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.