David Hellman

Chris Dahlen at Save the Robot blogged yesterday about Jonathan Blow’s recent lecture at the Games:EDU conference. There are other places to get the full content of the lecture (GameSetWatch or Jonathan Blow himself), but basically, Jon is talking about the frequent dissonance in games between story and gameplay. Often, the story will suggest one thing, but the actual rules of play will express a conflicting idea.

Bioshock, one of last year’s commercial and critical smash hits, offers a perfect example. There’s a kind of character called a “little sister” that you meet repeatedly. Each time, you’re offered an explicit choice between freeing her and “harvesting” her for a resource that powers you up and makes the game easier. The audio-visual presentation tugs on your sympathies by vividly depicting the little sister’s vulnerability: she cowers, and covers her face with pale little hands. But it turns out that if you free the little sister, you still can power up from alternative sources. So the choice between power and compassion is not supported by the game system.

Is it a nihilistic message that no matter how you treat defenseless children, your life will proceed unchanged as long as you can banish your guilt? Or material reassurance to those tempted towards violence that they can have everything they want without harming anyone? Bioshock leaves the impression of a fumbled idea, that the story and game system were seen to serve distinct, non-overlapping functions. There was this “moral choice” thing introduced through the graphics and audio, but to ensure that all players had a smooth and not-frustrating experience, the sharp implications of the choice, that should have been born out in the gameplay, were shaved down to nothing.

Surely there’s expressive potential in purposeful contradiction – one element of a work saying one thing while another element says something different – but I think Jon is right that sensitivity to this kind of technique in games remains generally underdeveloped, and conflicts of this sort are usually haphazard.

Anyway, there’s been plenty of discussion about this elsewhere. The reason I’m posting is that Chris opened the article with part of an episode of A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. It was a very appropriate choice, but Chris didn’t comment on why. So I thought I would butt in and explain!

(Click for full size.)

Back when I was doing A Lesson Is Learned…, I’d often try to reflect the core idea of Dale’s script in the layout of the comic itself. I believe this is one of the more successful attempts. The story here is about a sleepless little girl, Caroline’s doppelganger, being comforted by her father. Her anxiety is that she is not loved as much as the disappeared original Caroline – another little girl her parents had before her. She fears her doppelganger status makes her forever a shadow of the real girl. Worse, she believes Caroline is still living in the house, watching her from the window across the courtyard.

The layout of the comic reflects the doppelganger theme, first, by being divided in two. The panels on the left side of the comic are in the shape of a house, with peaked roof and a window – a motif repeated and confirmed in explicit depiction on the right side. Each side has the same peaked roof over a window with someone looking out, towards us. But the differences are as important as the similarities. The left side is warm with inner illumination. The house is a set of panels revealing an intimate moment between father and daughter. The thoughts and feelings of these characters are shared with us. In contrast, the right side shows a chilly facade. We do not know what lies behind that wall, whether Caroline truly lives in the darkness of that window, looking back at us. In fact, it’s deliberately ambiguous whether we are looking out from the doppelganger’s window, sharing her view, or looking back at her from the other side, inhabiting the perspective of the supposed Caroline. The left side reveals as much as possible, while the right side lets on nothing, forcing the reader to remain with the mystery for nearly half a page – a panel that overwhelms and haunts the first half, outlasting the brief and incomplete comfort with the expansiveness of a watchful night.

(I talked about this in a lecture last year.)

Content expressed through form – the overall form of the comic, its layout – was an explicit goal of this design, making it an appropriate compliment to the ideas in Jon’s lecture.

The 4Play gaming blog of azcentral.com has published an interview with Jonathan Blow and me about Braid. Highlights include a constant high pitched tone in the background. As a bonus, there is no transcript. Maybe the guy who usually transcribes these things didn’t want to listen to the high pitched tone through the whole thing.

I am being a jerk. It is a cool blog. You should read it and if you want, listen to our interview.

Here it is embedded in this page. You can listen without even going to the 4Play blog! (But you should go to the blog.)

Here’s a blast from the past for you baby boomers: an old interview with Dale Beran and me about our comic, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.

Here’s a choice quote:

What does the title of your comic mean to you? Are these your prescient last words?

David: The title refers to a persistent desire to understand and cope with life’s hardships, as well as the realization of our limits to enact change upon our ultimately flawed human existence.

Whoa, slow down there, younger-David, you sound like a straining undergrad! Highlights also include Dale getting wasted and trashing other web comics.

The great big whole interview is here.

Edge magazine has published a somewhat snippy preview of Braid, nevertheless pausing to complement the graphical style. Courtesy of Next-Gen.biz:

Braid is certainly a work of considerable aesthetic success – the praise for which largely goes to artist David Hellman, whose visual endeavors subvert the stereotype of the lo-fi 2D platformer. Instead, layered brushwork forms a luscious, moving painting…

You can read the whole thing here.

Less than a week after publishing an interview with me, GameTap’s editorial division is being closed.

Leigh Alexander reported the story on Kotaku yesterday, passing along a corporate memo full of assurances that it’s all about the games.

Here’s the interview with me on GameTap. Maybe the safe thing to do is reproduce it below…

Indie Games: Braid Interview

We speak with Team Braid’s lead artist on art, first impressions, and games.

By Douglass C. Perry
May 23, 2008

First officially revealed for Xbox Live Arcade at the Tokyo Game Show 2007, the indie-developed game Braid has attracted traditional and not-so-traditional media attention due to its unusual gameplay and distinct art direction. As part of GameTap’s desire to expose the work of independent developers, we spoke with Team Braid’s David Hellman, in charge of the game’s art direction.

GameTap: It’s interesting that you started working on the game partway into the Braid project, mostly because starting with someone else’s work can pose interesting challenges. When you took up the responsibility of the game’s art direction, what aspects did you want to keep and what did you want to do away with?

David Hellman: When I joined Team Braid, most of the game still bore [lead designer] Jonathan Blow’s basic and intermittently charming programmer art – just functional shapes with little adornment. Certain areas had been elaborated upon by an artist who’d since moved on, but in general this art looked dreary and very static and strangely not-to-scale. I wanted to get away from all the art that had come before–not because it was all bad per se, but I wanted to take a fresh look at the possibilities.

The best thing about the programmer art was that it was very clear from a gameplay perspective, so we tried to retain as much as that as possible. Also, certain things had a lot of personality. I liked the original yellow versions of the monsters that I assume Jonathan drew. I’m glad I got to play the game when it was still mostly all Jon’s work, because I got to see his sensibility unfiltered.

Some scenes already had a direction when we started. Jonathan had created a sunset for the title screen and a cloudy backdrop for the story screens, where you read excerpts of a story before each world. We stayed with the original impulse in those cases, but much of the game was reimagined from scratch.

Read the rest of this entry »

The latest Team Fremont Live podcast contains an interview with Jonathan Blow and me.

Here’s a direct link to the mp3: Team Fremont Live: 05.18.2008 (The interview starts at 12:27.)

I enjoyed talking with John, Moe and Hilden, and appreciated the implied invitation to drink alone in my apartment. As far as communicating what Braid is about, I think the interview went fairly well, but I would be interested in reactions from you guys. It can be tricky to sum things up sometimes …

This Wired article by John Scott Lewinski on May 7 used one of my lesser-known works, an anatomical modification of global village idiot Karl Pilkington.

Mr. Pilkington famously suggested that mankind would be better off with a toenail on the head and testicles below the ears. “It wouldn’t look weird, ’cause we’d all have it,” he explained. He then went on to say, “When people are sometimes talking, they do sort of mess with their ears, and they’re always saying ‘check for lumps’ … more handy.”

The “Karl Pilkington with Testiclears” image originally appeared in this very blog. Are we in the Media Echo Chamber?

Thanks to Sharon of Baltimore, MD for the tip.

The latest episode of The 1UP Show features J.B. and me yammering on about Braid. You can watch that segment below. For the full show, including segments on Dark Sector and Smash Bros. Brawl, click here.

Chatting with Matt Chandronait and Jay Frechette was a real pleasure! They were genuinely into the game and very thoughtful about the indie scene and stuff in general.