Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

One of the things keeping me off the blog for the past week was this in-depth interview with Jonathan Blow, designer of one of my games of the year, Braid. Originally planned as a formal AV Club interview, I decided to turn it into a blog post, both to get it out as quickly as I could (we spoke a week ago Monday), and because it doesn’t feel like a full-bore interview. We didn’t talk much about his background, his life, or general things like that; for most of it, we talked about the thinking behind Braid. And as far as I can tell, we went deeper into what the game means than anyone else on the ‘net. The “you broke up with some chick” theory, the “it’s all about the a-bomb” theories all fall by the wayside, and we namecheck a lot of Calvino. Check it out.

One thing that especially got to me about the interview was his implication that many of the interpretations of Braid have, frankly, sucked. It isn’t that people haven’t guessed what he meant by the game; rather, that many people come up with some reading of it and can’t back it up with the facts at hand. Granted, the game is complicated and subtle. Figuring it out is like some hyper-complicated meta-game on top of an already difficult platform-puzzler, and even getting the super-difficult eight stars isn’t enough to get you there. He’s not surprised that nobody’s put it all together yet. But he showed a lot of disdain for the random theories and agendas people have brought to the game. And while he was too polite to say it, my review – where I say how it’s a game about memory, and the fallacy of memory – is the same kind of shot in the dark reading of the game.

When we talk about “game criticism,” we often use it to cover blog posts that go off on some creative tangent using the game as raw material. Some game bloggers love to do that; some of them even brag about not playing the game before they start writing. But can a critique be valid if it doesn’t thoroughly explain the game? I don’t just mean that we need to finish the story. As Blow explains, games are systems. If you don’t deconstruct the system, how can you critique the game? Would you critique a car without taking the engine apart? Maybe we need to look at the algorithms to feel liek we’ve really “gotten” it. And if we don’t go that far, if we know we’re missing some facts and information that could be contradicting our theories, then maybe we’re just fuffing about.

Bummer.

Today I wrote a critical review of the new Fiery Furnaces live album, Remember. It’s the only Furnaces album I haven’t liked. In fact, looking back at my clips, for some reason I’ve reviewed almost every single Furnaces album except Bitter Tea and Widow City.

Gallowsbird’s Bark (Weekly Dig) – No longer online
Blueberry Boat (Pitchforkmedia.com)
Rehearsing My Choir (Paste Magazine)
EP (SF weekly)
“Duplexes of the Dead” (from Widow City) (Pitchforkmedia.com)

I interviewed them around the time they released Blueberry Boat, which you can see here via the Wayback Machine. And by the way, it’s really strange to look back at those old Suicide Girls ads from ‘04 … so much indier than American Apparel.

This weekend I spent maybe half an hour with the new “blockbuster” Too Human. In that short time, I concluded it’s clumsy, not fun and from a narrative standpoint, dismally retarded – the kind of “men at war against some generic fucking thing” game that I’ve pretty much had enough of.

But some people are excited about it. Namely, the posters at places like the Gamespot forums.

Most of the people over on the Too Human forum haven’t played the game – or at best, they’ve played the demo. But some people claim to have played the demo a lot. How many times? To quote spinnah: “I don’t know, at least 20, it might be getting close to 30.” They’re already writing length reviews for each other based on the demo. They are pumped about the game. And they’re attacking anyone who says otherwise.

Makdad88 is optimistic: “let the haters hate. because this game seems like so much fun. i cant wait.” Jesse7150 asks, “Where is the warehouse Too Human games are being held at?”

hocuspokuz thinks we’re all entitled to our opinions. “wtf makes your opinions right over ours? “The controls. Are. Bad.”?! controls are different… and you don’t like them. They aren’t bad, YOU DON’T LIKE THEM. why don’t you go to china and tell them that rice sucks? or go to a Rastafarian tribe and tell them marijuana sucks? “

Here’s a detailed prediction from russdaddy, who has not played the game:

1. Its not the best looking or controlable rpg/action game
2. It WILL offer customization and co-op that no other online rpg can on (360)
3. It will satisfy RPG and action players online and off
4.It wil not satisfy younger generation of game players that have high standards for new games.
5.This game will be Loved and Hated by many but many will still play it and learn to love it.

Pooperdoodle asks, if you already had your hands on the game:

Would you (assuming you already played it a little):

A) Come to this board to say how cool you are for getting the game early, and reveal previously unknown facts about the game,
B) Come to this board to tell us how awful the game is and advising us all not to waste money on it, or
C) Be too busy playing the game to worry about a message board.

I’d go with C.

They’re really upset about some of the early negative or mediocre reviews. GameInformer’s 6.75 rating – which is kinda high, by my standards – took a lot of flak.

Grubbybatsnow uses the “I’m hardcore” argument to justify his opinion:

I’m what you would call an old school gamer, and the controls are good and if you can’t get a grasp of them you do indeed suck.
There is a bit of reprogramming of the old noggin to unlearn the right stick camera mash button syndrome but after you learn it is actually good.

Any reviewer who says otherwise hasn’t put the time in to learn therefore hasn’t put much time into the game so their opinion is void.

Of course, some people just get nasty. For example, from hustlin_pimste:

Omg, you just have no listening skills.

Do YOU want me to go and link to every valid point I have made where I have been either insulted or totally taken out of context?

Because that would take me bloody ages to go through all of them, as it happens on such a regular basis.

Do NOT try an make out you are above all this, as that makes you look like a liar.

Ah screw it, what’s the point … you are just like so many here,deaf to anything that isn’t in your line of thinking.

As soon as the press embargo lifted, the onslaught of negative reviews finally made people start to doubt the game. Which is ironic, because it sounds like most of the people who eagerly awaited it were stirred up by hype and press – and now the press is squelching them. I don’t mean that people shouldn’t get wound up by hype. That’s the point of hype. It’s fun. But I still don’t get the “fanboy mentality” – the loyalty these people show to corporations, and brands. I’ll never understand that.

UPDATE: For some reason I forgot that Mitch Krpata prowls the Gamespot forums regularly for gems like these – you can enjoy his posts here.

I’ve been way underwater the last week, so no posting. But in the meantime, food for thought courtesy of Sun Ra.

From Space is the Place:

Dig Don Cherry and Lester Bowie …

If you play just one clip, make it this one: “Face the Music”

Garth Ennis’ new series The Boys, now at its 21st issue, sets up an alternate reality where superheroes are assholes. The whole “superheroes are actually crazy, oversexed and nasty” thing is not new, but The Boys changed from a curiosity to a significant series with its latest arc, where we learn the history of the superheroes – how they were created and misused by the military industrial complex, trained to put profit over patriotism, and in the latest issue, how they blew it on 9/11.

I have an ongoing interest in the pop culture of 9/11. And one reason it fascinates me is there isn’t much of it out there. The day that changed everything has become the kind of helpless, unfixable mess that launched us into Afghanistan and Iraq and Gitmo and led to a host of problems that the next President is going to have to fix, and by the way, we never did catch Osama. I get the sense that a lot of the kids today don’t think much about 9/11, and they don’t really go out of their way to hear about it in popular records or see references to it in films.

But I got a certain thrill when I saw the cover of The Boys #21. The premise: the Seven, a bunch of corporate-funded dickhead superheroes, try to stop one of the planes on 9/11. And you have a pretty good idea going into the issue that they’re going to fail. Keep smiling there, kid – while you can.

In the alternate reality of The Boys, someone smarter than Bush is President. The CIA knows about the plot to crash planes into the World Trade Center – in fact, they’re tracking seven planes – and on the day, they shoot down six of the seven before they hit their targets. But mysteriously they’re given orders to let one go, and that’s the one that the heroes try to intercept.

It’s tempting to read deep political satire into the comic, but I’m having trouble: after all, Ennis has chosen to put a smarter guy in the White House and to keep the CIA on top of the whole plot, which apparently wasn’t the case in the real world (unless you believe the more outre conspiracy theories). What’s rewarding about the comic is that they play off the tragedy and our familiarity with the events for well-earned shock value. In superhero terms, it’s a compelling story because the heroes fail so terribly. You know how in most books, the characters land in a challenging situation, and they improvise their way through it? And most of the pleasure lies in watching them wing it and come out on top? The Seven try to do that, and everything goes disastrously wrong. It’s probably among the most damning portrayal of superheroes, because they come out so weak and cowardly in the face of such a great need.

The Boys is far from the only comic to address 9/11, and Ex Machina scored a cliffhanger in its first issue by showing one tower still standing; a few years later we get to see the Great Machine literally talking the plane down to the streets of Manhattan, saving that building plus everyone on the plane. But I’ll take The Boys‘ cynicism any day. The biggest tragedy of 9/11 was the widespread fucking up that made it possible. It’s good to see someone still cares about that.

Fatherhood and constant deadlines have kept me out of the movie theater for the past few years. When I see a movie, it’s a rare and well-planned treat, something like taking my kid to see Wall-E as his first film, or catching Children of Men because it just looked too cool to skip.

But I caught three movies this week, and while all of them were pretty good, they didn’t rock my world. But worse, the trailers I sat through before each movie made me really despair for the human race.

All the movies coming out seem to fall into three categories. There are the “I Wish I Could Change My Life” films, where some character who’s scared or repressed or recovering from some kinda trauma finds some way to turn things around and have fun again. Case in point, Yes Man, a Jim Carrey flick about a guy who – get this – spends his life saying “no” to everything, and then decides to say “yes” to everything. High drama! He starts bungee-jumping and staying out all night with his buddies, thanks to Red Bull, which is prominently plugged in the trailer.

Then there’s the “I Wish I Had a Life” films, where teen audiences that should be out raising a ruckus and being young instead slap down $10 a head to watch movies about other people raising a ruckus and being young. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist looks like a movie about totally average kids running around fumbling for ways to make a pass at each other. I could do that for free. And then there’s another one of those college movies where everyone’s having the time of their lives at college. It stars nobody I recognized and is titled College.

I’m not razzed that the movies looked so stupid. I was just amazed that the movies – or at least, the trailers – had so neatly found some need or aspiration in the hearts of the audience and then promised, “We will make up for it.” I’m bored with life. I never do anything. I wish I were having a great Saturday night. These aren’t just feel-good movies: they’re targeted medicines, like getting different brands of aspirin for migraine or backache, one film for a wasted, confused adolesence, another for a middle-ager who wishes they had the guts to try golf.

There’s a third kind of film coming out of Hollywood, and it’s all people beating the crap out of each other. That’s where I went this week: Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Pineapple Express. Pineapple Express claims it’s a stoner film that you can enjoy straight, but don’t believe them: without a few tokes, it falls short of “hilarious.” The Dark Knight was about a year too long, and I was surprised how far to the right of Dick Cheney it fell; in fact, listen to that last monologue and try to hear it as a defense of the Cheney years during the War on Terror, and see if you’re still up for a sequel.

My favorite of the week was definitely Iron Man. It was sorta silly and the villain was awful, but I believed the character and the origin story was fun. Of course, they didn’t quite give the punchline of the movie’s big joke: Tony Stark says he wants to stop making weapons, yet he’s having so much fun dicking around in the basement with his soldering iron that he winds up making the next big stick that every army in the world is going to want. He makes a weapon of peace without acknowledging that he’s upped the ante for war. It’s just like his dad, who helped make the A-Bomb: it’s great when our army gets a bigger weapon, but that just makes the other armies fight harder to get their own copy.

There’s a simple lesson here. It’s fun to be the inventor, the entrepreneur, the genius who solves a big problem. But it sucks to be the other guys who have to run around, worrying about all the new problems you just created. So maybe this is another one of those aspirational wish-fulfillment type movies after all: how many of us get to be the carefree geniuses, and how many of us just clean up all the messes?

I’m laid up with some kind of strep throat or something tonight, and had to miss a great Boston Post-Mortem - but that’s not the worst news in North America tonight. In the Times this Sunday I read the news that the ’70s fusion band Return to Forever has reunited and started touring. It’s strictly motivated by cash and doesn’t answer any of the questions left by the band’s mysterious break-up at the height of its popularity – these guys were popular? – in the ’70s, plus I guess Corea’s still a Scientologist or something. And it’s taking them forever to remember all the parts.

Last fall I had a conversation with Mark Richardson about why I like jazz and experimental music, even though I’m not a musician. Sure, non-musos can enjoy music as much as anybody, but some of the music in my collection is usually found only on the shelves of real nerds and Berklee grads. I understand the basics of music theory, but not enough to really keep score when I listen to this stuff. I can’t keep track of every time they switch to 15/16 time or stick 18 more chord changes into “Cherokee.”

I like jazz for the same reason I’ve always liked comic book characters. All the great jazzbos have specific voices and abilities, special talents and gifts, a look and a weird name and something surprising they can deploy in a performance. From Dolphy and Coltrane to Zorn and Frisell, to futuristic guys like Mat Maneri and Craig Taborn – each of them brings their own panache to a difficult situation. And like superheroes – and unlike rock stars – they are endlessly recombinant. Wondering how Booker Little would have sounded in a band with John Coltrane is like throwing the Punisher in the Fantastic Four. Anything could happen.

I tend to follow individual musicians and dig deep. I have more Tim Berne records than I know what to do with, just as I have years’ worth of Avengers from the ’80s stashed somewhere in my attic. But in both my record collection and my comic buying habits, I tend to like the people who come at it from an odd angle – the ones on the fringe, with distinct flaws to go along with their unusual powers. What I don’t like – or at least, what I like to say I’ve grown out of – are the superheroes who are just out to clobber. The ones who take their virtuousic superabilities and just set out to abuse them. And that’s why I don’t like fusion, or Return to Forever.

Now, I had my fusion phase: fall quarter, sophmore year of college. I was dating a girl I didn’t really dig, and I’d hit a serious dry spell in my music discovery, to the point where I started checking out post-Miles jazz-fusion. I would go to the record stores on Hyde Park’s 53rd street and pick up used Allan Holdsworth and Mahavishnu records for $3 a pop. I had a cassette of Return to Forever’s Where Have I Known You Before, and listened to on headphones walking around the neighborhood. Some of those streets are ruined forever by those impressions.

While the earliest Return to Forever records featured cheesy lite Brazilian jazz, by the time they formed the quartet with a young Al DiMeola shredding on guitar, they were pure cheese, unsubtle and overcomplicated and unfunky and – well, you can also see why some guys (and no girls) liked it. The virtuousity is thrilling, the energy is high and the theatrics are impressive. It doesn’t thrill you or take your breath away so much as rivet you and make you bob your head ever so slightly during the guitar runs. It’s obsessive rather than demonstrative. You sit there with your headphones and rock out, alone.

But you know, power for its own sake is distasteful. Why do Eddie Jobson and Allan Holdsworth have to keep breaking out into long wanky solos on the debut U.K. album (a landmark intersection of the late-’70s prog and fusion movements; everyone involved should have lost their license to play music for other people)? What does that really add? But this is not music about the big picture. It’s music about playing as fast and loud as you fucking can so all the nerds in the audience can dream about how awesome it must feel. And now we have the reunited Return to Forever – who are like old age Superman and Batman, hobbling out to try to save the world one more time in the showiest way they can – and the fact that they’re actually wrestling with the parts is the one thing that could make the shows kinda interesting. Because when you know the hero can fly through the solos without breaking a sweat, then who in their right mind would bother to listen?

Make up your own mind:

(Update: For some reason the old clip didn’t work. Let’s try this one, “Beyond the 7th Galaxy.”)

In other game review news, this week sees my highly-anticipated write-up of Major League Eating: The Game for the Wii – which was a lot better than I expected it to be. My only gripe is that they left out my value-add links to Puzzle Farter and Jimmy’s Lost His Toilet Paper, as well as this video of the sport’s two greatest champions:

I don’t usually grade on value, but this would have been an easier sell at $5: it’s well-executed, but extremely limited. Also unfortunate is that WiiWare doesn’t have demos. A lot of people would probably check this out for the sheer “wtf” value and find themselves pleasantly surprised by the gameplay.

UPDATE: Forgot to link to last week’s review of Hail to the Chimp, which is heavy on the political junkiespeak and light on examining why the game is so unfun. You may wonder if I’m going to focus on indie and weird games from now on. With Scott Jones and Russ Fischer joining the AV Club games roster, and the mighty Gus Mastrapa still on board, there’s definitely room for me to stick to screwing around with niche games while they handle the blockbusters … so we’ll see how that pans out.

(Excerpt from a comic by David Hellman and Dale Beran, from the incredible A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible. Hellman is artist for Braid. That’s why I posted this.)

Yesterday GameSetWatch posted a write-up of Jonathan Blow’s talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton, UK. It’s a great read. Among other things, he talks about the problem of games where the story and the actual gameplay conflict with each other, instead of working together. “”We are a young medium because we’ve yet to come to understand this.”

- BioShock: there’s a ‘Little Sister problem’ in altruism versus balance. Blow noted that there’s only a marginal difference in the rewards you receive, no matter whether you choose to rescue or kill the Little Sisters. The game mechanics are telling you that it doesn’t matter which way you choose. So effectively, the game says that the Little Sister doesn’t matter, while the plot says that it does matter.” He suggested that “…this is disingenuous [and] robs the game of its emotional impact and potential.”

- Grand Theft Auto IV: Blow commented that girlfriends (and boyfriends) all have ‘benefits’ for befriending them. However, one character does not – Kate. The game rules tell you that you have no future with Kate (as she gives you no gameplay benefit) but, in the plot, the writers make Kate a romantic interest – a person pivotal to the story. So the game designer is saying ‘don’t care about this person’, but the game scriptwriter is saying ‘do care about this person.’

These examples aren’t deal-breakers in either game. A lot of BioShock fans enjoyed thinking and talking about the little sister dilemma, even though it had little impact beyond which ending you got to see. But I agree with Blow: the game would have been more engaging if the choice had mattered – and by the way, don’t forget that those final cutscenes were crap.

So what game solves this problem? Well, I don’t see anything in this write-up about Blow tooting his own horn, but his new game Braid - due out on XBox Live Arcade this week – is up for the challenge. He uses the text to add meaning and consequence to the gameplay.

As you play Braid, you can manipulate time in a number of different ways – to undo your mistakes, to slow down the action in a limited space, or to watch a ghostly version of yourself retrace your own steps while you go off and try a new course. The text gives this resonance, by telling a story about a boy who lost a girl and wants her back – but who also has had a lot of other experiences in his past that he’s trying to relive, or reshape, or just can’t remember so clearly anymore.

The text makes you realize that this isn’t a game about time, it’s a game about memory – and how much we like to run around changing our own, in the hopes that’ll change who we are and how often we’ve screwed up in our lives.

Okay, but does that make it a better game? And how well does Blow wed the text and the gameplay, anyway? Per Blow’s citations, Braid’s like a mash-up of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. If that sounds like an odd combo, it is. I spent much of the gameplay just focused on solving all the ingenious, awesome puzzles that were gating me from the final sequence of the game. Once I got ‘em all, I went back to reread the pieces of text that introduce each level – so my attention was finally really shifting to the story, but even then, the story doesn’t really click until you finish the end-game. At that point, the whole thing about memory and Princesses and not really liking yourself goes absolutely hand-in-hand with fast-paced platforming gameplay, and the result is pretty fantastic.

And yet, even after you “beat” the game there’s more text – so, all of a sudden, you’ve gone from putting all your attention into jumping around solving puzzles, to moving around puzzling together the narrative and its meanings. I’ve been reading Invisible Cities this weekend, and if you’re a Braid nut I highly recommend it, as the influence on Blow’s ideas is pretty clear. But I am experiencing the game now in a very different way than I was a week ago. Blow tells the story well through the game, but he’s clearly made the decision that you’re going to have to ponder all his ideas on your own time. I hear a lot of novelists do that, too.

Anyway, these are all notes by way of finishing my review, which I’ll file tomorrow and should be up on the AV Club a week from Monday. In my 400 words I spend a lot more time talking about this kind of stuff, and not so much highlighting just how fun, and satisfying, and well-designed the game is – how really nothing is wasted, how every puzzle is awesome in a different way, how great the music and art are. Like, never mind that we’re trying to namecheck Calvino here – the game is really, really fun!

(By the way, I’ve asked before if game critics should be able to cheat – but in the case of Braid, even though I was tempted several times, nobody’s posted any hints. The fact that I had enough time with a preview to do it all myself, and no way to cheat myself out of the pleasure of nailing one of these head-spinners all on my own, probably made me enjoy the game a hell of a lot more.)

UPDATE: My review at the Onion is now live.