addiction. I should add the few caveats: I am not an expert on shooter games. Prior to Halo 3, my only experience with multiplayer shooters came from a couple rounds of 56K dial-up Doom 2 with my friend Erik. (I lost. Badly.) So don't take this as a declaration of Halo's superiority to all other shooters. Also, I am not terribly good at Halo 3.

For me, the real bedrock of Halo 3's appeal is the controls. I think the central design problem in making a shooter for the console is getting the feel of the controls right, and to my mind Bungie's main accomplishment is communicating a real sense of movement and physicality through an Xbox gamepad. A lot of shooters can make you feel like you're just a viewpoint floating in space, and Halo 3 has all these small touches that give your character a sense of substance and weight as she moves through the world-- the way the perspective shudders subtly to suggest the Spartan's gait, the way you hang in the air at the apex of a jump. Each of the weapons also has a really distinctive feel-- even if you couldn't see or hear the TV, you could tell an assault rifle from a battle rifle from a shotgun in a second just by holding the controller in your hands as you fire them. I've heard that Japanese developers, who have traditionally held American game development in low esteem, have a great deal of respect for Bungie, and you can understand why. Bungie has done for shooters what Nintendo did for platformers: they've turned the visceral joys control and motion into the centerpiece of the game.

Maybe a point of comparison will help clarify. I finally played though the Half-Life 2 saga last fall when I picked up the Orange Box (which is, officially, the greatest game bargain of all-time), and that game also has really visceral and thrilling combat. But in Half-Life, all the physicality comes from the the realistic behavior of the enemies and objects in the world: I'll never forget the way a Combine solider crumples when you hit him at close range with a shotgun. The physics model of Half-Life 2 is unparalleled when it comes to conveying realistic explosions, but when it comes to control I never quite shook the feeling that I was just gliding over pieces of the environment rather than walking on them. Unlike Halo, I never felt that I was holding a person in my hands.

So, on top of its excellent controls I feel the real strength of Halo lies in the variety and refinement of its combat mechanics. The driving idea behind Halo's combat is to create engagements at three distinct registers: long, medium, and short-range. Succeeding at each of these three distances requires the mastery of a different set of weapons and tactics; lobbing your grenades well is one of the essential skills in the game, and using them effectively is a different proposition at each of these three distances. Bungie did a great job of balancing the various weapons such that there are a variety of plausible weapons and strategies at each register. For me, honing my skills with the battle rifle until I was good enough to have a competent long-distance game kept me engrossed in the game for hours and hours. (My short game is pretty subpar, and I still can't snipe to save my life.) Because the range of distances and range of weapons, there's just a lot to learn and perfect and refine as you play.

While certain maps favor different types of combat, the map design on the whole uses its geography in order to encourage combat at a variety of distances, so there is always an opportunity to work on different parts of your game regardless of the map you end up on. Despite my uneven mastery of the various weapons and skills I always felt like I could be effective on any map if I strategized well enough, and this is a testament to the quality of the map design as a whole.

I'm not blind to Halo's faults. Unless you happen to hate all ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, the Xbox Live experience can be pretty abysmal at times. Because of this I've never really gotten a the sort of collaborative team-play experience out of Halo that you can get from Team Fortress on the PC . Maybe I just need some friends who play on Xbox live who are not sociopaths or 14-year olds. There's also not a lot of variety to the game modes, and so far as my experience goes you have to squeeze all the fun you can out of playing Slayer over and over again. But for me, that well's never run dry.

Death, Liberty, and the Purusuit of Happiness

*** Coletta Factor: GTAIV plot spoilers below***

About a week ago, Leigh Alexander wrote an interesting post about the of boom-and-bust cycle that surrounds the release of critically lauded titles like Bioshock and GTAIV. The game releases to rapturous acclaim, then the backlash and the nit-picking set in, and then the nomadic gaming public moves on to the next AAA game and forgets about it entirely: the four-month bell curve. And the odd thing is that my personal four-month bell curve with GTAIV came to an end this week, when I made the final push and finished the game after buying it at a midnight launch. And my dominant thought after witnessing the game's tragic finale was: we should still be talking about this game. Why aren't we?

Well, it seems to me that everyone who had to play and finish the game within the first week (most members of the game press who had to play through the game for review) got a bad deal in terms of being able to appreciate what the game has to offer. I don't think anyone is going to forget their first taste of Liberty City. The first hours of GTAIV are likely to be burned into the collective subconscious of a generation of gamers, because the world of GTAIV is by any reckoning the most detailed and visually impressive environment ever created in a video game. And I spent quite a few hours at the start simply marveling at the details of the environment, enjoying the narrative, and appreciating how so many of the inconveniences of the previous iterations had been eliminated.

However, there was a distinct break about halfway through where the honeymoon ended. After a while you quit slowing down to appreciate all the architecture and you get sucked into completing the missions, and around the same point the ludonarrative dissonance sets in and you become disenchanted with the way your character is compelled to act during the missions. And this was the point at which I (like many others, I think) came to a dead stop and moved on to other things.

In retrospect it was a good thing that I stopped there, because I got a different perspective on the game when I returned to it a few months later. On one hand, the world impressed the shit out of me all over again, and on the other hand I found I had new stores of patience with the social-networking structure. And it was only after re-thinking the game from the perspective of these elements that I came under the sway of the game's thesis.

To my mind, the felt disconnect between the peace-loving Nico of the cutscenes and the unrepentant bloodletter of the missions, while disenchanting, is an element of the narrative itself. So many of the narrative pieces (especially his relationship to the mafia and police) explicitly play on the idea that Nico's plight is living a life chosen for him by others. The only role available to him is this weird hybrid assassin-janitor; like many other new visitors to our shores, he spends his time cleaning up other peoples' messes for money. Everyone in power also has some nasty history that they are unwilling to deal with themselves, and it falls to the newcomers to keep the gears of capital turning smoothly without staining the reputations of its controllers. As a player, you don't have any choice in this; to keep the narrative progressing you must resign yourself to piling up corpses for your handlers regardless of how you feel about it.

One piece of meaningful liberty the game's narrative affords the player is the option to cultivate relationships with Nico's crime associates and girlfriends. There's no denying that ferrying your friends and paramours across town is a chore, but the slim gameplay rewards of this efforts are compensated by the narrative rewards. Not only do you get a greater sense of Nico's character and motivations by having him discuss his life with his peers, but I also fell into the grip of the idea that cultivating these friendships (particularly with Kate McCreary, who offers no tangible gameplay rewards at all) was my one chance to write my own script for Nico. As the missions pulled Nico inexorably towards corruption, with few defining choices along the way, I was given a chance to redeem the protagonist through my own agency.

And like a sucker I took it. During the final mission you are given a decision that offers a choice between the two opposed values in the narrative: accumulation and honor. You can make money by working with a character who had betrayed you, or you can take revenge on him. Just as I was given a choice between the two, Nico calls Kate and asks her for advice. And since I had come to regard Nico's relationship with Kate as his one chance for happiness, I took her advice and went for revenge. And the game's reward for this choice was killing her off at Roman's wedding in the very next scene, setting up the final bid for revenge and the conclusion of the game.

This finale made a deep impression on me. By offering the player a chance to define Nico's values and character in the context of the gameplay, GTAIV gives the player the illusion that her choices make a difference. And then, perversely, the game eliminates the thing you choose to value the most. The message I took from this is that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what you choose. You may think you are in control, but you're not making the rules. The rules were set long before the player arrived, and Nico's happiness is not in the cards.

When Halo 3 came out last Fall, Daniel Radosh wrote that in order to attain maturity, “games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life.” As G. Christopher Williams noted, GTAIV humiliates the player in order to convey a message about the systematic corruption America visits on its influx of human capital. The structure of the gameplay contains a paradox at the heart of its vision of America: it inspires an unprecedented sense of freedom and open possibilities, and then this very sensation is shown to be a trap. The game's final achievement is labeled “You Win!”, and as it rolled by I knew the joke was on me. I had mastered all the rules, and it had gotten me nowhere. Welcome to America.