Is Braid great art?
After much delay, I finally did myself the favour of playing Braid. I’m always skeptical when people lavish too much praise on a game, because such titles tend to disappoint by not living up to the hype; but Braid isn’t really like that. It’s beautiful, it’s clever, it’s heart-wrenching at times. I loved it.
Yet, it is over-hyped. It was impossible to go on all these years after its release without constantly coming across Braid in the critical blogosphere. Together with Flower and Ico, it has become one of the favourite pieces of evidence for the “games are art” bunch. And in that respect I found it lacking.
(Minor spoilers for Braid ahead, as well as a big one for Shadow of the Colossus.)
To me, Braid is a very cool package of expressive visuals, hauntingly beautiful music and a thought-provoking story. The way the game plays, with its constantly evolving mechanics that never grow stale, was mostly fine for my taste, although it was a bit too hard in places. Overall a very strong offering and quite deserving of praise.
But art good enough to rival the best other art forms have to offer? I don’t think so.
Great art?
A lot has been said about the meaning of Braid’s mechanics and the way its levels play out. One example is the “Donkey Kong” level. In it, what — to me — look like pinecones with faces run down several tilted platforms in a level layout reminiscent of the iconic Nintendo classic. Tim, the game’s apparent protagonist, has to go through that level multiple times, but in each iteration time behaves differently. On one occasion it stops when Tim stops, moves forward when he goes to the right and backward when he goes to the left. The setup is inspired by quantum mechanics, which state that time has to abide by the same rules regardless of the direction it runs in.
The reason this link to quantum physics is known to us is that creator Jonathan Blow has said it exists. I doubt that anybody would have been able to take away that relation from simply looking at how the level works. And that is why I think Braid is fine, but not great.
Art is always inspired by something, but the best works of art don’t require their creators to make the inspiration explicit so that it can be appreciated by the public. A masterpiece is able to communicate something that has stirred its creator to other people in a manner that stirs them as well. Braid achieves that in the way it looks and sounds and through the story it tells, but not through its mechanics. The actual game bit in the whole experience is the part that is by farthest removed from being art.
Great art.
Consider for instance Francisco Goya’s The Shootings of May Third 1808. It was painted as a commemoration of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s occupation of the country. It’s about war and horror, and perhaps heroism. But you don’t need to know all those details in order to understand it and feel the impact of its emotional force. All you have to do is look at it and it’s all there.
At the beginning of Braid we learn that Tim has made a mistake. The obstacles he has to overcome on his quest to find the Princess can be seen as penance for that mistake. However, we never know what the mistake was. I’m not advocating being literal, but this knowledge is important — I think — for the understanding of what is going on. Is Tim being punished too hard or unfairly? Is he simply getting what he called for?
The figure of a devastated protagonist who is doing the wrong things is used to a much better effect in a game like Shadow of the Colossus. Realising the gravity of Wander’s mistake at the end of the game unleashes a veritable volcano of emotions, the stronger because the player, by controlling Wander, has become complicit in his crime.
It will be some time before the “are games art” issue is finally settled and some games are really taking great strides towards recognition. Braid is a very good platformer, but it isn’t one of those games.
Tue | 19.07.11
[...] Dilyan at split/screen co-op thinks we’ve been too generous to dear ol’ Braid. [...]
Tue | 19.07.11
SPOILERS
“A masterpiece is able to communicate something that has stirred its creator to other people in a manner that stirs them as well. Braid achieves that in the way it looks and sounds and through the story it tells, but not through its mechanics. The actual game bit in the whole experience is the part that is by farthest removed from being art.”
No. The mechanics actually communicate a deeper truth much more elegantly than the visuals or awkward prose does. The final level, which turns the protagonist from hero into villain, does so by turning the time-reversal mechanic on its head. The game turns out to have been about the problem of perspective (we see ourselves as the hero in games and in love) and the impossibility of turning back the clock or solving an intractable problem (the fact that the “princess” found someone else).
The game (for me) is a metaphor for the end of a relationship. The game mechanics both reference the way Tim tries to retro-actively fix what is broken beyond repair and the way games teach us that all of life’s problems can be solved if we just fight hard enough. Turns out, in reality, sometimes ALL the castles are empty, and Mario is a creepy stalker.
So no, it’s not true that “The obstacles he has to overcome on his quest to find the Princess can be seen as penance for that mistake”; rather, the quest itself compounds and aggravates Tim’s initial error, before he realises the truth at the very last moment of the game.
Thus, I can repurpose your thoughts about Wander almost exactly: “Realising the gravity of Tim’s mistake at the end of the game unleashes a veritable volcano of emotions, the stronger because the player, by controlling Tim, has become complicit in his crime.” The fact that Braid didn’t elicit these feelings in you hardly disqualifies the game from being art – surely you’re not arguing that a work should bring about the same reaction in everybody before it can be considered art.
Tue | 19.07.11
@Marijn Hm, I never really thought about it that way. I can see your point. I believe you will understand if I am loath to just forget all my objections; but I can see that there are more that one ways to interpret the mechanics of the game.
Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree that if Braid’s mechanics ever come close to great art, it is in the final world. The reversal of perspective you are talking about was something that really packed an emotional punch and that I (unjustly, in hindsight) ignored in my post.
I just want to make it perfectly clear that I liked the game very much and I *do* in fact think it is art. I just thought other games are better deserving to be our standards as we quest for recognition. But your perspective is certainly a valid one. Pity that I so rarely come across arguments as persuasive as yours.
Thanks for stopping by.
EDIT: Having considered your argument, I agree that the final world in Braid is a pinnacle of storytelling through pure mechanics. I would say it qualifies as great art. This does not change my opinion that for most of the rest of the game, the actual game bit remains separated from the story by virtue of being far less impactful.
Thu | 21.07.11
Well, thank YOU for writing this article in the first place. It’s great revisiting why I loved the game so much.
Thu | 21.07.11
I’d have to agree with what Marjin said about the mechanics. Very few games manage to tell a story with the mechanics alone but Braid not only tells it but basically makes the climax rely purely on the mechanics instead of a cutscene (as so many games do).
Also I’d like to add a bit about the visuals. While they don’t ‘tell a story’ all by themselves, like a great painting, they combine with the music to create such a serene atmosphere and also add to the mise en scene of the game: creating a sense of innocence, reminiscent of other platformers. This sense of innocence is then subverted by the ending. When the plot twist is revealed.
Great article though. Thanks for writing it.
Mon | 25.07.11
Have you read the exposition of Braid as involving Oppenheimer? That you get the full emotional impact (initially) of fighting past insurmountable odds to perform a great deed, only to find out that you are, far from being a hero, a monster, while the game’s mechanics are based on the process of experimentation (experiment fucks up, rewind, start again) suits it perfectly to the process of scientific discovery. In fact, Braid is possibly one of the only games that’s been made where your criticism, that surface and deep meaning are not isomorphic, doesn’t hold.