Paper presented to the Canadian Game Studies Association, May 30, 2012.
A longer version appears in The Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. Vol. 32, No. 6 (December 2012) 430-437
A longer version appears in The Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. Vol. 32, No. 6 (December 2012) 430-437
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Unravelling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative MoodTitle screen of Braid.
by Luke Arnott
In Jonathan Blow’s 2008 puzzle game Braid, players control the avatar Tim as he progresses through a fantasy world in search of a lost “Princess” and manipulates the flow of time. Braid has been read alternatively as an allegory of failed relationships, of scientific discovery, or even of the futility of story-based games. Blow himself has been outspoken about the fundamental inability of games to tell stories. Yet much of Braid’s inspiration came from literature: Blow has cited novels such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams as influences. I will suggest today that the link between designing and playing puzzle games and narrative signification is apparent in certain video games and novels, and a comparison of the video game Braid and the novel Life A User’s Manual in particular demonstrates an unacknowledged mode of object-based narrative that operates in both. There is a long history of novels modelled on games and narrative play; many of these works derive their narrative significance from that fact, rather than from notions of plot and character exposition derived from Aristotelian poetics. Among the best examples is Life A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi) by Georges Perec. This novel, describing the occupants of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier at a particular moment in time (8 PM, June 23, 1975), is perfectly intelligible as a conventional narrative; however, it derives far deeper significance from the role of puzzles both within the diegetic world of Life, and in the creation of the text itself, especially the authorial position Perec assumes as a puzzle-maker. Blow’s and Perec’s works, though produced in very different media, communicate significant parts of their stories in the same way. Both employ a similar kind of rhetoric that is based on the spatial relation of objects not only within the texts (i.e. the diegetic space of game and novel) but also within their meta-textual features (the arrangement of chapters, graphics, extra-diegetic pictographs, etc.). This rhetoric is most apparent in puzzle games, though certainly not limited to them. It does not describe actions or situations, as does the grammatical indicative mood; nor does it predict in the manner of a future tense. Rather, it is a rhetoric based on instruction or command. This is what I will call “storytelling in the imperative mood,” and I hope to suggest how this “imperative storytelling” may work across media, and thereby deepen our understanding about how similar semiotic elements operate both in games and in novels.
Fundamental to playing any game is learning its rules. Early video games had written instructions, printed either on the cabinet of arcade games, or, as with console and computer games, in an instruction booklet. Most modern games add an in-game tutorial or “training” level, since controls have become too complex to learn without some practice. As Tom Bissell notes, "It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book. Unfortunately, game designers do not really have a choice. Controller schemas change, sometimes drastically, from game to game and designers simply cannot banish a game’s relevant instructions to a directional booklet: That would be a violation of the interactive pact between game and gamer." Braid has two basic help screens accessed through the game’s menu, and a tutorial level in which simple pictograms illustrate what players must do to progress. Learning the game’s innovative time-rewind mechanic occurs naturally within the game itself, and other tasks that must be performed are signalled by pictograms of the appropriate controls. Most actions, like flipping switches, using keys to unlock doors, and so on, are conventions of puzzle-platformer genre. Novels have their own conventions too. Page numbering, chapter headings, tables of contents, even writing left to right (or right to left, in languages such as Arabic) are all unconsciously accepted, no less than the assumption that the avatar in a platform game will be able to climb ladders or jump off ledges. When novels deliberately play with the conventions of their form, however, they can resort to the same kinds of rhetorical phenomena that Bissell describes in the context of video games. For example, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, famously takes its structure from a game of chess. |
Carroll even provided an “instruction manual” in the preface to the 1896 edition of Through the Looking-Glass because the chess problem “has puzzled some of my readers.” The preface illustrates the set-up of the “board,” and the series of “moves” Alice makes in chess notation, with corresponding plot points and page numbers provided alongside. The reader is, in effect, told how to “read” the novel, precisely because Through the Looking-Glass does not conform to convention, and its incidents are “puzzling” if one does not understand that different rules apply.
Life A User’s Manual also uses a chess problem as an organizing principle – the knight’s tour around the chessboard, a puzzle in which the knight must land on every square once, and only once. Each chapter in the novel corresponds with a room in 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, and the order of the chapters corresponds with Perec’s solution to the knight’s tour. Like Carroll, Perec provides a diagram as a clue to the workings of his novel: a cross section of the apartment block, with the rooms labelled by tenant or by descriptors such as “Stairs” or “Cellars.” Perec may not have signalled that there was a solution as explicitly as Carroll had, but he couldn’t help adding an “instruction manual” of his own.
Indeed, its very name is a clue that the novel requires interpretation; as Perec’s biographer and translator David Bellos notes, “the oddest piece of French in the whole book was its title.” Although early written references to La Vie mode d’emploi marked a separation between vie and mode, for Perec mode d’emploi “was not a subtitle, but an inseparable part of his novel’s proper name”, and he made sure that upon publication it was printed without any comma, semi-colon, or colon. Although the translation of mode d’emploi when referring to Perec’s novel is “user’s manual,” it is also interesting to note that the phrase is a common translation for the “instruction booklet” that accompanies many video games.
The Preamble to Life is even more significant, because it acts as a subtler set of instructions. There Perec describes the art of jigsaw puzzles as “not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure”; the meaning of the pieces comes from how they fit together, not from any intrinsic quality. Perec is signalling that his book should be read as a puzzle; it also points to the particular importance of jigsaw puzzles to the “plot.” Attentive readers are being instructed to play along in a certain way, mindful of the novel’s various tricks. Even if this is not obvious at first, the fact that the passage on puzzles is repeated verbatim roughly a third of the way into the novel, preceding a description of a room in the apartment of Gaspard Winckler – the building’s resident jigsaw puzzle-maker – makes this clear. But what is most important is how Perec concludes the passage:
"despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
Life A User’s Manual also uses a chess problem as an organizing principle – the knight’s tour around the chessboard, a puzzle in which the knight must land on every square once, and only once. Each chapter in the novel corresponds with a room in 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, and the order of the chapters corresponds with Perec’s solution to the knight’s tour. Like Carroll, Perec provides a diagram as a clue to the workings of his novel: a cross section of the apartment block, with the rooms labelled by tenant or by descriptors such as “Stairs” or “Cellars.” Perec may not have signalled that there was a solution as explicitly as Carroll had, but he couldn’t help adding an “instruction manual” of his own.
Indeed, its very name is a clue that the novel requires interpretation; as Perec’s biographer and translator David Bellos notes, “the oddest piece of French in the whole book was its title.” Although early written references to La Vie mode d’emploi marked a separation between vie and mode, for Perec mode d’emploi “was not a subtitle, but an inseparable part of his novel’s proper name”, and he made sure that upon publication it was printed without any comma, semi-colon, or colon. Although the translation of mode d’emploi when referring to Perec’s novel is “user’s manual,” it is also interesting to note that the phrase is a common translation for the “instruction booklet” that accompanies many video games.
The Preamble to Life is even more significant, because it acts as a subtler set of instructions. There Perec describes the art of jigsaw puzzles as “not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure”; the meaning of the pieces comes from how they fit together, not from any intrinsic quality. Perec is signalling that his book should be read as a puzzle; it also points to the particular importance of jigsaw puzzles to the “plot.” Attentive readers are being instructed to play along in a certain way, mindful of the novel’s various tricks. Even if this is not obvious at first, the fact that the passage on puzzles is repeated verbatim roughly a third of the way into the novel, preceding a description of a room in the apartment of Gaspard Winckler – the building’s resident jigsaw puzzle-maker – makes this clear. But what is most important is how Perec concludes the passage:
"despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
From Perec's meditation on puzzle-pieces in Life A User's Manual.
This insight should give pause to any ludological fundamentalists who would argue that video games are, at heart, about player agency and control – that players themselves are the prime engines of game narratives. They are instead enacting what the game’s designers – the puzzle-makers – have already planned for.
Elsewhere Perec himself expressed that his writings always needed to find a balance “between two extremes: the excessively aleatory and the excessively determined” (James, 2009, p. 133); one reason why Life is so successful at achieving this balance is that the narrative constraints which Perec set for himself “operate on the macrostructural and the microstructural levels, organizing the novel’s structure while offering inspiration for its particular stories.” (James, 2009, p. 156)
So if Perec can design a successful narrative based on the relationship between a puzzler and puzzle-maker, can we then see this same phenomenon occurring in a game like Braid? And if so, how does the game’s narrative – if it is a narrative – work? Is it similar to the games that Perec, Lewis Carroll, and the rest play?
The answer to the first question is yes, though Jonathan Blow is firmly against the idea of game narratives, at least in the traditional sense. For Blow, game stories are too often simply tacked on; since most game designers are only good at designing games (and not at telling stories in other media), they are “focusing on the wrong provider of meaning, and no one is challenging them to do otherwise.” (Bissell, 93) Although gameplay is the meaning-maker towards which Blow would have video games direct their artistic energies, implicit in Blow’s practice is the same authorial/puzzle-making relationship seen in Perec.
To demonstrate this, we might begin with an instance of implicit puzzle-making, before moving on to what Blow has explicitly stated about certain levels in Braid. In a tidy coincidence, a large part of Braid’s gameplay is the collection and assembly of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each world in the game has pieces scattered throughout, and Tim must solve spatio-temporal puzzles to reach them. Once he has all the pieces for a particular world, Tim can assemble them to create a picture.
Elsewhere Perec himself expressed that his writings always needed to find a balance “between two extremes: the excessively aleatory and the excessively determined” (James, 2009, p. 133); one reason why Life is so successful at achieving this balance is that the narrative constraints which Perec set for himself “operate on the macrostructural and the microstructural levels, organizing the novel’s structure while offering inspiration for its particular stories.” (James, 2009, p. 156)
So if Perec can design a successful narrative based on the relationship between a puzzler and puzzle-maker, can we then see this same phenomenon occurring in a game like Braid? And if so, how does the game’s narrative – if it is a narrative – work? Is it similar to the games that Perec, Lewis Carroll, and the rest play?
The answer to the first question is yes, though Jonathan Blow is firmly against the idea of game narratives, at least in the traditional sense. For Blow, game stories are too often simply tacked on; since most game designers are only good at designing games (and not at telling stories in other media), they are “focusing on the wrong provider of meaning, and no one is challenging them to do otherwise.” (Bissell, 93) Although gameplay is the meaning-maker towards which Blow would have video games direct their artistic energies, implicit in Blow’s practice is the same authorial/puzzle-making relationship seen in Perec.
To demonstrate this, we might begin with an instance of implicit puzzle-making, before moving on to what Blow has explicitly stated about certain levels in Braid. In a tidy coincidence, a large part of Braid’s gameplay is the collection and assembly of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each world in the game has pieces scattered throughout, and Tim must solve spatio-temporal puzzles to reach them. Once he has all the pieces for a particular world, Tim can assemble them to create a picture.
Completing these puzzles unlocks other worlds, and completing them all unlocks the final world. The puzzles themselves are very simple, with two exceptions, which build on each other very significantly.
First, the jigsaw puzzle of World 2, “Time and Forgiveness,” contains within its picture a platform on which Tim can stand once the puzzle pieces that its parts are found on are assembled; this platform is then required to reach one of the remaining puzzle pieces. Blow has said that level design “communicates the things you can touch” in Braid, as in most video games: objects with higher levels of graphic detail are interpreted as “foreground,” and the avatar can interact with them; objects with lower graphic detail are interpreted as background. Although the puzzle pieces and the images on them are background in every other instance, here Blow is playing with the expectations of his puzzlers to complicate an otherwise straightforward instance of graphic representation.
First, the jigsaw puzzle of World 2, “Time and Forgiveness,” contains within its picture a platform on which Tim can stand once the puzzle pieces that its parts are found on are assembled; this platform is then required to reach one of the remaining puzzle pieces. Blow has said that level design “communicates the things you can touch” in Braid, as in most video games: objects with higher levels of graphic detail are interpreted as “foreground,” and the avatar can interact with them; objects with lower graphic detail are interpreted as background. Although the puzzle pieces and the images on them are background in every other instance, here Blow is playing with the expectations of his puzzlers to complicate an otherwise straightforward instance of graphic representation.
Second, the puzzle of World 3, “Time and Mystery,” has one of Braid’s eight “secret stars” hidden within it as a meta-puzzle. To reveal the star, the player must collect two of the corner pieces of the puzzle, which have two points of the star hidden within them, and then assemble those pieces contrary to the logic of the jigsaw puzzle; the flat edges must be placed against each other. Then, the two pieces must be arranged near the top of the puzzle frame so that their two points line up with the top point of the star which is part of the background outside the puzzle frame. If this is done correctly, the secret star reveals itself. Finally, to collect the star, the player must use the same in-puzzle platform from World 2 to get up to a position where he can reach the star. Thus the meta-jigsaw puzzle requires the solution of a previous jigsaw puzzle for its own solution. This of course is “fairly typical of the spirit in which Gaspard Winckler designed his puzzles” in Life (Perec, 2009, p. 381); Perec’s puzzle-maker – and by extension Perec himself – did not conceive of his puzzles or their solutions in isolation. The patterns of previous puzzles inform the calculus of all the puzzles that follow for Blow as much as for Perec.
We have already seen how Perec’s re-use of the Preamble to Life in the subsequent Winckler chapter gives it added signification; nor is this the last meaningful repetition of descriptive material. At the end of the final chapter, five paragraphs summarize what the inhabitants of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier are doing. The first four begin with the sentence “It is the twenty-third of June, nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening” (p. 563); the last reads, “It is the twenty-third of June, nineteen seventy-five, and in a moment it will be eight o’clock in the evening” (p. 563). Though the actions and poses have already been described throughout the novel, their repetition here is a reprise or a variation, giving formal closure and thus new meaning to what has come before. This is paralleled in Braid: Blow has said that some of the puzzles take their cue from classical music, in which “restatement is valuable and repetition is not”.
We have already seen how Perec’s re-use of the Preamble to Life in the subsequent Winckler chapter gives it added signification; nor is this the last meaningful repetition of descriptive material. At the end of the final chapter, five paragraphs summarize what the inhabitants of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier are doing. The first four begin with the sentence “It is the twenty-third of June, nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening” (p. 563); the last reads, “It is the twenty-third of June, nineteen seventy-five, and in a moment it will be eight o’clock in the evening” (p. 563). Though the actions and poses have already been described throughout the novel, their repetition here is a reprise or a variation, giving formal closure and thus new meaning to what has come before. This is paralleled in Braid: Blow has said that some of the puzzles take their cue from classical music, in which “restatement is valuable and repetition is not”.
"The Pit."
Thus the first level of each world, “The Pit,” – in which Tim must fetch a key from a pit and rewind time to get back out – is repeated, but with subtle variations that introduce new gameplay mechanics. The last version of “The Pit” doesn’t require Tim to do anything but jump over it; this is a “pattern break” that Blow put in knowing that too many variations can become predictable.
Clearly there is a communicative impulse behind these symbolic orderings and arrangements. For Blow, the relationship between the game designer and game player, between puzzle-maker and puzzler, is a rhetorical one. He speaks of “gameplay rhetoric” as a way of signalling a message by use of the objects and spaces of the game within the context of gameplay mechanics. “One of the simplest pieces of gameplay rhetoric” in Braid, according to Blow, is the early level called “Leap of Faith.”
Clearly there is a communicative impulse behind these symbolic orderings and arrangements. For Blow, the relationship between the game designer and game player, between puzzle-maker and puzzler, is a rhetorical one. He speaks of “gameplay rhetoric” as a way of signalling a message by use of the objects and spaces of the game within the context of gameplay mechanics. “One of the simplest pieces of gameplay rhetoric” in Braid, according to Blow, is the early level called “Leap of Faith.”
To progress in this level the player must make Tim jump off a cliff whose bottom he cannot see. Many platform games put the player in a similar position, though it usually requires the loss of one of the player’s finite “lives” to figure out the solution. But in Braid the level is “called ‘Leap of Faith’ very blatantly as a statement that when you’ve got [the ability to] rewind [time] … it’s actually okay to kill the player all you want.” (“Game City,” n. d.) The pictograph that accompanies the start of the level, moreover, depicts Tim falling off the edge of the cliff. Thus a combination of written language and visual and spatial cues, combined with platform genre conventions, all add up to a rhetorical gesture.
Thus solving puzzles can be seen as a complex, mediated communication between a puzzle-maker and a puzzler-player, in which the pleasure comes from fully understanding the communication implicit on all its levels. Even a one-player video game is “not a solitary game” (Perec, 2009, p. xviii); to win is to defeat the designer.
Braid’s “Jumpman” level illustrates this relationship particularly well, showing how all the elements discussed earlier, from implicit and explicit arrangements of objects in space to the understanding of context and conventions, work together. One part of the level is set up as an allusion to one of the Ur-texts of platformers, Donkey Kong.
Thus solving puzzles can be seen as a complex, mediated communication between a puzzle-maker and a puzzler-player, in which the pleasure comes from fully understanding the communication implicit on all its levels. Even a one-player video game is “not a solitary game” (Perec, 2009, p. xviii); to win is to defeat the designer.
Braid’s “Jumpman” level illustrates this relationship particularly well, showing how all the elements discussed earlier, from implicit and explicit arrangements of objects in space to the understanding of context and conventions, work together. One part of the level is set up as an allusion to one of the Ur-texts of platformers, Donkey Kong.
The literary technique of allusion is achieved through the signification of objects again; the platforms, ladders, and movement of the enemies mirror those found in the first screen of Donkey Kong; also, an ape statue holds the cannon that is shooting out enemies at the top, while the puzzle piece that Tim must retrieve is in the same relative position as Pauline, Jumpman’s girlfriend, whom he must reach to free from the clutches of Donkey Kong. If that were all there were to the allusion, this would simply be a clever bit of intertextuality. However, Blow designed it as a trap: players who recognize the allusion and climb toward the puzzle piece in imitation of Jumpman find that it is impossible; Tim cannot reach the piece without touching an enemy and dying, since the movement of time in this world, and hence enemies’ positions, are linked directly to Tim’s own movement. It is only when players take another route that they can solve the puzzle. To put this in terms of a spatio-visual imperative mood, Blow has designed the level knowing that all the objects in combination would signify “proceed as if this were Donkey Kong.” To the player savvy to the tricks that Blow has already used, this signifies “proceeding as if this were Donkey Kong is likely a trap; find another way.” The less-attentive player (or the “freely-exploring,” interactive player) can take the imperative at face value, but he will be frustrated in his efforts to play as though this were a simple repetition of Donkey Kong gameplay. Sooner or later he will have to conclude that “proceeding as if this were Donkey Kong is a trap; find another way.”
Storytelling in the imperative mood is not so much the dominance of the spatial arrangements of objects over language, but the use of both elements in varying degrees as befits the medium in which the narrative is taking place. A book will necessarily privilege words over objects, while a video game will privilege objects over words. Life A User’s Manual and Braid ought to remind us that a medium’s prevalence toward one form of signification (narrative or ludic) does not exclude other forms working in concert, and that it would be a mistake to assume otherwise. Stories can play games, though not all stories are sophisticated enough to do so; and while not every video game has a compelling story behind it, games can tell stories. The idea of “imperative” storytelling allows for a discussion of games – and for that matter, novels, and perhaps other media as well – that denies neither the importance of player interactivity nor that of authorial design.
Storytelling in the imperative mood is not so much the dominance of the spatial arrangements of objects over language, but the use of both elements in varying degrees as befits the medium in which the narrative is taking place. A book will necessarily privilege words over objects, while a video game will privilege objects over words. Life A User’s Manual and Braid ought to remind us that a medium’s prevalence toward one form of signification (narrative or ludic) does not exclude other forms working in concert, and that it would be a mistake to assume otherwise. Stories can play games, though not all stories are sophisticated enough to do so; and while not every video game has a compelling story behind it, games can tell stories. The idea of “imperative” storytelling allows for a discussion of games – and for that matter, novels, and perhaps other media as well – that denies neither the importance of player interactivity nor that of authorial design.
References
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Beran, D., & Hellman, D. A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible. Retrieved 12/14, 2011, from http://www.alessonislearned.com/
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Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person: New media as story, performance, and game (pp. 118-130). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Lebowitz, J., & Klug, C. (2011). Interactive storytelling for video games: A player-centered approach to creating memorable characters and stories. Focal Press.
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Parkin, S. n. d. Jonathan Blow: The path to Braid. Retrieved 12/14, 2011, from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3786/jonathan_blow_the_path_to_braid.php
Perec, G. (2009). Life A user's manual (D. Bellos Trans.). Boston: David R. Godine.
Ryan, M. (2004). Multivariant narratives. In S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A companion to digital humanities (pp. 415-430). Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
Ryan, M. (2006). Avatars of story. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP.
Schwartz, P. (1988). Georges Perec: Traces of his passage. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications.
Bellos, D. (1993). Georges Perec: A life in words: A biography. Boston: D.R. Godine.
Beran, D., & Hellman, D. A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible. Retrieved 12/14, 2011, from http://www.alessonislearned.com/
Bissell, T. (2010). Extra lives: Why video games matter. Pantheon.
Blow, J. (2008). Conflicts in game design (MIGS 2008). Retrieved 11/21 from http://number-none.com/blow/slides/montreal_2008.zip;
Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities (W. Weaver Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Carroll, L. (1971). In Gray D. J. (Ed.), Alice in wonderland: Authoritative texts of Alice's adventures in wonderland, through the looking glass, and the hunting of the snark with backgrounds and essays in criticism. New York: W.W. Norton.
Darley, A. (2000). Visual digital culture: Surface play and spectacle in new media genres. London; New York: Routledge.
Fordyce, R., & Marello, C. (Eds.). (1994). Semiotics and linguistics in Alice's worlds. Berlin; New York: W. de Gruyter.
Galloway, A. R. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP.
Game city jonathan blow braid talk. Retrieved 11/21, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwsi7TEQxKc
James, A. (2009). Constraining chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP.
Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person: New media as story, performance, and game (pp. 118-130). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Lebowitz, J., & Klug, C. (2011). Interactive storytelling for video games: A player-centered approach to creating memorable characters and stories. Focal Press.
Mitchell, P. (2004). Constructing the architext: Georges Perec's Life a user's manual. Mosaic, 37(1), 1-16. Retrieved from http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion-us&rft_id=xri:lion:rec:abell:R01710175
Myers, D. (2007). Plays of destruction. Intermédialités: Histoire Et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres Et Des Techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, (9)
Number None, Inc. (2008). Braid. [Xbox Live Arcade]
Parkin, S. n. d. Jonathan Blow: The path to Braid. Retrieved 12/14, 2011, from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3786/jonathan_blow_the_path_to_braid.php
Perec, G. (2009). Life A user's manual (D. Bellos Trans.). Boston: David R. Godine.
Ryan, M. (2004). Multivariant narratives. In S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A companion to digital humanities (pp. 415-430). Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
Ryan, M. (2006). Avatars of story. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP.
Schwartz, P. (1988). Georges Perec: Traces of his passage. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications.