BRETT MCCALLON | AT PLAY | August 24th 2008

"Braid"

The element of time--thrilling, oppressive--has long been a feature of videogames. But what happens when we we have the power to move time backwards? Undo decisions? Some daring new designers, such as Jonathan Blow, are letting us find out ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Different media have different strengths. We go to novels for the way they can explore a character's inner life; we choose films for their visceral urgency. A great war film can convey the pure terror and chaos of the battlefield in a way that "War and Peace" never could for me. When it comes to videogames (despite the strengths and weaknesses of the artistic medium), some of the most interesting developments have been in creating complex new relationships between players, game worlds and the flow of time.

Anyone who has ever played a game knows the extra thrill of working within a time limit.  "Super Mario Brothers", a Nintendo classic, forced players to reach the next level within set minutes--jumping platforms and dodging wily turtles along the way. Arcade racers, such as "Pole Position", used a countdown clock to add urgency to the race (and to impel a steady flow of quarters plunking into the machines, of course).

The 1990s brought more a complex use of time in videogames. For example "The Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time"--viewed by many as the finest game ever made--began from the perspective of a child and then skipped to the character as an adult. The childhood portion served essentially as an extended tutorial in the game's complex rules, while the adult portion was the main adventure. 

As gaming technology has advanced, designers have started to let players take some control over the flow of time. Though such mechanics can quickly become overused, they have provided some of the best "oh wow" moments for gamers in the past decade or so.

One of the most notable and imitated uses of time-manipulation was introduced in the hit game "Max Payne" (pictured below). With a quick button-press, players could send the titular character into a dive that slowed down the entire game. This meant that players could fly into a room and slay goons with an accuracy that would have been impossible at full speed. When the game returned to real-time, the player could watch the results of his handiwork, as his former enemies crumpled to the ground or flew into walls. Though the term attached to this mechanic--"bullet time"--was originally used to describe the 360-degreee, slow-motion fights that thrilled audiences of the "Matrix" films, the most direct cinematic antecedent of "Max Payne" were the "bullet ballet" films of John Woo in his Hong Kong heyday. Anyone who has seen Chow Yun Fat in "The Killer" or "Hard Boiled" knows just how cool this is.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long after "Max Payne"'s debut for "bullet time" to become ubiquitous in action games. By the time Midway got around to releasing an authorised John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat game based on this idea, it had lost nearly all of its cachet.

The next big time-control innovation let players move time backwards. In a rather mediocre series called "Blinx", and then in the popular revival of the classic "Prince of Persia" series, the games let players rewind to a few seconds before a miscalculated action--a missed leap or a crushing blow. In the case of the "Prince of Persia" games, this feature encouraged players to take bigger risks and attempt more complex acrobatic manoeuvres. After all, there were few real consequences for a bad move. (If only such a feature could be had in real life.) 

By removing some of the frustration of a slight miscalculation, designers found that they were free to create much more challenging and interesting puzzles. And this brings us to the latest game to toy with time: Jonathan Blow's beautifully complex "Braid" (pictured at top).

Blow is a very clever, very outspoken game designer, who seems to believe that most of the industry's output is on the wrong track. Initially, "Braid" (available through the Xbox 360's "Live Arcade" download service for $15) seems simple. As in most platform games, in which the aim is to progress through different levels, the player can move in either direction on a horizontal plane, and can jump to higher elevations. But this game has another big feature: the "rewind" button. Like the earlier games, this input allows players to erase the effect of an action. But in "Braid" this power is essentially unlimited. At any point the player can rewind all of the time that has passed in a given level. Moreover, "Braid" does away with the convention of "death", since players can simply undo any fatal decision (even when pounced on by a rabid bunny, which happens weirdly often).

But what is essential about the elasticity of time in "Braid" is how it has enabled Blow to create an elegant series of complicated puzzles, which build logically upon each other.  The result is gameplay situations that remain new and fresh throughout each level of the game.

The game's design becomes more impressive with each succeeding world. Blow sometimes returns to an idea, only to subvert what the player learned earlier. For example (spoiler alert): in the first world, the player encounters a level where he must jump on the heads of a number of creatures in order to open a door. The puzzle here is simple--it turns out that the player must skip one of the creatures on the way up, in order to use that creature as a springboard to reach yet another target. Several worlds later, the player finds himself in an environment where his rightward movements advance the game forward through time, while leftward moves reverse time (for example, a player could move rightward and eliminate a creature, only to move left and find that creature resurrected, because it is suddenly the moment before it was eliminated). This results in a complex series of limited rightward and leftward movements, as the player tries to ensure that he isn't negating his earlier progress.

As I seem to have made clear, the solutions to the puzzles of "Braid" are very difficult to describe and explain. Shawn Elliott of 1up.com suggests that this may be part of Blow's design--after all, his favourite film is "Mulholland Drive", David Lynch's compellingly incomprehensible masterpiece. The game's narrative even alludes to the quantum mechanics of the Manhattan Project. Perhaps Blow's game is intended to simulate the "a-ha" experience of piecing together Lynch's remarkable, unfinished puzzle, or the cognitive leaps of a scientist dealing with the ineffable behaviours of the invisible. 

Unfortunately, Blow ties his game together with a clunky third-person narration, told through a series of books scattered throughout the game. (Blow's narrative skills aren't nearly as impressive as his mastery of game design.) But it is easy to overlook this amid the pleasures of solving a particularly complicated puzzle, or while reaching the game's smart climax, which is as impressive to experience as it is difficult to explain.  

In the final level of "Braid", the time-reversal feature enables the kind of self-revelation that takes most of us a lifetime to achieve. Suffice it to say (without spoiling it) that the hero's quest, when reversed, becomes something altogether less noble; from another character's perspective, he's not the hero at all. It is as if players embody the young, headstrong protagonist throughout most of the game, only to finish the puzzle reflecting on that young man's hubris. The sophistication of years comes in mere hours of gameplay.

Regardless of Blow's penchant for overreaching, "Braid" is a very cleverly designed game. It provides just enough hints about the next layer of complexity to keep both novice and experienced players engaged (though some disagree). Videogames may not yet be able to convey emotional depth, but the medium is breaking new ground when it comes to toying with our perception of time and its otherwise confounding limitations. 

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was "Shall We Play A Game?")