‘Pretentious’ is a word that gets wheeled out an awful lot by people who simply don’t want to look into something enough to understand it. You didn’t really get that film you just watched? Call it pretentious. Can’t figure out what the person who wrote the book you’re reading is going on about? Must be because it’s so pretentious. It’s a lazy, thoughtless response that deserves to be made fun of.
But, at the same time, people use this argument in turn to make it sound as if ‘pretentious’ has no meaning. If anyone calls a piece of art out as full of itself, whether it’s a book, film, game or anything else, the moment they say ‘pretentious’ they’re accused of using words they don’t understand. This is just as lazy, with people dismissing any argument they don’t like the sound of because the person making it summed it up with a label that’s easily abused.
And at the end of all this, you come out a better person. (And in the game!)
It’s perfectly okay to call something pretentious if you can back it up with reasons why you feel that way. So let’s have a go: indie developer Jonathan Blow’s time-stretching platformer Braid is really, really pretentious. It’s not exactly the Emperor’s New Clothes – there are plenty of moments of absolute genius in there – but it’s a collection of scattered ideas, not a game that comes together into a solid whole. And whatever Blow thinks he’s saying, there’s no message in there beyond empty soundbites, the kind of thing people take as deep wisdom because they can read absolutely anything into it.
“But hang on,” people say. “You can’t call a work of art pretentious if you don’t know what the creator meant by it.” Rubbish. If I tip some paint on a canvas and go around telling everyone I meet it’s a potent message on the prospects for world peace in the next century, that’s pretentious. I could have designed it using a complicated system where every splotch of colour meant something and it’d still be pretentious. I could have a degree in political science and that wouldn’t change anything.
Uh... yeah. Let me get back to you on that one.
If we’re being pedantic (and I am) pretentious just means to claim you’ve made something important. (The idea you don’t deserve to be able to say that comes afterwards.) It’s fairly easy to argue Blow does this: he’s spoken repeatedly in interviews about the lamentable state of the games industry and what he’d like to do about it. That’s not what I’m interested in getting at. So how does Braid claim to be important? Well, personally, if I see a work of art (play a game, read a book, whatever) and it repeatedly hits me over the head with a symbol of some kind – if the same visual or audio cues turn up over and over – I tend to figure the people who made it want me to notice that.
If it goes further than that, and talks about these things too, at length, I start to think I might be onto something. When Braid revolves around manipulating time, and then it wants me to read lengthy bits of prose about some hypothetical relationship, talking about growing up and thinking about the past, it’s not hard to think you know where this is going. Only it isn’t. Yes, yes, I know how the game ends, but tell me, seriously, what is Braid about? What’s the story behind the books between every world? If you’ve got an answer, is it something you actually saw while you were playing – and not just something you’ve read in an interview with our good Mr. Blow, or similar?
Off in the clouds. Is that saying something, maybe?
It’s not that I want everything clearly spelt out for me. Some of my favourite films ever are arthouse movies where very little happens on screen, and it’s up to the viewer to piece together an idea of what the director wanted to say. But there needs to be a framework to start with, something people can build those ideas on. Blow doesn’t give you any such thing – vague platitudes about maturity, regret and so on aren’t a framework. They’re just betting people want to fill in the gaps with their own ideas rather than ask you about yours.
And when there’s no real sense to be had out of the story, you start to think about how sketchy the game is; how there’s no real feeling of progression, or sense you’re actually learning anything. This is skirting even further into personal taste, obviously, but I never got any ‘Aha!’ moment from Braid. I do play puzzle games – I know what it feels like when the answer just clicks. All Braid ever got me feeling was disgust it took me so long.
Oh, I know this! This is meta, right? It works on so many levels!
Again, some of this is me not being as smart as Jonathan Blow or his fans, I’m sure, but the ending left me convinced it wasn’t just that. I didn’t get the ending under my own steam – I’d finally finished all the worlds, so there had to be something waiting for me, right…? Few games have ever made me feel quite so much nuclear-powered rage as when I realised I was expected to get every. Single. Jigsaw piece in Braid to see any ending at all. Would people honestly have loved the first Portal so much if GlaDOS’ chamber stayed locked until you’d beaten every single challenge in the game?
I repeat, you see utter genius on display all the way through Braid. The moment you first hit rewind sticks with you for, well, forever and when you understand how a puzzle works it’s hard not to feel awed by the guy who thought of it. But that doesn’t mean it’s the greatest game in years, any more than randomly flashing LOVE and TIME and MARRIAGE in my face makes its story (such as it is) one for the ages. Jonathan Blow is the kind of guy videogames need more of, I’d agree with that much. But I’d call his first game a missed opportunity more than the shining light in a dark and lifeless industry everyone says it is. Either way, here’s hoping for his second title – The Witness – he’s resolved to try harder.
I don’t know if I feel that the game itself is pretentious, but I definitely feel that many of it’s fan clearly are. They are the same pricks who tell you that the reason you disagree with them about film, music, etc is because you simply aren’t as smart as them and therefore you don’t understand.
While there definitely should be more Jonathon Blows in the industry, we need less hipster fanboys.
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Catwo0d (April 21st, 2011)
Braid was an interesting one. For a game with such a personal and human story, its construction was so, so clinical. I loved the hell out of it, and struggled to find any significant flaws, except for the fact that it lacked that little spark of something that would have tipped it from exceptional puzzle game into undeniable classic.
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Lewis Denby (April 21st, 2011)
I really never understood the furore surrounding Braid’s “deep and meaningful” narrative. As Lewis says, it’s an excellent puzzle game, but I found that this underpinning story that supposedly makes you question this, that and the other about life, was, as you say, a little pretentious. Fair enough maybe I just didn’t get it, whatever ‘it’ may be. Still enjoyed the game all the same. Great piece, by the way, really enjoyed it.
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Ally Doig (April 21st, 2011)
I think it is definitely a classic. And yes, the story may have a touch of pretension about it, but at least it’s trying to do something different. It’s definitely in my top ten games of the last decade, a list which is primarily dominated by Valve games.
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Saul Alexander (April 22nd, 2011)
Compare with Limbo, for example. A similarly artful puzzle-platformer, but one whose narrative subtlety gave it a much more human touch than Braid, which made it – for my money – a stronger game.
If we’re doing silly numbers, Braid is a very strong 9 out of 10 for me. Limbo’s full marks.
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Lewis Denby (April 22nd, 2011)
While I don’t really consider myself especially deep-thinking, and I didn’t find anything particularly meaningful about most of the story, I did really like the absolutely tiny hidden story at the end, after you find 7 of the 8 secret stars.
I very much love that it attempted to tie you – you, personally, the game player – into the story & its lesson, but only if you were willing to obsess about the game as much as Tim obsessed about all the different things he obsessed about.
The lesson was that your obsession can cause you to destroy the things that you love. It suggests not to waste too much time wanting things you can’t have. It applies to love, war, candy, and video games. As well as other things I suppose! These stories are braided together because the lesson is exactly the same between them.
To me, most of the story really only served two purposes – to warn you about the danger surrounding the things which you haven’t found yet, and to also make you curious about them.
When I first played through, the story just utterly confused me though, and it still does, I’m sure there’s plenty about it I don’t understand. But then, the very last block of text in the game suggests that Tim was more confused than ever as well – so I like to figure, I probably shouldn’t obsess over it too much.
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tyroie (April 23rd, 2011)