Braid – Jonathan Blow
It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.
