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.

Foucault on the Pleasures of being Subject

First off, more good news for the good ship Clu: our exchange with Michel Abbott and Corvus Elrod garnered a mention on N'Gai Croal's Level Up blog, which means that now I can die in peace.

Second, we continue a weeks-spanning tradition of giving big ups to GameSetLinks. Thanks for reading, Simon Carless! I am going to name my first-born Simon Carless Pliskin in your honor.

And now to business. Michel Foucault was one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20^th century. Foucault's main subject was a historical development of social and cultural phenomena he came to call “discursive regimes,” and the theory of pleasure that grows out of his inquiries into these regimes illuminates many different cultural practices, including play.

The easiest to way to think about a discursive regime is to think of it as a set of rules that govern practices in sphere of life-- civic government, economics, medicine or even hygiene. These rules specify which sort of behaviors count as “normal” in that sphere and which actions count as “abnormal.” So in the case of medicine you have all sorts of practices that are used in order to determine who is (psychologically and physically) healthy and who is unhealthy, in the case of law you have a bunch of rules and procedures that determine who is a criminal and who is a functional member of society, and so on. Foucault thought that analyzing the history of distinctively modern practices like clinical psychology cast a good deal of light on the nature of modern society. (For example, he was interested in how the idea of mental diseases like hysteria and schizophrenia supplanted the old, theologically-based idea that mental illness was the result of a damaged or possessed soul.)

One of the main theses of Foucault's later work was that many other interpreters of these phenomena had failed to understand these aspects of human cultural life because they had a mistaken understanding of power. There is a temptation to think that the way these regimes operate is purely punitive: those in power, who make the rules, coerce the populace into compliance with them, purely through violence and sanction. On this line of thought, removing these artificial systems of control would allow our natural desires to find their full expression. Marxists, for example, often though that once the populace was free of the ills visited upon them by the political and economic regimes of capitalism, a type of social cooperation inherent in our species-nature would reassert itself and come to govern our social lives.

Foucault thought that there was a good deal wrong with this picture, but one of his main points is that discursive regimes to not just function negatively, through punishment, but also positively, through pleasure. This is why these regimes are so powerful: not because they terrorize us into conformity, but because they create new forms of pleasure through the imposition of discipline on our lives and bodies. As he once said in an interview: “If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”

Thinking about regular and well-understood cultural practices, like ballet dancing, illustrates his point. Learning ballet requires the imposition of all kinds of arbitrary and physically unnatural rules on one's actions and body. You have to learn to tailor your bodily movements and to manipulate your feet in a way that is painful and difficult. However, by doing so you develop the capacity to use your body in a way that is elegant and pleasurable.

To take another example, think of Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is a regime of power: it induces me to play the correct notes with the correct rhythm, and it punishes me when I fail to do so. The game poses problems I would not have otherwise in my life. But it also creates a certain type of pleasure that would not exist otherwise: the pleasure of playing all the correct notes in the correct rhythm.

Towards the end of his career, Foucault came more and more to regard the ancient Greek and Roman practices of self-discipline-- their forms of care over their own conduct and bodies-- as a model for liberation. Unlike self-sacrifice undertaken for the sake of God or for the State, the Greeks were disciplinarians who assumed these regimes for the sake of pleasure. The Olympics, in a way, are a paradigmatic product of this Greek enthusiasm for creating pleasure by submitting one's body and conduct to rules.

Many game designers think that that long-term goal of design is to bequeath real freedom on the player by removing all of the arbitrary limitations on the worlds they create which are necessitated by the limitations our technology, giving her the same liberty of action she enjoys in real life. And to be sure, the pursuit of verisimilitude, especially when it comes to expanding our modes of interaction, is a worthy one. But it seems to me that over the long term you cannot remove the rules without removing pleasure. Games are systems of rules, and you cannot make more fun by taking rules away. It is the limitations on our action imposed by systems of government that lends significance to our behavior. And they also make for all of the pleasure we get from flipping out and killing ninjas.

Michael Abbott Offers some Concluding Reflections on Braid

Michael Abbott posted the final installment of our conversation about Braid over on the Brainy Gamer today. Thanks go to him and Corvus Elrod for engaging in this conversation, it's been great. I still have some ideas about Braid's narrative and gameplay, but I'm going to let those thoughts marinate for a few days, as the internet appears to be saturated at the moment.

And also, if you have not purchased Braid, I really encourage you to buy it. It is a game that could change the way you think about games forever. It is a game with uncommon aspirations, and more games will aim to achieve the sort of emotional and thematic depth it strives for if we (as a gaming community) support it and reward Jonathan Blow's efforts financially.
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I live with one foot in a gaming world and the other in a non-gaming world. Most of my local friends are academics who teach art, theater, music, rhetoric, philosophy, etc.. Without exception these people are curious about the world and eager for an intellectual challenge or exchange of ideas. They're sensitive to the nuances of human communication; they love the arts; and they're genuinely curious about new ideas and forms of expression.

And none of them can play Braid. Not one. Most of them can't even figure out what they're supposed to do. I know because I've put the gamepad in their hands and watched them. Sure, these folks aren't gamers like me, but they're also not senior citizens or video-game-phobics. They're mostly people in their late 20s to mid 40s who may play games now and then, but could never be described as gamers. And they're all pretty smart.

The tragic thing is they want to play. The music, the visuals, the opening text - all hook them and pique their curiosities. They didn't know games aspire to explore the human psyche. They didn't know games can look like paintings. They didn't know game music can feature a cello. Braid invites them in, and they willingly enter. Then, just as quickly, Braid boots them out and slams the door in their faces. They discover that the game is as inaccessible to them as an unknown foreign language.

The tragedy of Braid, to me, is that it bars the door on what might have been its most receptive audience. I understand that one game can't be all things to all people. I get the fact that Braid is, in many ways, a gamer's game with homages to iconic aspects of gaming history. And I'm sensitive to the fact that Braid relies on our collective sense of games and our experiences playing them as part of its meaning. But when you consider how small that audience really is - and when you subtract from that number "hardcore" types like me who found the game severely unyielding - what you're left with is a relatively small group of devoted gamers who truly love the game and find it meaningful to them. That's great, and I don't mean to diminish that experience in the least.

But is this what we want? Why must we so often isolate ourselves in this way? It's a shame to me that a game with Braid's narrative, artistic, and aesthetic aspirations is inaccessible to so many people hungry for exactly those things. I have an agenda here, and I make no effort to conceal it. I want my friends - the painters, poets, musicians, and philosophers I work with every day - to experience for themselves what video games can do and say and mean. I believe they will meet us halfway if we offer them a reasonable hill to climb and a meaningful experience for their efforts. I wanted Braid to be that game, and I'm disappointed and a little sad that it wasn't.

This is my last post on Braid. It's been a terrific discussion, and I'm terribly grateful to Iroquois, Corvus, the commenters, and the designer himself, Jonathan Blow, who have made this multi-post cross-blog conversation so vigorous and thought provoking. I greatly appreciate your interest. Now I'm gonna go play me some Madden.

I Trade More Blows with Michael Abbott on the Subject of Braid

Michael Abbott and I are continuing our blog-exchange on Braid. Corvus Elrod has also joined the conversation over on the Brainy Gamer, and his comments are well worth reading. Michael and I set out to start a lively and civil discussion on Braid with this exchange, and if you go over to the comments section on his site you will find just such a conversation underway.
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Hi Mike,

I noticed that your astute readers picked up on the fact that we lovingly pilfered the "vs. mode" idea from Croal/Totilo's exchanges in no time flat. It bears mentioning that we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.

It's funny to me that you described parts of your experience as drudgery. I was on a console-less vacation last week and one of the first tasks for me when I got back to my 360 yesterday was finally cracking the last few segments of Braid-- my girlfriend was my sidekick and puzzle-solving assistant as I played through the latter half of the game, and we were joking that it was my "homework." I think part of this feeling comes from the way that blogging colors my experience (maybe you felt this too, where there is this pressure to finish the game in order to become well-informed), but it also speaks to the ethos of the game itself-- puzzling my way though Braid was onerous. Blow himself is quasi-puritanical about making the player work hard to figure out things on her own, and this attitude is reflected in the game's design.

The positive side of this, as I see it, is the sense of earned satisfaction you get from mastering the new rules and teasing out the diverse logics of the game-worlds. And it as it happens, this is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate. With a the exception of few puzzles ("crossing the gap" on world 5, for example), which I couldn't have gotten through without just stumbling onto the right solution, I felt that the demands Braid makes on the player are reasonable-- uncompromising and rigorous, but reasonable. Braid is an imperious mistress, but she is rarely fickle.

The negative side of this, as your experience illustrates, is that Braid just lacks any immediate sense of fun. It does not set out to entertain you, and with the exception of some pretty aesthetic moments it makes you earn the pleasure you take from it. (Portal, which makes for a good point of comparison, wants the player to like it and desires to be understood in a way that Braid does not.) I think part of this is that the feel of the platforming is kind of stiff compared to contemporary platformers-- the fact that it was sometimes difficult to execute the proper solution to a puzzle because you couldn't jump properly is a design flaw, in my opinion, and imposes needless barriers to the core enjoyment of experimenting and problem-solving. (Part of the problem here is just that Nintendo makes everyone else look bad when it comes to making buttery-smooth and tactile platforming controls.) This is too bad, because I liked the fact that the rewind mechanic removed the need for the frustrating-controller-slamming-repetitive-death and platform-pixel-length-estimation that is endemic to platformers (indeed, I think this idea of removing player death from the rule-learning scenario was one of the best ideas in the whole game design); it was unfortunate that some of the unrewindable elements in the later puzzles made the easy "redo" impossible.

You're right that the deep concentration and tricky jumping you have to perform to solve the puzzles pulls you out of the narrative. I'm not sure if I would say it "clashes" with the narrative-- as you say, there are some interesting and complex thematic connections between the the texture of Braid's play and the narrative elements. (I have some theses-- crackpot theses-- on this front, which I will inflict on the internet at some future date.)

So I feel where you're coming from Mike, and I understand your disappointment. I thought there was something really refreshing, even respectful about the way Braid makes a set of stringent demands on the player. It shows a certain confidence in the player's capacities. But while meeting these demands can feel ennobling, it can also be alienating to play a game so rigorously governed by the intentions of its author. Braid offers a very specific type of fun, and if this sort of puzzling doesn't suit your temperament it's a game that's easier to admire than to love.

Yours,
Iroquois Pliskin

A Letter from Michael Abbott Concerning Braid

Michael Abbott has posted a response to my first missive over on The Brainy Gamer, which I have reproduced below the break.

The game is officially afoot! Stay tuned.
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This is a tough one for me, Iroquois. Before I played it, Braid looked like a game targeted directly at me and my tastes: thematically ambitious, artistically rich; an homage to genre-defining games I love. As I've written here previously, I want to play games that explore emotions rarely found in video games, like sadness and longing. I'm eager for games that don't fear ambiguity; games that offer open space for interpretation and rumination.

Braid is all these things. So why don't I like it very much?

I admire the game Braid wants to be, but I see a fundamental disconnect between the game's narrative ambitions and the mechanisms Braid relies on to deliver them. Essentially, it's a platformer/puzzle game with story elements interspersed throughout, separating each of the worlds. In this way, it's a fairly conventional structure, with what appears to be a purposefully thin story attached.

But as others have suggested, the real story of Braid is delivered via gameplay. Its thematic through-lines, such as memory and regret, are said to be manifested in the player's experience of turning back time and other activities. Intellectually, I understand this melding of form and content, and it resonates with me as an exciting approach to game design. But my experience playing Braid was nothing like this at all.

Maybe I'm simply not skilled enough as a gamer, but I found playing Braid a thoroughly frustrating affair. The process for accomplishing things can often be terribly fussy, requiring repeated attempts (for me, sometimes 25-30) to overcome a single obstacle or special reverse-time maneuver. At one point, I found myself perched on the last pixel edge of a moving cloud waiting for just the right moment to jump from my time delay circle to catch the next cloud. After 50 or so unsuccessful attempts, I consulted a video walkthrough (more on this in a moment), and even with that running next to me, I found it incredibly difficult to reproduce what I was seeing. At this point, any allegorical meaning I was meant to derive from this experience was destroyed.

Some players complain about single-path "guess what the designer is thinking" puzzles, and I confess I'm not crazy about them myself. But if they're cleverly designed and fun to execute, they can hit that "sweet spot" you describe. While I admire Braid's various chrono effects and the clever ways they're implemented, I found myself repeatedly stymied by the puzzles. Worlds 4 and 6 were only possible for me with multiple cheats. Perhaps if I had devoted more hours to each, I might have overcome them. But I made an earnest effort, and at a certain point it began to feel like drudgery. I understand the game plays on a certain narrative parallel between the player's difficulty making sense of things and Tim's uncertainties about the world. But for me, the frustration negated any possibility of this sort of engagement.

Anybody making the ironic connection between the name of my blog and the fact that I simply may not be smart enough to play this game?

You mentioned the writing in the narrative vignettes and wondered if such text might be considered "retrograde" in a game like this. I don't necessarily have a problem with games relying on text per se, and in the case of Braid it seems part of its spare, ambiguous aesthetic. I just wish the writing were better crafted. This is all terribly subjective, of course, but I personally found it awkward and bit mawkish. I wish it were more poetic or evocative than it is.

So it sounds like I really hate this game, doesn't it? I'm troubled by that impression because so many people I respect have written so enthusiastically about Braid. Perhaps this game just isn't for me. Despite all that I want to admire about it, it just feels like Braid doesn't like me very much, and that's pretty hard for me to overcome. I consider myself a skilled gamer, so maybe I'm just a little embarrassed that this game was too much for me. I don't know.

I do know this, however. Braid is the bees knees and the talk of the town at the moment, and I'm feeling very much like the odd man out.

A Letter to the Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott Concerning Braid

Hi Michael,

I've been looking forward to Braid for a long time now, because I've been listening to Jonathan Blow, the game's designer, talk and critique modern game design for about a year now. Blow really interests me, since he strikes me as one of those quintessential modernist avant-gardistes who is avid to declare that everything being done with the art form is wrong, and that his own magnum opus is going to point the way the future. He's wrong about the tradition, of course, but his mere existence and the viability of his game is a sign that the creative ecosystem for games is healthy and flourishing, as it ought to be.

So I proposed that we conduct this correspondence about the game, and you-- being both gracious and unaware of what you were getting yourself into-- agreed. In the interim, the Internet has been rife with intelligent commentary on the game, so let's move things forward.

When I was racking my brains for something interesting to say about Braid, one of the first things that came to mind was your “narrative manifesto” post last week, which included some comments by Blow. All of the designers you mention seem to recognize a common problem with realizing narrative in games: The player is a creature of whimsy, an “agent of chaos,” and the choices they tend to make with their freedom in the game's world are not usually conducive to narrative coherence. In order to convey a narrative with specificities of character and plot, the designer needs to devise scenarios that take control over the narrative out of the player's hands-- through cutscenes, slow-to-open doors, elevators, and other devices. And by doing this they remove the feature-- interactivity-- which gives games their unique potential as works of art.

Most of your subjects said that their solution is to abdicate the role of author: they put the scriptwriting tools in the player's hands in the form of the game's rules and then give them responsibility for crafting their own interpretation of the world and characters devised by the designer. This approach goes hand-in-hand with a particular gameplay aesthetic, the open-world game genre exemplified by GTA and Oblivion.

Since I've played Braid, I've come to think that Jonathan Blow is the odd-man-out of your examples, Mike. Braid is not about the player's creation of a narrative from the game's rules. It's about finding the one way to get each puzzle piece-- choice doesn't enter into it. And at the level of game design, I think the game is a masterpiece. The time-manipulation mechanic is both innovate and easy-to-use (this is no mean feat), and I liked how each level introduced new wrinkles into the manipulation of time.

The creation of these puzzles is an art in itself, and I thought Blow's design choices on this front were just superb; each challenge struck me as both unobvious and logical. (When I was playing I remembered your recent game-club discussions of Grim Fandango, which illustrated how important it is to strike this balance.) For me, it hit that sweet spot where I found myself mentally navigating some sticky puzzle before I went to bed, and I had to restrain myself from crawling out of bed and firing up the console when the pieces dropped into place just before I went to sleep. (The last game to do this to me is Portal, and this is good company indeed.) When I finally figured out how to get that one piece, I felt like I was being rewarded for doing something genuinely praiseworthy, and for me this sensation is the one experience I wish all games aspired to create.

Blow could have rested his laurels on the quality of the fundamental design. But Blow isn't a man to settle. The little story-vignettes between levels aren't there to tell a story, really, but are there to color the player's experience of how he navigates all the ingeniously-designed puzzles. These vignettes are modest devices as bearers of the game's whole plot, but they are appropriately suggestive-- I really thought they transformed the basic gameplay and invested the mechanics with a sort of allusive depth and significance. I think that Blow's attempt to wed form to content by transforming our experience of the game's mechanics into something with a definite narrative texture was brilliant. It's gotten me thinking about how games themselves (all our other games) alter our experience of time and give free rein to our fantasies about perfection and repeatability. (Maybe you're like me and you just find it satisfying to run across games that have something to say about what games mean to the players, what their ethical significance is. Perhaps it's because they facilitate coming up with blog posts.)

So I love Braid. But I'm wondering what you thought of the artistic package as a whole. I had some reservations about the aesthetics, especially the writing of the narrative vignettes, which carry so much weight. Am I being curmudgeonly for feeling that text is a really retrograde way for a video game to convey its framing themes? Gameplay of this caliber covereth a multitude of sins, but do I give the man a pass on appearing (in some places) to have torn some pages from a high-school journal and pasted them into the game?

Yours,
Iroquois Pliskin