Network now...BLOG
Is Braid Pretentious?
For those of us who write or think about videogames seriously, the question ‘are games art’ has ceased to be a question that is particularly interesting. Those like the American film critic Roger Ebert would prefer to draw a line in the sand between Art and Not Art; others, like his one-time sparring partner Clive Barker, would rather defend this still-developing medium from assailants.
Personally, I’d prefer to address those who already accept games as a valid form of expression, because among those of us who feel this way, there remains a divide far more worthy of exploration. It’s the divide between the people who feel that all videogames should strive for is to entertain us, and the people who believe that games are capable of more – even if developers, critics and players alike are still struggling to figure out what that is and how it can be achieved.
Look at the various reactions to Jonathan Blow’s Xbox Live Arcade game, Braid. Some immediately applied the term ‘pretentious’ – to its storytelling, its gameplay and even Blow himself – as a way of dismissing it. In my opinion, the term ‘pretentious’ generally obscures more than it reveals about the subject matter under discussion, but it often speaks volumes about those who throw it around without much reflection.
This includes those who gave the game good reviews, but were critical of the text blocks for being, well, pretentious. Take, for instance, the first set of books in World 2: Time and Forgiveness, after which we’re introduced to the gameplay. We’re informed that our protagonist, Tim, is on a quest to rescue his princess, with whom he made many mistakes which have caused her to become distant. The text reads, in part: ‘Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness… What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell her: “I didn’t mean what I just said”, and she would say: “It’s okay, I understand”, and she would not turn away and life would really proceed as though we had never said that thing? We could remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience’.
On the surface, this passage is simply a way of establishing the world and its main character. If we look a bit closer, it is clearly a metaphor for the time-rewinding mechanic that is Tim’s core ability in Braid; sure enough, the introductory text for each of the worlds in some way draws a parallel between the time ability/power contained within that world and an aspect of Tim’s life.
Yes, the prose is more florid than what we’re used to in a typical game, but not offensively so, and it’s far less so than even pop fiction, let alone literary fiction. Yet this mere effort by Blow to reach just above videogame mundaneness for something more evocative of his artistic intent – not to mention perfectly in keeping with Braid’s painterly backgrounds and Celtic-themed score – was enough for the p-word to be slapped on to his game. Had Braid employed Portal’s minimalist approach to narrative and pared back on his text blocks even further, he might have avoided the label. But because Blow opted for allusively written clarity over sparely written mystery, the label was trotted out.
Another related criticism targeted Braid’s puzzles and their accessibility, or lack thereof. Garnett Lee, the 1UP Yours podcast host who struggled with the game before giving up, said these are the sort of puzzles that are designed to make the people who solve them feel smart. The Brainy Gamer blogger Michael Abbott, for his part, complained that Braid’s mechanics made it impenetrable to the non-gamers who would have been drawn in by Blow’s ambitions. ‘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’, Abbot wrote. ‘I want my friends – the painters, poets, musicians, and philosophers I work with every day – to experience for themselves what videogames 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’.
Is Braid guilty of interactive pretension? Again, I don’t think so. From where I sit, Braid had to be made in the way it was in order to express what Blow wanted to express and make it accessible. Platformers are about as accessible as game genres get; 2D side-scrollers even more so, because they give us complete situational awareness without requiring us to control a camera. Similarly, some have suggested that the time abilities should have accrued like a Metroid game, allowing us to use each ability we’ve acquired at any time, but that would have either broken the game or confused us – to say nothing of the complicated control scheme that such a design approach would have mandated.
Braid may or may not be perfect, but it is exceedingly well thought out at every level, and if that’s pretentious, please, let’s have more of it.
Contact Us / About Us / Advertise With Us / BeltwayBlips / TechBlips / MassiveBlips / GamerBlips / FAQ
Subscribe To Edge Magazine / Corrections / Terms & Conditions / Privacy Policy
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Subscribe To Edge Magazine / Corrections / Terms & Conditions / Privacy Policy
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
My reasoning for labeling "Braid" as pretentious: It's inconsistent in a way that tries to "fool" people into believing it's "smart".
A good friend of mine had the opportunity to study creative writing under the late David Foster Wallace. In a candid conversation with my friend, Mr. Wallace revealed to him one of the many secrets of writing that I feel applies to the creative process as a whole. He said something to the effect of this:
"If you write something, and people don't understand it, and they think it's YOUR fault, then you 'suck'. If you can write something, and people don't understand it, and they think it's THEIR fault, then you're a 'genius'."
Specifically, although his prose is not as florid as something written by David Foster Wallace, it's a little too "flowery" for what I consider a Super Mario clone with a time-rewinding mechanic stolen from Prince of Persia. Or to put it another way, the prose, and the hype were a little too great for such a mediocre game. It's not that I don't understand it, I DO understand it. I'm just not that impressed.
To get away with using flowery prose like that, you have to demonstrate the ability to innovate "for real, for real". Braid just didn't do that in my eyes. Of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I decided that the "auteur" in question was full of himself, and "it", a long time ago. In that regard, I guess it didn't really have a fair chance to impress me.
In my eyes, a piece of rope nailed to a board is not art. But to someone else it may be the epitome of art.
If it get's a reaction, it's probably art.
Personally i don't really think of Braid or any other game as 'art' but thats more to do with my negative concept of what makes something 'art' (where people who seem to think they are much smarter than the rest of us throw together a few bits & pieces, give it a 'story' and then tell everyone not to touch it while charging an exorbitant amount of money for it)
I'm only about halfway through Braid but I'm really enjoying it so far. The only real problem i have had with it is that some of the puzzles require a lot of trial and error/blind luck to solve. As an example I spent half an hour yesterday repeatedly trying to run through a level while grabbing a key to try and get to a puzzle piece that was behind a door which was slowly closing. All of this was on one screen and so the 'solution' seemed obvious but after numerous attempts I gave up and continued through the level, only to find a switch which negated the whole problem and made the solution obvious (but only after you knew what the switch did). However most of the other puzzles have been brilliant and have put a big smile on my face when i finally figured them out :)
If you can cry out "it's art" louder than anybody call it out as BS, then it's a win for the person implying an object to be art. Ask people printing soup cans and signing toilets about that. Then sell your art off to a single buyer for a ridiculous amount of money.
Or make 'mass market art' and label some complete waste of time as something better, aimed at "those who truly understand", in an effort to please a guilty conscience. (Theater, Books, Movies).
If you are willing to kill a bystander for your "art" then it's called a religion and if two people consent to kill each other using their "art" then it is called a sport.
Hear, hear. I was actually rather suprised to see the label 'pretentious' being applied to Braid, the word never even crossed my mind as I was playing it. I agree that it's actually pretty useless as a critical term. When you have, for example, the work of such disparate filmmakers as Michael Moore and David Lynch being held up equally as 'pretentious', you've got to question what the term actually means. If you think a particular media product attempts to do something and fails then articulating what the problem is is much more interesting and useful. If you have a gut reaction against something for aesthetic reasons then you can say so. What concerns me is that when people start labeling things as pretentious they are drawing boundaries around what kind of work should and should not be attempted within a particular medium, and that limits our understanding of what, in this instance, video games, can achieve.
I wouldn't claim that Braid itself is pretentious, but would certainly say that Jonathan Blow is. In most of the innumerable interviews I've read or listened to since the game was first previewed, Blow has come across as almost a caricature of the tortured artist, and has engendered an air of pseudo-intellectualism in many of those who have conducted these interviews. Hence the backlash which undoubtedly prompted this editorial.
As for the misuse of the term "pretentious": the author here has employed a cheap rhetorical device (read: "I know you are but what am I") to by implication impugn the intellectual capacity or motivations of those who perceive some art or artists as pretentious. It is not a scientific term, so its use is subjective, but it doesn't require labored thought before it is employed. It sort of falls (like pornography) into the category of "I know it when I see it". A popular, and unsound, defense is: "You just don't understand it". Nonsense.
As I've written elsewhere, every art form has its pretentious creators, pretentious critics, and its pretentious consumers. As video gaming has been elevated to the level of music, film, and other popular art, it is just now starting to produce these players. Braid has amplified this effect.
It's a beautiful little game that shows the way forward.
Pretentious? Well I never played "braid" with that word in my head! I had other issues with it. Here is what I wrote about it a while ago :
" If you read the reviews for this game you might be forgiven for thinking that God himself had descended from the skies and possessed game designer Jonathan Blow’s brain for a while such was the praise and adoring worship of the game and its design. I’m not disputing its quality but, as a puzzle game, it falls into a few design traps.
For instance, it doesn’t attempt to address or adapt to the player’s intelligence or patience at anytime so, unless you possess a lot of patience, have an above average IQ and have a lot of spare time on your hands, you are likely to become very frustrated and annoyed before the game is even 50% complete. There is no hint or help system in place or player customisation to guide you through the mundane tasks of experimentation so if you get stuck, too bad!
I heard there was a fantastic and original ending: too bad that I won’t get to see it because I am obviously not patient or intelligent enough. For the chosen "few" who reached the end, well done: I don’t mind looking up to you but perhaps you could warn me to stay away next time before I fork out the money? "
I may be totally unromantic or cold, but one of the things I enjoy with the gaming industry is that it has no need to be proclaimed art by anyone.
Many good videogames have the kind of art that decadent wannabes today just dream about - the art of something skillful. To me, a lot of the so called art today is nothing but crap. Even if I dig into my most deep and emotional brain cell I can never feel touched when I look at a Kandinsky painting. Nor can I listen through a Björk album and pretend like it is half the wonder of what a Beethoven symhony is.
However when I come across the technological marvels of certain video games like the view of Jerusalem in Assassin's Creed (although it wasn't my favorite game) it doesn't take much for me to get astonished. The storylines alone of video games are not exactly Shakespeare, but combined with the overall expression of what some only perceive as dead polygons they add upp to something far more memorable than what the cultural elite considers art today.
In a way, videogames today are what art was before it all became too absurd to be enjoyable. I think that if Michelangelo or Monet were alive today they would consider some of the visual art in videogames more touching than modern paintings.
So to get to some kind of point, I think that the only thing needed to separate an artful game from a non-artful one is quality of content. Pretentious or not, if the game is not good it will pierce through whatever emotion the creator want to get through. The art of technology and skill should not be looked past.
great article. i particularly enjoyed the remark about people who are quick to use the word 'pretentious' and how it actually tells us more about them than anything else.
I recently showed Braid to a friend of mine. When he read the dialog and saw the execution of the game he couldn't stop laughing. He thought it was a very very funny joke. He wasn't trying to be ironic, he seriously thought it was a great joke spoofing the idea of 'games-as-art' pretentiousness.
Is Braid pretentious? I think so, but that's ok. It's attempting to be serious, which is nice, and it's sparking dialog which is nice.
However, just because Braid proclaims itself as art very loudly, doesn't mean that there haven't already been tons of games just as meaningful.
Braid represents something good. It's an indie game with artistic aspirations. We need more games like that. However, it seems to be a success more cos of its marketability than its actual quality.
There are lots of other indie games out there just as deserving of attention, but those games will never get into most gamers hands cos they are made by humble people who don't know or even want to promote themselves.
The lesson to learn with Braid is that indie developers need to do better marketing. They can't be afraid to talk themselves up. The next generation of gaming is not graphics or storytelling, it's marketing to an audience that's larger and more diverse than ever.