Time Out of Mind [WSJ, via GameSetWatch]

Does that mean that the segment of the population who has parked their Learjets long enough to complete the download have made the game a profit? Not quite.

Jonathan Blow, the game's creator, says Braid needs to reach sales of exactly "a lot more than it has gotten so far" to get out of the red. Let's hope the rest of the Xbox Live community, the type who don't sport platinum cards and massive trust funds, will be able to dig deep and snatch up what Blow says is "the highest-rated XBLA game ever." See? He says it right down there.

Braid is the highest-rated XBLA game ever. (Also, sales data). [Braid Blog]

Braid had already appeared at two GDCs before I ever got involved. Jonathan Blow, its creator, showed Braid's time manipulation puzzle-platformer gameplay at a couple Experimental Gameplay Workshops, and an Independent Games Festival, where it won an award for game design. Minus some polish, it was nearly a finished game: playable, coherent and individualistic.

Visually, though, it was primitive. Its blocks, spikes and ladders were utilitarian, communicating merely the elements of platformer-ness. It could have remained a visually simple game, but it already contained hints that it wanted to be more, to express itself across the full multi-media palette available to video games.

... Hired as visual artist in the summer of 2006, my challenge was not only to clearly present Braid's mechanics and behaviors, but to help tell a story that was anything but literal: part anecdote, part artifice, part philosophy.

It's an interesting article even if you're not terribly interested in Braid, as it goes through the art creation step by step with lots of screens. It's an edifying little essay.

The Art Of Braid: Creating A Visual Identity For An Unusual Game [Gamasutra]

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, explains why it was priced so, commenting on the official Braid blog he had to "guard against [...] the Space Giraffe problem." He offers up the low priced, low selling (just 19,000 downloads) psychedelic shooter as an example of how pricing came back to bite the developer in the ass (specifically the wallet).

He writes that Space Giraffe for XBLA already had a built-in audience of Jeff Minter followers, something Braid does not.

"There is a significant possibility that Braid would have been the next Psychonauts or Beyond Good and Evil (critically acclaimed but nobody played it)," Blow contends "Even at $10."

He later puts the cost into more tangible terms, commenting that "If it were just a matter of my own money, I wouldn’t care so much, but I ran out of money while developing Braid and had to borrow a lot — so I owe people a lot of money. That makes the nature of the decision a little different."

That decision, it sounds like, may not have been entirely Blow's to make. He theorizes that Microsoft would have priced the title at 1200 MS Points regardless of his wishes to go lower.

I'll be buying the game when it's released on Xbox Live Marketplace early tomorrow morning, despite having free access to it right now. I would recommend you do the same. But only if you like awesome games with a great sense of humor, fantastic gameplay mechanics and stunning artwork.

Recent Braid Review and Preview [Braid Blog - thanks, Mike!]

Now we just have to wait a couple more weeks to see if the Castle Crashers price tag was wrong yet actually right as well.

Summer of Arcade: Braid - XBLA - Wednesday [Gamerscore Blog]

I started fumbling my way through instead of actually understanding the exact solution and executing it flawlessly. I beat the boss at the end of the branching-paths level but I'm still not sure how I did it. This again reminds me of taking a math exam and writing down some random number because I kind of figured that was the answer, but couldn't crisply explain it. There are plenty of games that you can win just by randomly mashing buttons - say, any number of fighting games - and everyone's played an adventure game where you combine the plunger with the rubber ducky and the shoelace and somehow manage to fish the key out of the grate, but the only reason you threw all that crap together is that it was the only stuff left in your inventory.

That said, Braid has little tolerance for half-assedry.

I personally didn't find it maddening, since there's no penalty for screwing up and it's pretty easy to hop back and forth between levels if you find yourself hideously stuck (sometimes it's better to just come back later). The experimentation was what made the game fun for me; if I couldn't 'crisply' explain how I did something, did it really matter? I've come through more than one boss battle or game level on little more than luck and just managing to survive; since Braid doesn't have a death penalty, 'managing to survive' isn't a concern, and that luck can lead to happy accidents that will allow you to understand exactly how to manipulate the controls.

Braid: More Fun Than Calculus! [Save the Robot]

Developer Jonathan Blow may be an annoyingly pretentious loudmouth, but this video for his upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Braid shows that he at least has some idea about making an intriguing game. The game revolves around manipulating time, with time behaving differently on different levels. It looks like a rather interesting mechanic, and the obvious homage to a certain famous plumber gives it a silly sort of charm. As long as playing the game doesn't involve me having to actually listen to Blow talking I think I might be sold.

The way you've formed the question is the way I think a lot of principled indies approach it — "I want to have integrity, but I also need to get my game out there so people will buy it." This is sort of true, but I think this way of looking at things inherently causes problems. Making money is hard sometimes, and if you convince yourself that you need to make money (in order to eat, or fund the next game, or whatever), then you are automatically on a slippery slope and will start justifying all sorts of things, and eventually you are far from your original ideals but that doesn't seem too bad because you "just had to be realistic".

Do people sometimes go in directions they might not otherwise because they have silly things like food to worry about? Sure. But 'automatically on a slippery slope'? Give me a break. God forbid people should want their job to at least provide basic necessities — how un-indie of them! However, I wasn't really irked until I read his take on Passage, even though he managed to throw the designer a bone after seemingly missing the whole point. It's an interesting interview to read through, even if it did make me hopping mad at points.

Jonathan Blow Says 'Fuck That!' [Gamehelper]

Blow attacks World of Warcraft, describing the grind of leveling and the reward system inherent in that as "lying to the players", and even suggests that designers should be ashamed of exploiting illusory level-based mechanics. He argues that games are, like film and literature, becoming a powerful medium in which creators will be able to make choices they can be ashamed of. He wonders whether games as they are currently executed could lead to a "societal problem". Gasps and nervous laughter rises from the audience as Blow delivers his ideas, an audience which reportedly included uncomfortable-looking reps from Blizzard ....

There's more, of course (including going after the 'moral dilemma' of the Little Sisters in Bioshock that has been much discussed), but if it sounds interesting, you can head over to the Braid blog and snag the files.

This game is about expanding your perception. It demands that you learn to see. Most of the reviewers who gave the game low scores, I claim, were too closed-minded; they weren't receptive to this kind of teaching, which the game is obviously telling you it wants to do, if you are quiet enough and listen.

The game could be much clearer about its intentions. There's a tutorial, but it only teaches you the basic game mechanics (and not very clearly, at that). The tutorial never says anything like "this game is going to throw ever-more visual insanity at you, and your job is to make sense of it all". That would have been undesirably heavy-handed, but I know that if Jeff had structured the game so that this intent was somehow clear to the player from the start, there would be many fewer bad reviews.

He goes on to say that maybe Space Giraffe is like James Joyce's Ulysses - a firestorm for controversy, but some people just don't get it. Me? Not a fan of Ulysses, but I'm pretty fond of Space Giraffe.

In which I compare Space Giraffe to Ulysses [Braid via GameSetWatch]

About gamers these days and what they are thinking, I'm not sure. With those of us who have been in the industry for a while, it helps to be honest with ourselves that we are pretty far-separated from the viewpoint of the typical gamer. So I can't exactly know what the general perception is about the creative vision of games, but my guess is, people don't think that games are generally created with much of a vision at all. For me, the very existence of the "are games art?"argument is proof of this. It's obvious — of course games are art! The entire argument just seems ridiculous to me. But it doesn't seem ridiculous if you don't have a certain kind of mental model about what a game is, and about the role of the creators' vision in that. If you think a game is "Madden 2008," then hey, games probably aren't art.

There's some sweeping condemnations in the interview, but some relatively refreshing view points, as well.

"A Higher Standard" — Game Designer Jonathan Blow Challenges Super Mario's Gold Coins, "Unethical" MMO Design And Everything Else You May Hold Dear About Video Games [MTV News: Multiplayer]