Braid was released in 2008 to critical acclaim, and it quickly attained a privileged place in the narrative of indie games. As such, it’s been discussed at great length by the game critic community (much of which is collected at the game’s Critical Distance Compilation). On the heels of developer Jon Blow’s new title The Witness, I decided to finally finish Braid myself. The game has a cryptic and layered narrative, but it’s also fairly limited in size and scope. I left my playthrough with a fairly salient interpretation of its meaning, filtered through my particular background, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find it laid out anywhere. I’d be surprised if this angle has really never been argued before, but I’m going to put it here for practice and on the off chance I’m creating something new.
Obviously, significant spoilers for Braid ahead.
I studied ecofeminism and related ideologies in college, and I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy of science lately. So the fact that I saw these things in Braid may be because I know about them and recognized things that are present in the text. . . or it may be that I’ve just filled my head with these ideas and now I’m seeing them everywhere I look. You’ll have to judge that for yourselves based on my argument and the evidence I provide.
My thesis is that Braid is an ecofeminist (or simply a feminist) critique of science. I want to say up front that the ideas I see the game as advancing are far from universal among feminists, and are generally ideas that are dated or even exist more as strawmen used to discredit feminism than as genuine arguments. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “such implacably negative views of science are more often attributed to feminists than embraced by them. The claim that feminists are categorically hostile to science appears to derive from a conviction that feminism, as a political stance, is inimical to science.” However, they are things actual feminists have written at one point or another, meant to be taken seriously. Incidentally, they’re also not positions I hold myself (though I am a feminist and a scientist) and I have no idea if Blow holds them either.
The Story: Review
Braid begins by presenting a fairly hackneyed and stereotypical story of a breakup: our protagonist, Tim, has made mistakes and lost his girlfriend, who he refers to as The Princess. He fantasizes about reversing time, taking back those mistakes and returning to a time when they were happy together.
All those years ago, Tim had left the Princess behind. He had kissed her on the neck, picked up his travel bag, and walked out the door. He regrets this, to a degree. Now he's journeying to find her again, to show her knows how sad it was, but also to tell her how good it was.
Toward the middle of the game, it becomes clear the the Princess is not Tim’s fiance; he tells her that he’s leaving her in order to find the Princess.
Over the remnants of dinner, they both knew the time had come. He would have said: 'I have to go find the Princess,' but he didn't need to. Giving a final kiss, hoisting a travel bag to his shoulder, he walked out the door.
Blow uses the same language to draw a parallel between this action and Tim’s relationship to the Princess in the first chapter. At this point, it seems that the Princess is an idealized woman, Tim’s soulmate—someone he hasn’t but must be out there, must be worth looking for.
All of this establishes the first layer of Braid’s story: Tim and his complicated relationship with his fiancé and with the Princess. It’s an intensely gendered story that matches some feminist narratives about obsessive ex-boyfriends, jealousy, even stalkers (discussed a bit here).
The epilogue once again changes everything about how we understand the game’s text, reframing things even more fundamentally than the encounter with the Princess. It includes several explicit (even cited!) quotes about the Trinity nuclear bomb tests, and links Tim explicitly to that work.
He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. Through these clues he would find the Princess, see her face. After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder's glass up to his eyes and waited.
This text places Tim as a physicist, present at the first nuclear bomb tests. More importantly, it gives us a new identity for the Princess: she is the atomic bomb. This interpretation is strongly supported by an alternate ending: when Tim is able to make contact with the Princess, she explodes in a mushroom cloud. This is the interpretation that was widely circulated soon after the game’s release. There’s a more thorough explanation here.
This interpretation reframes a lot of elements in the game, and it feels a bit revelatory. It addresses some of the facts, and it provides a satisfactory biography for Tim: he left his fiancé to work on the nuclear bomb, but the fact of the bomb, its horrible violence and the evil that it was used for, led him to reevaluate his life and leave science for a time. The game represents his process of exploring his life, his regrets, and his relationships with his fiancé and with the bomb.
The Science Layer
The atom bomb story is supported by a lot of evidence, and it has been elaborated convincingly and in detail at Gamasutra. But that interpretation doesn’t account for a substantial part of the game, which instead points us to a broader theme about the whole scientific enterprise.
He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.
This set of activities is not accounted for by Tim’s work on the nuclear bomb. It’s a summary of scientific experiments in a variety of fields, from Newtonian physics to physiology and neuroscience. The use of the active voice puts Tim in the shoes of all these experimenters, positions the Princess as the goal of all these disparate activities. In this context, the Princess is a not just the technology of the atomic bomb, but a more abstract symbol of truth, progress, and knowledge of reality.
Tim's search for truth about nature plays out in the gameplay mechanics as well. Each world is defined by a physical rule. In an early interview, Blow lays out a cut-content example that provides a good case study: the rule of the world was that every action had to be valid both moving forward in time and in reverse (eg, you couldn’t fall off a ledge too high to jump up on). This concept is meant to represent the notion from quantum mechanics that there is no directional arrow to time, that there is no particular reason time seems to flow inevitably in one direction.
So in addition to its role in Tim’s biography and soul-searching, each world represents a Kuhnian paradigm in science, a tentative theory that we explore and exhaust until evidence accumulates that inspires a better one. When we reach the end of a world, we find a castle, but learn that “the Princess must be in another castle.” By the end of the game, Tim has explored at least five of these paradigms, and while each of them has proven inadequate, they provide stones that can be recombined into a bigger, better castle. It still won’t contain the Princess; it can never correctly describe reality. But it’s something.
To build a castle of appropriate size, he will need a great many stones. But what he's got now, feels like an acceptable start...
The Ecofeminist Critique
The gendered relationship between Tim and the Princess follows the dichotomy of science and nature in ecofeminism. As Virginia Woolf puts it, "science, it would seem, is not sexless: he is a man, a father and infected too.” And nature is, of course, a Mother. The objectification and violent exploitation of nature is analogous to the objectification and abuse of women in patriarchy. Of course this is not how the men in this framework understand their role—they believe they work in the service of progress, creating a more peaceful and prosperous society. Historically, this progressive vision was linked to the attainment of a rigid, hierarchical social organization: progress meant greater control over the world, both socially and ecologically. Much of the ecofeminist backlash against it can be ascribed to this legacy.
In Braid’s epilogue, the text in each note changes when Tim is hidden—allowing the Princess’ voice to speak. This dialogue is the main source of the ecofeminist language in Braid. I find it fairly unambiguous, and it’s baffling to me that Blow would say feministe’s analysis (though it focuses primarily on the relationship layer) is building on things that “aren’t in the game.”
His arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck. “You're burdening me with your ridiculous need,” she said. Or, she said: “You're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you.” In another time, another place, she said: “Stop yanking on my arm; you're hurting me!”
The examples of science chosen throughout this section are meant to illustrate this clumsy, violent approach: dissecting rat brains, implanting metal in monkey brains. Animal testing is a standard example of the callous disregard, the amoral hunger for knowledge that ecofeminists ascribe to scientists, and that Braid ascribes to Tim.
But the case study Blow chose to put at the center of the game, the splitting of the atom, is perhaps the best ecofeminist narrative there is, at least in the 20th century. There is no clearer case of men putting the needs of the state, the goals of the political elite, over the well-being of the people around the planet. Nothing seems more irresponsible, and nothing does more direct metaphorical violence to the fabric of nature.
If [...] the domination of nature and the domination of persons are inextricably connected, then a nuclear arsenal epitomizes what is wrong with male-oriented hegemonies. A nuclear warhead mounted on the top of a Minuteman missile is the culmination of the phallotechnocracy and is certainly the ultimate symbol of the phallocentric attempt at total domination over all forms of life on the planet. - Lee Schweninger in The Nightmare Considered
The Princess is nature, truth, reality. She is idolized and lusted after by scientists, but their goal is not just to know her, but to obtain the power to control her--at any cost. Yet she remains unattainable, always hoarding secrets, pushing us away with obfuscations and ambiguous data and the limits of our perceptions. But her secrets are tantalizing, valuable and worth chasing.
The candy store. Everything he wanted was on the opposite side of that pane of glass. The store was decorated in bright colors, and the scents wafting out drove him crazy. He tried to rush for the door, or just get closer to the glass, but he couldn't. She held him back with great strength. Why would she hold him back? How might he break free of her grasp? He considered violence.
This again feels like a classic feminist narrative. A man is denied what he wants by a woman and tries to take it by force; she flees, erects barriers, pushes him away, and he pursues, undeterred, raising the stakes. And when he finally reaches her, exhausting five physical paradigms throughout the game, unearthing their secrets and disarming her defenses, they just explode. Whether this is his frustrated anger finding its mark or her empowered fury to defend herself seems immaterial; in a sense, they are both swallowed in the blast. But the game does make it quite clear, at least, that this is not the passion of reunited lovers.
She stood tall and majestic. She radiated fury. She shouted: “Who has disturbed me?” But then, anger expelled, she felt the sadness beneath; she let her breath fall softly, like a sigh, like ashes floating gently on the wind.
She couldn't understand why he chose to flirt so closely with the death of the world.
The Princess is angry, sad, baffled at Tim’s actions, at the childlike immaturity of men with technology. She emphasizes her ultimately unassailable authority.
They had been here before on their daily walks. She didn't mind his screams and his shrieks, or the way he yanked painfully on her braid to make her stop. He was too little to know better.
She picked him up and hugged him: “No, baby,” she said. He was shaking. She followed his gaze toward the treats sitting on pillows behind the glass: the chocolate bar and the magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so many other things, deeper inside. “Maybe when you're older, baby,” she whispered, setting him back on his feet and leading him home, “Maybe when you're older.”
Every day thereafter, as before, she always walked him on a route that passed in front of the candy store.
Inside the candy store lie all the fabled scientific grails: hypothetical physics objects, grand theories about the nature of reality, the way to square what is and what should be. Placing this right before the end of the game restates the authority of nature: while Tim and his colleagues have violated nature in horrible, evil ways, she remains the ultimate authority in the universe, our mother-figure, and Tim’s knowledge remains stunningly incomplete, childlike. And this realization is Tim’s way to cope with his guilt and regrets. He returns to his castle, to science, and continues his work. Chastened, wiser perhaps, but undeterred.
The main thematic thrust of Braid, then, is that the insatiable lust for knowledge and power through science pushes men to violence against the world and, at best, neglect toward the people around them, particularly women. It’s not obvious where the game ultimately comes down on this—perhaps Tim’s journey brings him back to science with a new perspective, incorporating the ecofeminist critique and building a better institution. But the theme could also stand on its own as a simple critique of science.
I personally imagine that Blow wants to leave us on a more positive note, with Tim successfully processing the lessons of the past and building a new castle informed by its lessons. The ecofeminist critique, at least as presented in Braid, is not a widely respected viewpoint in feminist or philosophy of science circles today. I think Blow is less interested in presenting the viewpoint for its own sake than in using it as a case study in the history of science, a way to explore how science affects our relationship with reality and truth. The emotional flashpoints of the ecofeminist narrative--the very traits that often weaken its standing in academic circles--provide ways to grant the theme emotional potency.
Comments