Braid and #metoo
“I’m hanging on in there,” said Harvey Weinstein, in the wake of revelations about a pattern of abuse that has upended the entertainment industry, tipping all its secrets out. “I’m not doing OK, but I’m trying. I’ve got to get help. You know what — we all make mistakes.” Laurie Penny, "We're All Mad Here: Weinstein, Women, and the Language of Lunacy"
Last week, I taught Braid, Jonathan Blow’s 2008 Mario-critique that’s credited with starting the big indie boom. Braid isn’t my favorite, but it’s interesting, historically important, and a great way to illustrate to students the way that a simple game mechanic can birth a rule, the rule can have a consequence, and the accumulation of rules and consequences can deliver a message. This is what Blow is known for—he designs puzzles very organically, growing an idea from simple mechanic to complicated meaning (for a great explanation of this concept, see Game Maker’s Toolkit). By showing so directly how a game’s play can reflect theme and narrative, Braid did something hard and new.
That said, it’s never been my favorite because the game and its writing are so intensely self-indulgent. Tim, our protagonist, “is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake." You get this text in a prologue screen. Tim, your avatar, is a little white dude in a suit and tie. Ok, Tim made a mistake, the Princess was snatched, so far, so Mario. Next bit: "Not just one. He made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one remains clear: the princess turning sharply away, her braid lashing at him with contempt." I am...less on board with Tim at this point. Then: “Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving them too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we've learned from a mistake and became better for it, shouldn't we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?"
By the end of this first set of prologue screens, Tim has been established as 1) our protagonist, and 2) a whiny, lying, entitled person with a victim complex. You don’t need to read far between the lines to see that he’s framing the situation with very little regard for his partner’s experience. He “made a mistake,” and, whatever it was, she left him for it. She wasn’t “snatched by a horrible and evil monster.” She left. Braid tells us this, 30 seconds into the game. But Tim is really a nice guy. He should be “rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake.” She should be his reward.
We play the game under the shadow of this expectation. Tim can reverse time in various ways, thus undoing his mistakes as he makes them and solving puzzles that would be unsolvable otherwise. It’s really fricking cool, except for the sense that our entitled hero fundamentally misunderstands his due. I didn’t want to help him learn. I didn’t want her to give him another chance. The final world in Braid illuminates this tension beautifully: Tim moves backwards in time throughout the level, ending up victoriously at the Princess’ window, only for time to begin moving *forward* again and showing how, from her perspective, she was always running away from him (Here’s a run of the last level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiGU0GXQdKA)
So, fair enough. Braid brilliantly critiques the “save-the-princess” mechanic, gives us a “nice guy” anti-hero who turns out to have been the monster all along, and offers some really sweet time-reversal puzzles. But the thing that makes Braid feel so cringy to me is that we still feel bad for Tim. We are supposed to. It doesn’t matter that his mistakes are clear and his whole quest is self-indulgent. It doesn’t matter that the Princess runs away at the end and he (and the player) are left morosely to consider their complicity and nice-guy-ish-ness. He’s still the victim. My students’ overwhelming reaction to the end was frustration ("Wait, we were the bad guy? Why did we bother playing?") and empathy (“I feel so bad for him!”) The game paints Tim so prettily that, when the Princess runs, your sadness is all for him and his disappointment.
I’ve been thinking a lot about victimhood this last week, because of Tim and because of #metoo.
The women who write #metoo are also forced to claim a victimized subject position. It’s grammatically prescribed—the dative pronoun makes it clear that “I” am not the subject, that something was done to “me.” A lot of smart people wrote about #metoo last week, and a lot of the discourse has been really interesting—how frustrating it is that women must re-affirm their trauma again and again to be believed, how uncomfortable it is not to know whether or not you “belong” in the conversation if nothing “that bad” has happened to you, how plenty of survivors aren’t posting because it’s too upsetting or they don’t want their professional networks to know, how wearying to have so little hope that anything will actually change, because no matter how many million people say they were hurt, no one self-identifies as an asshole that hurts others. Everyone is their own protagonist.
Everyone is their own protagonist. But to be a female-presenting person is to get a lifetime of conditioning that you are fragile, you are vulnerable, your rape is just around the corner. You may, like me, be lucky enough to avoid the most traumatic events, but there is no way to avoid the smaller reminders.
For a totally pedestrian example: when I was 11, I ran onto a hotel elevator in my bathing suit with a towel over my shoulders. I was on vacation and my brothers were already at the pool on the first floor. At the next floor, a man about 45-years-old got on and stared me up and down without doing anything for about 10 seconds. It wasn’t a leer, just very, very thorough. Then he smiled and said he forgot to press his floor, and it was my fault for distracting him. I smiled back hesitantly. He said I had a pretty smile.
I have is about a hundred very minor stories like that one. Their ubiquity is, as Alexandra Petri wrote, treated like the weather. It’s a cloud you’re just always aware of. You learn that you’re living at someone else’s discretion, that the world is not quite yours.
This, then, is the message you glean from the very simple mechanics of patriarchy. A look, a gesture, a catcall, a comment made in passing—repeat and repeat these structures until their repetition becomes the procedural ethic by which you live. Tim gets to reverse time and learn from his mistakes and make the whole world his, but you don’t. You’re too busy running away.
