Hooray! Braid has launched on Xbox Live Arcade! Reviews are pouring in and the froth is palpable. Jon is keeping track of them on his blog.

He also created a handy walkthrough for busy people looking for answers.

Gamasutra has published the first collection of the Art of Braid columns. This one combines parts 2, 3 and 4 with a new introduction.

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.

After a couple months of disquieting calm, Action Button .net unleashed yesterday the first three entries of its 25 Best Games of All-Time. One is a Genesis game, another is for PS2 and another for PSP. There is so far no ranking for the Mario Kart series, neither for a particular game nor for the series as an indivisible, canonical entity.

Here’s a choice passage from the Castlevania: Bloodlines (abdmn #25) review:

I like to think of the lead designers of the three Castlevania reboots (Super, Rondo, and Bloodlines) as three young men, let’s say sons of the King of Konami. They worked together on the first Castlevania games for the Famicom, and chose different sides when the console war — MegaDrive versus Super Famicom versus PC-Engine — began. The lead designer of Super Castlevania IV was the loyal son, always blindly looking to impress Father. The designer of Rondo was the scholar, the go-getter, the strategist, seeking to prove himself superior to all humans, not just to his brothers. The designer of Bloodlines was the slacker, the one everyone assumes could get ahead in the world if he’d just stop hanging out at the tavern with the local band of hooligans. (He can otherwise rip out a hell of a guitar solo. I imagine he also looked like Johnny Depp in that one movie where he first had a beard.)

What I like about Tim Rogers’ writing, besides its punk-like reckless momentum, is this kind of knowledgeable and idiosyncratic characterization.

Microsoft is promoting it as part of the Summer of Arcade, a PR feat underlining an imminent batch of quality games.

Meanwhile, IGN has awarded Braid as “runner up” for Best Artistic Design at E3 2008. Normally I prefer to win awards rather than almost win, but Prince of Persia, which received the top honor in that category, does look pretty cool.

Braid did win IGN’s awards for Best Puzzle Game and Best Xbox Live Arcade Game, and was runner up for a couple other categories, as blogged by Jonathan.

I am pretty excited to have more people playing Braid! It’s a transformative moment when an art work becomes available to a broad public. What begins as an object of personal creative attention suddenly belongs to each individual who encounters it. My relationship to the work, with all its stages (inspiration, uncertainty, resolve, satisfaction, malaise, pride, doubt, and on…) becomes secondary to this brand new moment: someone sits down, starts to play, has a feeling. My intentions and expectations recede as the work starts to live on its own, meaning whatever it will mean to each player, as a game among games. I’m very aware of this because I’ve never worked on something for so long before it reached its audience.

With luck I’ll get another Art of Braid up here in coming days/weeks. Or maybe there’s a fresh way to shed light on and help to promote Braid? Jon and I are working on some modest additions to the official site to provide a better overview. I’ll post here when that’s done. Hopefully before the game comes out!

I haven’t been updating the blog so frequently recently, but you should know that there are other places to get your David Hellman fix. (Think of how much I must trust you to tell you this!!)

David Hellman is Director of Operations at the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, an annual bike-a-thon that raises money for cancer research and treatment. His influence can be felt from the organization’s web presence to the portable toilets made available to ride-a-thon participants. He lives in Chicago.

David Hellman is an attorney specializing in taxes and estate planning based in San Rafael, CA. He graduated from Berkeley in 1972 and he owns www.davidhellman.com!

David Hellmann is a graphic designer from Germany. His specialties include Digitalen Spiegelreflex Kamera, Webseiten and Grafiken. I have sent him a Facebook friend request.

David B. Hellman is maker of fine furniture living in Massachusetts. His firm creates gorgeous custom-made wood furniture. I could not find a picture of him.

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 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.

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.

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.

GameTap: You’ve said that the levels are entirely different and more or less avoid the clichéd snow-lava-cart mine levels so readily apparent in other games. Why do you think those kinds of levels were used so often in games? And what do these types of levels offer gamers that’s different in the context of your game?

David Hellman: Probably when visual artists were stuck with very restricted resolutions and palettes, not to mention ROM sizes, changing the colors from level to level was an efficient way to evoke dramatically different settings. Make a level all white and blue and draw some icicles, and the player is already going to feel that this is a cold place. It already has an atmosphere, a temperature, a bunch of enriching associations.

I think a lot of clichés get perpetuated in part because the people making games have genuine affection for what they’ve played before, and they want to re-create those things. What really matters is subtext. Familiar or not, are the settings purposeful? Do they harmonize with other attributes of the game? In Braid, the visual design of each world reflects its special gameplay mechanic and its framing story excerpt (which are thematically linked).

As an example, world 4 starts with a story about a guy visiting his parents’ house and old college campus, and encountering all the sensations and emotions he associates with earlier periods of his life. We chose to depict world 4 as ruins from an ancient civilization. When you visit ancient buildings that haven’t been renovated or repurposed, they can seem to exist out of time. They “hold” their time, and you can feel that as you walk through. Also, ruins convey stillness, which is very germane to the special time behavior of world 4.

We also have a world that’s made of nice furniture and books piled up in a marsh, which I don’t think has been done before.

GameTap: You mentioned in your latest blog entry your thoughts about the title screen. It’s quite beautiful, emotive. I remember when Nintendo showed Super Mario 64 in 1996; it was at the same time everyone was going nuts for PlayStation games, all of which had these enormous load times. When we saw Super Mario 64, a cartridge-based game, it loaded instantly. It made an impression. What do you think that the first set of images does for gamers, and what is the value of the instant start?

David Hellman: First impressions matter. We gather lots of information in those first few moments. It’s always an important place to represent a work’s aesthetic priorities. For Braid, one of those priorities is giving the player unmediated, uninterrupted contact with the world. The game is about coming to understand the rules of the world, and thereby solving puzzles, through direct experience and experimentation. The puzzles are totally logical and always derive from the inherent implications of the rules. There’s no intermediary, no narrator or guide shuttling you around or telling you what to look at. The instances where the player doesn’t have complete control are very limited, and deliberately placed. I think players will notice that.

Another thing about the beginning of the game: for two whole screens, the only thing the player must do is walk to the right. This is the most basic action, upon which other activities are gradually layered, like opening doors, climbing ladders, jumping, climbing, rewinding, etc. It’s like a song that starts with just a simple 4/4 beat, or just a bass line, before the other instruments join in one by one.

GameTap: There is a lot of good, healthy discussion about whether video games are art. What is your stance on the evolving form of video games? Are they art, entertainment, pure amusement? Or some new combination that’s yet to be fully grasped?

David Hellman: Video games are a great medium for making art. They embody human ideas, values, and emotions in all kinds of interesting and unique ways. They’re remarkably diverse and rapidly evolving. It’s really a frontier medium. As an artist, I look at them the same as movies or music or novels, to the extent that they can hold an expressive imprint, communicate, and be aesthetically enriching.

It’s easy to be cynical about this topic, because it’s been so thoroughly run into the ground on so many occasions. Never shout “art” in a crowded room. It does the job in casual conversation, but when push comes to shove, the word is more divisive and distracting than useful. It’s like conversations about whether or not there’s a god. The amount of personal baggage these words dredge up is unbelievable. You’ll have two people agreeing there is a god, then realize that to one person that means a man on a cloud and to another it means a sense of communion with nature. You’ll spend forever just sorting through preconceptions. The other problem with the word “art” is that to a lot of people it represents a cultural power play. Once something becomes legitimized as art, you have people shoving it into galleries; you have art types re-contextualizing it in their idiosyncratic way… It becomes a distinction between high/low culture. And while it’s far from monolithic, gamer culture on the whole is deeply suspicious of anybody that wants to dictate taste.