As it comes to no one’s surprise…I was in graduate school for the past 2 years of my life. I acquired a MA in Art History with an emphasis in Digital Media and Video Game Studies. I wrote my thesis on the indie digital title Braid developed by Jonathan Blow. Since you are all gaming fans, I figured I would share with you a bit of my research which hopefully will give you a better idea of what my research interests are.
Below you will find an abstract of the overall thesis and a snippet of a paper I presented at the graduate symposium this past year. I hope you like it and PLEASE….don’t be afraid to ask me questions.
Abstract
Many video game designers today employ an architected design philosophy focused on realizing a preconceived vision. This approach frequented by a small number of game designers often births “art games”: games designed to underscore artistic expression. An “art game’s” structure is intended to yield some kind of reaction in its audience by affecting players and reformulating their understanding of the medium in multitudes – not only the fun of the game but also the message of the game. This thesis specifically analyzes the indie downloadable software title Braid, designed by Jonathan Blow within the context of “art games”. By re-contextualizing Braid within the paradigms of “art games” and by framing it around a procedural methodology, this thesis extends the discussion of artistic value to video games by dealing with the medium at its foundation: the algorithmic procedures that make them. For Braid’s sake, an analysis of these procedures create an understanding in the ways in which Braid privileges spatio-temporal challenges and engages and perverts procedural operations of a platformer. Thereby irrevocably changing the notion of not what games are, but what games can do.
Excerpt
“Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness”
The title Braid emblazons the sky in juxtaposition with a reddened cityscape. A soft and mysterious melody can be heard heightening curiosity as the player is given immediate control over a tiny-silhouetted figure. As the player begins to maneuver the figure to the right by walking over a silhouetted bridge, he/she is (re) introduced to the basic concept of movement by text that appears, instructing them to “Use the ARROW keys to move.” This basic movement found within a two-dimensional platformer provides familiarity for the player, provoking he/she to continue in order to reveal who they are actually controlling. Soon thereafter, the silhouetted figure emerges from the shadows and is revealed to be a man named Tim: a redheaded man dressed in formal wear that is similar in size and shape to the iconic video game hero Mario. As these connections are made, the player continues into a house, assumed to be Tim’s. With only one place to go, the player enters into a door that is marked as “World 2”. It is here where the player & Tim begin to unfold the protagonist’s story: to rescue a princess from a monster.
When Braid, designed by Jonathan Blow, debuted in August of 2008, no one had experienced a video game quite like it. This was due to its prolific nature in coherently negotiating within the imposed parameters of the designed system. Unlike Braid, most video game title screens are just like DVD menus. They show the title, usually a kind of collage or splash imagery and present a list of choices: play, select chapter, setting configuration, etc. Braid deposits the player directly into the game with no explanation, relying on intuition & discovery rather than handholding and exhausting tutorials. With the ability to manipulate time, given at a moments start, You, the player, are Tim.
The player of Braid finds himself or herself immersed into a world filled with beautiful saturated colors, painterly landscapes, imaginative dreamscapes, and a sensational zen-like soundtrack. It aesthetically pushes the conventional style and format of the action video game to the point where it approximates a “breathing painting,” all the while providing an ingenious twist on the classic 2D side-scrolling platformer genre that originated in arcade games and was popularized by the Nintendo Entertainment System console in the 1980s. The game is a visual representation on the nature of causality supplementing notions of time and regret. A meticulously crafted and a continuously engaging game, Braid is more about learning the rules than “saving the princess”; as we have all saved “the princess” in some way or form. The ending sequence is an arresting marriage of interactivity and simple narrative. Jonathan Blow toys with the player by “shifting player intention and proxied embodiment”[1] by suggesting player empathy as well as effortlessly braiding aesthetics, dynamics and mechanics through its algorithms of procedure – the unique language inherent to computers.
In essence, it is through this procedural rhetoric that Braid exhibits artistic valor as an “art game”: a small subcategory of computer games that represent a process, designed to emphasize art or whose structure is intended to produce and demand self-reflexive actions that result in some kind of reaction in its audience. Procedural rhetoric, in Braid’s case, involves the ways in which it privileges spatio-temporal challenges and engages and perverts the procedural operations of a platformer such as time and consequence. Therefore, Jonathan Blow’s Braid becomes a performative intervention persuading the player to rethink what games can be through arbitrary tasks of “trial and error” that reflect the human condition. This implies that “learning doesn’t happen from failure itself but rather from analyzing the failure, making the change, and then trying again.” Braid, thereby, exploits the way humans experience reality, reformulating the way we experience time and narrative through its procedures, which cannot be experienced in any other medium.
Ontologically speaking, video games are software and are described as “algorithmic cultural objects” – algorithms being the step-by-step processes that permit simple and complex computation, and that allow control and exploitation with the promised certainty of reliable outputs. Generally composed of rules, video games mediate experience from an input device (typically a controller) from the hardware/software apparatus to the player.
It is through these rule sets that proceduralism surfaces. Defined by Ian Bogost, it is the moment where a game’s rules are heavily contingent upon play rather than narrative elements, which enables a more emergent play experience rather than a progressive one. In his book Persuasive Games, Bogost argues that the unique meaning-making strategy of games is “procedural rhetoric” – that is, the act of making an expression or argument through a game’s processes or rules. Bogost is especially concerned with the enthymeme, which he traces back to Aristotle. An enthymeme is a rhetorical technique where you present a piece of inferential reasoning but omit one of the premises of that piece of reasoning. For example, the phrase “where there is smoke, there is fire” makes the assumption there is a fire but there is no truth, just deductive reasoning.
Moreover, Bogost proposes that video games are particularly adept at creating procedural enthymemes. As the player interacts with the system of rules by learning to play the game, the player also gains a grasp of the deeper logics that shape its surface logic. These deeper logics can stem into richer understandings of the narrative or the representational/graphic world in which the engagement is staged. This interaction in which these “deeper logics” can emerge is possible through the actual rhetoric of game design: Mechanics (rules), Dynamics (flow of gameplay created by mechanics), and Aesthetics (emotional feeling created by Dynamics).
In Braid, the procedural rhetoric succeeds in being expressive and persuasive simultaneously. The game conveys such themes like time and regret due to the fact that the mechanics of the game are heavily invested in the manipulation of time. The procedure of rewinding time is an operation that is given to the player at the start of Braid and then is utilized in different ways throughout its entirety. Through the procedure of rewinding time, character death is completely avoided. In this way, the player can never “fail” in the traditional platformer sense. There is no total number of lives, no game over screen, and no burden of failure. This incidentally allows the player to recover from every mistake, impacting the way they perceive time and narrative in video games. This established mechanic is built upon over the course of the game through each of Braid’s worlds, with World 4 being of the utmost importance…………
Well that’s all I am going to share here folks. Hope I didn’t bore you too much.
