Ever since reading my first review of the game Braid I’ve looked forward to eventually trying it out and seeing if all the hype was true regarding the “little game that could”. The premise seemed amazing and some of the adjectives thrown around describing the game seemed out of place for a contemporary XBOX 360 game; a fact that really captivated my attention. Words like philosophical, artsy and thought-provoking were common place amongst the slew of positive reviews I came across. Braid was released about a year ago yet the logistics of a move to a new country prevented me from seeing for myself if the hype was true or not. As I mentioned in a recent post, this has now been rectified and the lovely philosophical, artsy game called Braid has recently been bested by myself.  Even though the game has been available for quite some time, and reviewed extensively, I still find it pertinent to share thoughts on my experience with the game in hopes that I might be able to offer some unique insight into exactly why Braid is deserving of such high praise.

A description of the game is relatively straightforward but at the same time somewhat complex. Braid is a 2-d platformer, much like Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, made by Jonathan Blow for around 200,000 dollars; relatively cheap for a modern game that has been met with a great deal of both critical and commercial success. Blow is a former video game consultant and some things are immediately apparent about Blow’s inspiration and interests pertaining to the medium when one begins to play through Braid. First and foremost the pure aesthetics of Braid’s characters and game world are like a moving impressionist painting. As a fan of Van Gogh’s Starry Night I have to say I fell in love with the game the first time I glanced a screen shot. I am hazarding a guess at calling the game post-impressionistic and maybe postmodern-impressionistic if such a thing can indeed be classified as such. Beyond the artistic touch of the renderings there is also an interesting technique known as parallax effect that is used in Braid to make the 2-d platformer literally pop out and come to life. The technique and aesthetic succeed in breathing life into a very classic genre, the platformer, proving that a game does not have to be 3-d and based upon massive amounts of polygons in order to achieve success. To this effect, it supports some reasoning being currently debated pertaining to the fact that some believe there is no need to improve upon the hardware specs of this current generation of consoles, that is beyond the potential monetary awards for the companies that produce them. Instead the focus should be returned to innovative game play and story telling.

Braid’s game play one ups its aesthetics by making use of the codes us “gamers” have developed over the evolution of video games. These codes are to some extent comparable to throwing or hitting a baseball. We learn to do things with one hand or from one side of the plate, while Braid forces a gamer to essentially become a switch hitter, or in my own case as a “righty” to pitch left-handed. A great deal of the difficulty and challenge in Braid is directly linked to being forced to think outside of the box in order to solve a puzzle. Illustrative of this fact is one very simple puzzle found early on in the game dealing specifically with a very Donkey Kong-esque set of variables and iconography. In effort to not to give away the solution I will simply state that, at least in my own case, the puzzle was solved simply by thinking what perhaps any frustrated gamer has thought while playing classic Donkey Kong or games made in its likeness, that is, why can’t the rules be broken?  Braid is a game much like a great film in the fact that it tunes into the essences of its genre and medium, it makes use of things not directly represented and in the case of a video game directly programmed. The answers are often not found in the details. To this extent I would state that Braid perhaps rests as the pinnacle of postmodern gaming, its solutions sometimes found in the memories and experiences of play sessions past.

However, all of these previously mentioned qualities pale in comparison to perhaps Braid’s shiniest of shiny, achievements, and that is simply put the philosophy of the game. Braid beyond its entertainment value functions alone as a “text” that critiques linearity. It therefore has academic value in calling into question just what is possible in a video game and furthermore in society when we are forced to think outside the box. Being a fan of Philip K. Dick I am immediately reminded of his non-fictional writings on cosmonology by the dynamics of Braid’s game play. Dick alludes to an idea that our lives are in a perpetual state of re-analysis or re-living,  producing an ever increasing perfect reality. The comparison Dick makes is with a tape that is rewound, analyzed and reformated in real time; manipulated to produce a product or life of higher quality. This is precisely what Braid represents from top to bottom, apparent when one completes the game, but in effort to allow my readers to enjoy the ending for themselves, you’ll have to take my word for it.

Braid proves that success is achievable via much simpler means then the over use of flashy bells and whistles. Jonathan Blow has in fact admitted that his vision was created in order to critique contemporary trends in video games. To this effect, the discussion about contemporary video games or the video game industry as a whole is comparable to that of the film industry and blockbuster films. What I don’t understand, growing up as a part of the original Nintendo generation, is what happened to having a decent innovative, immersive story line in a game, or the development of completely new genres coupled with new mechanics? With its limited “on screen” resources and budget Braid succeeds where its complete polar opposites, multi-million-dollar MMO’s as an example, typically fall short. It is not only a lesson for an individual gamer as to what is possible in their own skill set and problem solving ability but also a direct critique as to how the video game industry and its producers have, as a whole, begun to blindly follow and become limited by the game industries older, ginger-headed step brother the film industry. An analysis of Braid contains within it a simple lesson in game construction and resource management.

Both of these mediums mentioned, games and film, and the people who create within them must realize that an individual can still be successful by breaking the pre-established codes of a genre and medium, inevitably creating entirely new ones as a result. As I alluded to in a post a few months back, pertaining to the arts in general, this type of innovation becomes more and more obtainable and realized as individuals begin to retain and execute greater control over their original creative vision. The streamlining of the production system and return to interdisciplinary skill sets are a large reason why a game like Braid exists as it does. To me, universalism has always been readily apparent as the solution to a great many of society’s serious ailments and disputes, however it’s even more fascinating that it also can provide astonishing levels of entertainment and enjoyment when used effectively in cinema and now video games.

Omnipotence is a funny thing. An adjective normally bestowed upon human beings possessing transcendent and redefining talents, but also a gift that in the long run carries with it a terribly slow and socially acidic, terminal disease. The only cure of which is deconstruction of the self or physical death. – Random made up quote

I finally managed a few nights ago to sit down and properly watch Citizen Kane (1941). For a film scholar several years into the business this has been somewhat of an embarrassment (although only one amongst many) that I have been almost unwilling to admit. However, I am a firm believer in serendipity, that is the concept not the shitty John Cusack film and or that things occur at different times for different reasons. The pertinence of this particular fact deals with the recent death of a certain Michael Joseph Jackson, you might have heard of him. Not having seen Citizen Kane until now actually provided a different aspect or illumination upon the tragedy of Michel Jackson’s untimely death that I might otherwise not have come across. That is, two and two would not have been put together.

The parallel between Jackson and the film begins as follows: Charles Foster Kane, aka Citizen Cane, in the film begins as a young child who inherits an exorbitant amount of wealth that immediately has an impact upon his life, making it essentially impossible to grow up as a “normal” human being under “normal” circumstances, his world must be tailored made to fit him. We the viewer are then transported rather quickly to Kane as a young adult with an interest and extraordinary talent for running a newspaper, aided by his fortune, that quickly turns him into an even wealthier “media mogul”. This is all fine and dandy but eventually sees Kane, and his somewhat honest  attitude, attempt to run for public office. Here his honest character is quickly dispatched by dishonest competition, a sex scandal is created and suddenly Kane finds himself on a downward spiral to becoming a complete recluse. An enormous estate is built in Florida named Xanadu, an enormous estate that serves in the end as Kane’s sarcophagus.

Needless to say, it doesn’t take a genius to see the similarities here. Jackson started out as a very talented child in the group the Jackson 5. Instead of pure capital like Charles Foster Kane, he possessed a fairly large amount of what Pierre Bourdieu calls social capital, present and obtained by his ability to sing, dance and captivate a crowd. The story for me as a child of the 80’s, much like the one in Citizen Kane, quickly begins its next chapter with Jackson as the ultra popular entertainer that sees his records outsell anything that has come before them, his star power dwarfing anyone else existent in the entertainment industry, arguably making him the most famous individual to ever tread upon this planet. At this point, like Charles Foster Kane, Jackson seemingly tried to use his star power to enact social change differing from the movie in the fact that one has to say Jackson, unlike Kane, succeeded; bypassing the need for public office due to his immense popularity. The story of Jackson’s life though is not quite, as you well know, as simply defined as I have written above and definitely does not have its end or entirety summed up by the aforementioned facts.

Much more gruesome than Kane’s inability to obtain public office and his subsequent descent, we the public bore witness to what the tabloids dubbed him “Wacko Jacko” a sort of surgically enhanced liminal figure. As Dave Chappelle alluded to, a person who underwent countless enhancements to impress us. Perhaps not completely admitted nor seen from this perspective until after his death, we were witness to a child that never grew up, a self-admitted modern day Peter Pan, who attempted to rebuild a childhood that never existed, complete with his own “never never land” in the form of a ranch. Like Kane’s Xanadu, Neverland Ranch seemed to function as a socially constrictive sarcophagus that housed pop-culture artifacts of the times and allowed for what many believed to be weird and inappropriate social interaction with children that Jackson thought of as his peers.  Fast forward to two molestation cases later and Jackson ceased to be a liminal figure, for many becoming only a pedophile.

What makes the two stories so interesting, as I alluded to in the first few lines of this post, deals with ideas of omnipotence and its function in a capitalist society. Simply put, expanding markets are always in need of the next big star that opens and or bridges a gap and at certain points in time these stars become so big and burn so bright that they threaten the stability of the entire system. Instead of inspiring massive record sales, book sales or box office receipts they begin to inspire such things as social change and creative thought, dangerously unpredictable things. They also inspire fanaticism and massive amounts of interest into the banal personal details of the star’s life, eventually spinning everything out of control and into the realm of pure speculation. The point is that these stars begin to expand the market beyond what the checks and balances in the system can peacefully control or contain. I am not saying there is some sort of evil collective that decides the limits upon success. However, I do believe that it is simply a fact of capitalist nature that when someone rises and wins so big it is inevitable that they have to loose and fall; the system is predicated upon this fact.

The fall I speak of, from what I can tell during my studies and time spent dealing with the subject, can take place in few varying ways. Normally it is either a self deconstruction perpetrated in order to relieve oneself from the burden of omnipotence. In such a case I would use a figure like Bob Dylan as an example, who at his peak in the late 60’s changed the very popular way he preformed music and seemingly shunned any ideas that were attached to him as a spokesman for social change, something many thought to be the core of Dylan’s music and popularity. The second option here as I see it is the news media. In their frantic search for details and information pertaining to a given celebrity often times a certain amount of conflict is created between the media and an individual. At its core the media believes it provides a service to society in informing them if someone or something is dishonest. With omnipotent stars it really becomes a hunt to provide the public with a corrected picture of the individual to double check and inform idealizing fans of the blemishes and personal details that sometimes suggest that a star is simply put “just as fucked up as you or I”. With Dylan again as the example here we have the media’s attempts at providing his proper background, stripping away the mystery into his seemingly auspicious beginnings. Possibly, I could even state that the media functions as a limiting body for such aspiring individuals, begging the question would you really want to be exposed, putting people into an ever questioning position of am I worthy of praise, am I any good at what I do, can I really enact change?

It is here that the two stories I began this post with differ. Charles Foster Kane in the film gives up and retires as recluse to Xanadu with his wife. While Michel Jackson never seemingly by his own hand wanted to leave the spotlight (he was for all intensive purposes born, raised and ultimately laid to rest there) fluctuating in and out of the spot light. Citizen Kane is interesting on its own as showing a man’s deconstruction by a device that he himself builds and deploys, a tabloid, or speculation based newspaper. Michael Jackson I do not believe is really a victim of an establishment he willingly helped to create; it is however a similarity in his deconstruction that he shares with Kane. Like Kane, Jackson’s death has spurred a hunt for a MacGuffin, or I should say a whole slew of them. It’s as if the media is shocked and to some extent feeling guilty, appropriately trying to balance the scales or their prior verdict on Jackson, not so much for Jackson himself, but for their own future reputation and credibility, they must “get it right”.

I would like to think there is a great amount of honest truth to my sentiments described herein, albeit not based upon any kind of insider perspective into Michel Jackson unlike that which the media has been frantically, even to this day, searching for. It is more a set of observations that a movie like Citizen Kane, made long before Michael Jackson’s birth and rise to fame, has brought into perspective for me. The film even in 1941 was not just a fictional piece; it contains many meta-film aspects that deal with then contemporary figures of arguable omnipotence such as William Randolph Hearst and Howard Hughes, coupled with the controversies surrounding them. Sometimes knowledge and texts can provide a solid blueprint or filter through which we can better see the reality of a given situation. For me such is the case with Orson Welles‘ master piece Citizen Kane in conjunction with the death of Michael Jackson. It shows clearly for me the who and why of the event and much like the boys from the paper in Citizen Kane, the boys on CNN and other “reputable” news networks are still busy trying to find out just what rosebud means. I guess I still have my own concerns with it as well, but they only pertain to just how widely applicable the definition of a MacGuffin fits. Is rosebud in the case of Jackson’s death an honest interest, an admonishment of guilt, a cathartic experience for the networks and the fans who participated in the speculation or just an elaborate societal smoke screen so we don’t see the mechanism at work, sot of like a bourgeois escape lever if you will?

In the end I hope to have proved at the very least why one can debate Citizen Kane as being one of the greatest, if not “the” greatest film ever made, that there is some well based merit to such a discussion. To be so highly applicable to this day, pertaining to the life and circumstances surrounding such an enormous icon is an amazing achievement that shows the film and film maker’s mastery in capturing a pure essence beyond banal details, displaying in the process cinema’s timelessness. My thoughts pertaining to Michael Jackson are a much more complicated topic; it’s not fictional, although elements of it appear to be so. His is a tragic death and more so than that, a tragic life that borderlines in my opinion on persecution by the media and his fans. Not to mention that one of popular culture’s biggest icons and money maker dies at a time when the entire system has been rocked by enormous earthquakes of ethics and injustice. To a person who spends a fair amount of time in musty tombs of knowledge, who has intently studied as many aspects of the system I live in as I possibly can, it simply provides a great example about how real life is almost always more unbelievable and dramatic than fictional work. Or perhaps it all proves the fact that there simply is no difference; we are all pulled along by the same timeless narrative devices.

During the course of a film sometimes there comes a reaction or idea so strong and so right that it can encapsulate perfectly the essence of the moment without the need for afterthought or analysis. It begs to be exclaimed on the spot, bursting out at the seams in tourette like fashion, sometimes border lining on being extremely inappropriate.

I’m proud to introduce a series to my blog entitled creatively enough, “Random Thoughts” where I will state my gut reactions to some of the films that fly across my radar on a weekly basis, ignoring completely any previous knowledge or love I have for them, shooting straight from my hip directly down at my foot.

Random Thought # 1

Good Will Hunting – Somebody kick that kid’s ass!

Most people are well acquainted with the film in question here, Matt Damon plays an over intelligent kid from a hard knock lower middle class life in south Boston. He reads a lot of fucking books and is basically the human calculator. We the audience are meant to feel for him and his shit hole of a life in the projects of Southie, and come to grips with the themes of wasted talent and opportunity. I get it and some part of me maybe even enjoys the film, Ben Affleck does smoke a lot of grits and that’s pretty sweet and all, he also kind of looks like what I would imagine a henchmen sporting a Carhartt jacket would look like, but that’s not really here nor there.

Its not politically correct but I really have to say watching the film last night something really irritated me. A simple thought or question if you will, why didn’t Robin Williams character just kick that kid’s ass? You know the scene where they sit down in the park and Robin Williams seems to be apologetic, somewhat angry but still really overly sympathetic to Will’s asshole-like attitude. Will in this scene, see profile shot above, reminds me a hell of a lot of that one kid everyone knew growing up who had a one way ticket to juvenile hall, a kid who begged on a constant basis for a punch to the face along with removal from his current home by child services. Perhaps as an example and effort to conjure up those memories for you I’ll throw out a name like Randy, in this specific case a name supposed to connote sexual arousal but in reality ultimately just a name and a figure that solicits anger. I realize Randy would not have worked for the context of the film’s title but to me Will is a Randy, the film now for me forever known as “Good Randy Hunting” from here on out.

For the sake of cathartic purposes and a conclusion here I’ll once again propose the question exactly as I expressed it last night, “Why didn’t he just kick his fucking ass?”, “Somebody anybody for the love of god kick that kid’s ass”. No, apparently Robin Williams was velcroed to himself in his study and Ben Affleck was preoccupied smoking grits in the dooryard.

For all you American readers with an interest in film the subject of Netflix is probably dated, it is however new for a returning ex-pat. I can though, if you bear with me for a moment, share a hint about an even more robust Netflix experience. For those of you outside the United States well I’m sorry to say, in the infamous words of Mr. T, “I pity the fool who don’t have the Netflix.”

Netflix on its own is a phenomenal service for a film lover. For 8 dollars a month I get one DVD of my choosing that I swap out any time I want with all postage and envelopes provided by Netflix. There exists also the possibility to pay more and have more than one film out at a time, a tiered system, with I believe up to 7 films at about 40 something dollars per month.  Their catalogue is simply astonishing, and as of yet there exists only two films that I have searched for that they do not have immediately available. Living in San Francisco there is a two day turnaround on swapping out a film, 1 day to send it back and 1 day for them to send out a new one from my film que. This equates to the possibility for me to see 3 films a week if I am ambitious and film hungry.

I know, I know those of you that don’t have access to Netflix are now wondering if your country should indeed be called civilized without such a service and those of you already acquainted with Netflix are wondering what’s in this conversation for you, where is the aforementioned nouvelle information. Well here it is in the form of 1 word and a set of numerals, XBOX 360!

In the market for a next-gen console the selling point for me in regards to the debate on what to buy, a PS3 or XBOX 360, came down to the fact that the 360 allowed for the streaming of Netflix’s on-demand choices. While one can also watch these on demand choices over the PC we all know that by exhibiting films in such a manner it’s really bastardizing the film viewing experience, especially when you have just bought a brand new honking plasma TV and surround sound system. Netflix on the 360’s streaming service, at least for me, exceeded my original expectations. The quality of the stream is shockingly amazing, providing HD quality choices which are unexpected as I was expecting something slightly better than youtube approximating normal digital cable TV. Add to that the fact that when I began to look through the over 12,000 choices Netflix has on their streaming service I realized that a great many of them are high quality films. That is one is not presented with a few decent films with the rest occupying the B-film category. Out of the 300 films I originally placed in my Netflix que, 58 of them were available as on demand choices filling in any evenings where I find myself without a film. Pure awesomeness and an absolute steal for 8 dollars a month.

Now, one is not forced to buy a an XBOX 360 there exists other gadgets that will stream Netflix, however as is the case with debate surrounding the benefits of buying a PS3 with people arguing the point that you basically get a free gaming console with your blue ray player, on account of standalone blue ray players being pricey, I would say the XBOX 360 is an even better deal when coupled with Netflix.

Wow time flies when you’re having fun!

Or in this specific case moving to another country. 2 months has blurred by and while everything regarding the move has gone much better than I could have asked for I simply have not found the time to properly write or devote time to this blog.

Hopefully now I am into calmer seas and should be able to once again properly entertain the public with my musings. I am a firm believer that with any restart there has to be a redesign so you have that to look forward to in the next few weeks along with a slight modification to my original topical format that has to do with my ability to finally own a next-gen gaming console and properly “game it up” again. So for you gamers out there I will now be providing Dennis Miller like cryptic analysis on the past, present and future of video games!

Apologies for the delay once again sit back and enjoy the show!