“A Higher Standard”
The pc version of Braid was finally released, and I’m enjoying it so far (I don’t have an xbox, and I bought it yesterday, so “so far” doesn’t mean very far). I found this old interview with Jonathan Blow, the game’s designer, and it pleasantly defied several of my long-standing prejudices: it’s on mtv.com, a site I’ve never visited but always assumed was crap, and it’s about games, but it isn’t banal.
You should just read the whole thing, but there are a few things I’d like to point out. One is an interesting game mechanics idea that Jonathan says he abandoned for being insufficiently deep (something similar might be in the final game; I don’t know, I haven’t played it through, and this interview is from 2007):
For example, one of the ideas I wanted to explore was the fact that, when you look at the rules of quantum mechanics, there is no arrow of time; whether time goes forward or it goes backward, things follow the same rules. That is a weird existential problem, because if you really take it to heart, what does it mean for your daily existence? I wanted to try and make some gameplay that explored that idea, but the best things I could come up with were relatively weak. So for example, when you go to the No Arrow of Time World, you need to get from one end of the level to the other, but in order for that path to be valid, you need to be able to retrace your steps backwards. One way for this design to work would just be to do it with the normal player controls, which means the player when traveling forward would have to choose a path where he never fell from a height higher than he can jump — otherwise that path is invalid in the other direction, and he fails. Another way to do it is, for that world, to give him a powered jump, where you hold down the jump button for a while, and the duration you hold it down controls the height of your jump; so if you fall a long way on the way forward, you need to powered-jump that on the way backward.
That could be a little interesting but in general this idea did not seem too deep, so I just never pursued it.
Someone made a proof-of-concept game called Jump on Mushrooms, a Mario clone, based on this very concept. It’s interesting (and, I daresay, not in the least bit shallow — it’s an important fact about reality), and if I were more talented I’d take the idea and run with it.
Then there’s this great bit about games as escapism:
Saying “games are about escapism” is a nearly content-free statement; it just provides some kind of pat answer so that you don’t have to look any further into the subject. But it’s obviously, at its core, woefully incomplete, and I think people who really understand games know this implicitly. For example, movies and books provide escapism too. So if games are about escapism, then how are they different from movies or books? Why would anyone ever play a game, if they play games to escape, but they can escape with movies or books instead? Those things are way cheaper! The answer of course is some people like games better, or want to play them sometimes, but what that really means is that what they get out of games is different from what they get out of a movie or a book. And of course you have a good idea what those things are, since you are very familiar with the medium of games. But even for someone who doesn’t understand games, it should be clear that if people get things out of games different from other media, then those things obviously can’t be pure escapism. They must be something else. (…)
Games let us author experiences. I can give you a game about something in reality. Maybe it’s about driving a car, in which case you come to understand a little more about it than you would get from a book (though not necessarily as well in some areas as others; the video game would not be as good at communicating the feeling in your body of being accelerated). The driving-ness that you get from the game version of driving is different from the real version; but it is its own thing that is there. That’s what that game has to communicate to you.
Imagine a future where you have that driving-ness experience for a whole wealth of things — geopolitical negotiations, or marital infidelity and deceit, or calculus. And you didn’t get that by running a bunch of tedious programs in school, but rather, by engaging in activities created by skilled authors, that were compelling in their own right? If everyone had the same intimate understanding of propaganda dissemination as they do of the way buddy cops interact in buddy cop films, would we be at war in Iraq? Who would be President of the USA right now? etc.
And finally, a bit of life philosophy that nicely ties in with the Camus quote from the other day:
From a very early age I was determined to find out the truth about life, and not to accept living for lesser things. Even when very young, as a relatively smart kid, you can look around and see that a bunch of what all these adults are doing is pretty stupid — and because you’re so detached from it, you’re not yet enmeshed in that adult world, the lameness is even more obvious. That made a huge impression on me. The problem is that if you refuse to accept easy answers, if you keep digging and insisting on understanding the truth, it becomes very difficult to exist. Because people only manage to get by in their lives, from day to day, by being at least a little bit stupid, by not thinking about this or that; because if they really cared about the answers to certain things, everything would fall apart. At some time in my early twenties I made a deal with myself, that I would let this relentless truth-seeking part of me go inside for a while, so that I would be able to exist and not go crazy; and maybe it could come out sometime in the future, when I would know better how to pursue the truth, and when, maybe, I would be emotionally strong enough to keep going.
Jonathan Blow, even if he’d never created a game, sounds like someone we should listen to. As I said, I recommend reading the whole interview.
