It’s been a decade since Braid arrived on the Xbox 360 and set the video game industry ablaze. A surreal, cerebral, and defiantly retrograde project in an era of triple-A releases, Braid immediately established itself as a buzzy critical darling (and made its creator an instant millionaire).
How did it all happen? In retrospect, Braid was perfectly timed to become an instant benchmark in gaming. As a timed exclusive on the download-only Xbox Live Arcade, it represented an early shift from discs you’d buy at Gamestop to files you’d download onto your console. It was also one of the first and most influential examples of a ongoing boomlet in independently-developed video games—a still-growing market, filled with many games that owe a debt to Braid’s minimalist gameplay and dreamlike visual design. And Braid’s earnest effort to make an artistic statement that went beyond the bloody, visceral, often repetitive first-person shooters that dominated the market made it a game that was championed by the medium’s most forward-thinking critics.
But most memorably of all, there was Jonathan Blow: Braid’s intellectual, highly opinionated, and occasionally very frustrating developer, who brought an inherent seriousness of purpose to an often misunderstood medium. Blow collaborated with others for both Braid and its long-in-the-works followup The Witness, but the success of Braid positioned him as the first true auteur of the modern gaming industry.
And the world responded accordingly. It was uncommon—and remains uncommon—for a video game developer to be profiled in a prestige publication like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. But Blow, having quickly established himself as one of the industry’s big thinkers, offered a path to legitimacy for video gamers—an absurdly lucrative medium that rarely earned serious criticism. Blow also made a tantalizing subject for video game journalists, whose beat was often misunderstood or belittled by non-gaming readers. And it didn’t hurt that he made for great copy, tearing into industry darlings like World of Warcraft and Uncharted with genuinely sharp, incisive criticisms.
Blow’s pet obsessions about gaming are baked into Braid, which is both a video game and a statement about what its creator thinks video games should be. The game casts the player as Tim—a relatively normal-looking dude, for a video game protagonist, who wears a suit that codes him as prep-school boy or a businessman or maybe both. Braid is a sidescroller—the genre popularized by the original Super Mario Bros.—and Tim runs around the game’s 38 levels, jumping on enemies and collecting puzzle pieces. The key gameplay hook in Braid is that Tim can reverse time. If you bump into an enemy or fall into a spike pit, you can hold a button and rewind for as long as you like. Death is impossible. Instead, the challenge comes from using Tim’s power—and contending with the new wrinkles introduced in each level—to solve the game’s fiendishly difficult puzzles. (If you’re interested in digging into the gameplay mechanics of Braid in more detail, I highly recommend this video by critic Mark Brown, which delves into Blow’s unique method for designing a puzzle.)
Early on, Braid tells you that Tim is trying to find a princess. Each level opens with a row of books for the player to read, which offer a short, thematically appropriate vignette to meditate upon while you solve puzzles. But the story doesn’t really come alive until the climax.
The biggest moment in Braid—the one that pushes it from an unusually artful puzzler into a game that feels like it has Something to Say—arrives at the very end, when Tim finally finds the princess. He rushes forward, evading traps as she flees her burly captor above him. But when Tim finally reaches the princess, something weird happens: The game begins to rewind again. And as the whole sequence plays out again in "reverse," it becomes clear that the princess has actually been fleeing Tim, with the help of the "captor," all along—setting up traps in a desperate effort to keep him from reaching her.
This is hard to describe in prose, but trust me: It makes a big impact when you’re playing it in real time. It’s still, ten years later, one of the great twists in video game history. But what does it means? Many players walk away with some version of the most straightforward explanation for Braid’s ending: that Tim’s seemingly noble quest for the princess was a statement about toxic masculinity—maybe an elaborate metaphor for the lies an abusive boyfriend tells himself, or the self-mythologizing delusions of an obsessive man pursuing a woman who isn’t interested.
For what it’s worth, Jonathan Blow bristles at the toxic masculinity stuff as a fundamental misreading of the game—and if you dig into the game a little deeper, another meaning does present itself. An ominous flash of light and a stray quote from the Trinity test seem to recast the entire game as a metaphor for the creation of the atomic bomb. In this reading, the princess is the bomb, and Tim as an Oppenheimer-like figure, suddenly horrified by the realization of what he so desperately and foolishly pursued.
I think that interpretation is closer to what Blow intended, though you can plumb extra, Matryoshka Doll-level layers of nested meanings if you’re so inclined. (It’s certainly possible that the bomb, like the princess, is a metaphor for something else.) But the fundamental obscurity of the climax is one of Braid’s most interesting contradictions. Blow says he created the game to communicate a message—a message "important enough to me that I spent three and a half years of my life trying to express it." He’s also the guy who—having successfully captured an audience’s attention with a very good game, and earned a platform to stand on—staunchly refuses to explain what the game’s message is supposed to be, even as he criticizes those who he says don’t grasp it.
That might sound like criticism, but it’s not. Blow’s disdain for taking the easy route is one of his most consistent and admirable qualities as a developer. He expects the player to solve all of his puzzles. The actual meaning of his story is clearly one of those puzzles—and, given that it comes at the climax, maybe the most important one of all.
But at the risk of inciting the rage of Jonathan Blow, I still think the straightforward explanation for Braid is richer and more fully developed than the more complicated one he seems to prefer. As an elaborate allegory for the creation of the atomic bomb—or maybe for the heavy price that can come with acquiring any knowledge, with the bomb as a metaphor—Braid is needlessly coy. But as a metaphor for the way video games often infantilize female characters, robbing them of their agency—and, by extension, the way male gamers might imagine themselves as the heroes of stories in which their actions are actually selfish or deluded or even harmful—Braid’s story feels even more potent today. If Braid had come just a little later, it would probably have been read by many as a meta-commentary on the Gamergate movement.
Braid also plays more convincingly as a deconstruction of video games and video gamers because those themes aren’t tacked on in a coda at the end; they’re rooted in the gameplay itself. Part of the reason Braid is able to explore so many heady little detours is because the mechanics themselves are based on the widely beloved, famously accessible Super Mario Bros.. On the surface, Tim’s quest is functionally identical to Mario’s: travel through surreal landscapes, overcome bizarre challenges, and press on despite the friendly ally who appears at the end of every level to caution that the princess is in another castle. Your knowledge of the Mario formula is no small part of the reason that Braid’s climax has such a haunting, subversive impact. It’s potent enough that Blow employed a version of the same trick for his Braid followup, The Witness, which borrows heavily from the PC gaming landmark Myst.
If Blow really wants to establish that video games are an independent art form, the interior self-reflectiveness of his games—which remix, wink at, and challenge the key elements of the iconic video games that came before—are a key step in the process. But postmodernism also tends to reject singular and straightforward readings, and Blow’s strident obsession with telling gamers they have misunderstood Braid strikes me as the key flaw in his grand artistic statement. By over-explaining his work, Blow does a disservice to the thing that separates video games from every other medium: the individuality of the player’s experience.
More than any other artistic medium, game developers need to become comfortable with the idea that gamers won’t play their games as intended. Unlike a movie or a TV show—in which every viewer has an individual experience of a fixed, unchanging work of art—every player approaches a game differently. We’re deep into the era of speed-running, when experts exploit a wide range of glitches to complete games much, much faster than developers could have intended. Video game plots tend to be more straightforward, but morality systems, dialogue trees, and optional side-quests and pickups ensure that many players will finish the same game with a dramatically different understanding of its story. If Braid has one correct meaning, it’s in defiance of the medium itself. And if you’re going to challenge players to find the answers for themselves, you need to accept that they might walk away with answers you never intended.