The Game Critique

Indie Game Spotlight is a weekly feature where I highlight an independent game that deserves attention. Given the difficulty these developers have in being heard, every little bit helps. Some will be free, some will cost money, but all are deserving of some attention.

P0nd is a one-button, flash game by PeanutGallery that came out I want to say over a year and half ago. It is a strange game and before I go any further I want you to go try it. It won’t take more than a few minutes of your time, definitely not more than 5.

Played it? Okay, good.

P0nd is a strange game as it is one built upon contradictions for a numerous point that don’t make any sense until the end, by which point most will have been left confused, disappointed and/or angry. All of those emotions are part of the point. I know it’s a less than five minute long flash game, but spoilers from here on out.

You start off at the beginning of the day as your avatar goes out for a walk with the opening lines appearing on the screen once you hit start:

I delight in the smalle things,
the shape of a leafe,
the curl of sunlight on the grasses.
I set out before dawne, one foot afore the other,
To see what wonders the world may holde.

Those spelling mistakes are not mine; it is word for word what the opening says. (It uses old English spelling for four of the words, but it isn’t consistent and done for no reason.)  The atmosphere is very relaxing until you get to the titular pond. You do the inhale, exhale, feel relaxed, enjoy the scenery thing until it all goes to hell. A giant cell-shaded squid emerges from the pond and the soundtrack turns from light piano to hard rock and the sky turns blood red. Two health bars appear at the top in traditional fighting game style with instructions of what to do flash on screen. It ends with a cutscene of a meteor coming down and laying waste to both the squid and the pond and a scene of your character standing there, with what I can only imagine as the biggest WTF expression on his face.

It ends in the evening with the avatar returning to his cabin and turning the TV on as represented by the noise and the windows flashing white, green, blue and red. We then get a parting quote, “I may be wrong…” – Roger Ebert. This is a clear reference to Ebert’s now famous claim that games can never be art that after much argument and much digital ink refuting him, he recanted saying he doesn’t know enough and that, who knows, he may be wrong. There was more to that hence the ellipses.

From this we have a new lens to examine the game through. The game is a commentary on the nature of the game industry at this point. It all comes from a place of synthesis. No single part of the game has any part of that commentary built in. It is in the compare, contrast and finally the end where it becomes apparent, or rather, the thesis, the antithesis and finally the synthesis.

We don’t know at the time, but afterwards we can look at the beginning segments of the relaxing indie game with an innovative or at least different looking enough to subscribe to the stereotypical indie game label. The opening poem is pretentious, the pixilated look, the light piano music, the game could probably win at indie game bingo. Then we arrive at the pond and everything becomes EXTREME. The graphics, the music, the animations are all EXTREME and meant to pump you up. It’s all about the hyper action of the AAA game industry looking to have you participate in awesome looking things, even though you have no agency. Now we have an avatar after the fact just looking confused.

He went out promised something Zen or sublime and his experience ended with this. Better to go off home and watch TV instead. In this environment, where even something new and possibly enlightening done through mechanics is saddled with tropes and conventions that make a game a game so that people wont be confused or something. In the end everyone leaves unhappy. This moment punctuated by the Ebert quote now reading almost mockingly. Yes, he may be wrong, but we certainly aren’t helping.

The meaning is hidden in the synthesis of the game. Here it uses it by having the thesis and antithesis as contradictory elements. I can see in another game using discordant, but not contrary elements to create meaning. The purpose is that the game recognizes the differing elements and presents a conclusion immediately after they have been recognized and internalized. It’s not something I see in game much like I see in other mediums. Not all games with discordant elements though are doing this or are capable of it. It requires recognition on the part of the creator and a conscious effort in the game to pull it off.

This isn’t a deep game by any means, but it’s a perfect example in a seemingly ongoing argument I’ve been having about authorship. There is a contingent in all art forms that claim the author has no say in the meaning of their own work, that only what is in the text matters and everything else is unnecessary. Now despite the logical fallacy that without the author the work couldn’t be created, here we have a work that with the text alone is not great. Then the author reaches out at the audience and smacks them across the head. The author’s voice is loud and clear in what they are trying to convey. With that, I cannot see, at least in this case how the specific author’s voice does not matter to a work in which it is embedded, regardless of what you think of it.

Indie Game Spotlight is a weekly feature where I highlight an independent game that deserves attention. Given the difficulty these developers have in being heard, every little bit helps. Some will be free, some will cost money, but all are deserving of some attention.

The Stanley Parable is a Source Code mod made by Davey Wreden. It took two years of work to make and is a superb think piece. That’s what it is, a think piece in interactive form. It’s not a game in the traditional sense. There are no points. There are no enemies. It’s a first person game with no shooting or jumping. It is a game about choice. That’s all you do during the course of the game make choices.

They are binary choices, each one of them, but they all lead to a very different conclusion. Why? It’s unusual in that it’s not just a work that may need to be experienced again in order to fully appreciate it; it demands that you play it again. In fact there are 6 endings. I’m not sure if I should tell you that before telling you to play it before reading on, but I feel that you need to know that to appreciate everything. It is easy to miss one of the choices. This way there is no confusion.

But seriously, I highly recommend you go play it now. It will require Source SDK Base 2007 installed on your computer to run and Steam since that’s how you get it. You can download the mod here with instructions.

This is a game about the relationship between player and designer. That is what it is at its core. It is called a parable in the title, but that is a cover. The parable is the story you get should you follow everything as instructed, as the narrator wants you to. By itself, that ending is a parable, a short tale about freedom and control. It’s light and doesn’t offend or really make you think. It’s fluff. Alone it is a parable, but with the rest of the game it becomes part of something greater. The game as a whole, with all the endings is allegorical.

There are six endings with six very different stories tied to them. They all start the same way. You are Stanley, office drone number 427 who spends his day pushing buttons as commands pop up on the screen. You know this because you hear a narrator telling you all this and then you are told no one else is here. So you go looking for someone following the instruction the narrator give you until you come to your first choice.

I thought hard how to explore this game and while just relating my own experiences from the order I played it, I noticed the whole. While playing towards each individual ending it is difficult to see the whole, you can only see what the specific story you are playing out is telling you, but this is a game that demands reflection. It is a game that only works in that context.

The designer has said you can play the choices in any order you want and there is no prescribed way to do it. And there isn’t. It’s an interesting work of post-modernism that eschews reading order and drive to the end for the meaning under the whole as the desired goal. A game with six endings where getting to the end is not the point. Though the order does not matter in playing, the human brain is a funny thing and demands order from chaos, structure from the random. To see the allegory the mind needs to see the story, the flow of events with a beginning, middle and end. The order I think is in the degree of defiance from the narrator.

The first part is to follow the narrator’s instructions all the way to the end. To get the “proper ending.” One follows the designer’s prescribed path to an ending where Stanley is free, but is he really. Once it is over, control is taken away from you and with the narrator speaking you have what essentially is a cutscene. So all the game has done is free Stanley from your control and place it in the hands of the computer. You are not Stanley and all this time you were following the instructions of a computer and when you turned off that computer in game we are presented with an exit where our computer now takes over. This is an irony not recognized by the game. We followed the designer’s story and it was boring. There is nothing there;` it’s dull and safe. It was a parable that taught us nothing.

The second time, one does everything as instructed until the very last part. You turned the computer back on, which, paradoxically, is supposed to put me back under its control, while at the same time defying the narrator. Here we see the designer as tormentor. Things don’t go his way so he punishes the player. We’ve all seen this person. The DM who sends hoards of monsters or instakill random accidents when the players go too far a field and destroyed everything he made. The spoilsport who doesn’t get his way so he takes his ball and goes home. Here we understand there are three people here and not two like we always think in video games at the very moment the narrator/designer explicitly states this is a video game, but there is no escape from the impending doom. The three people are the narrator, Stanley and the player. Because now the narrator is no longer addressing Stanley or even veiling talking about him in order to get the player to act. He’s angry Now he’s outright about communicating with you and not your avatar.

The third part is playing to see where the other stairwell goes. And here is where things get trippy. Not just because of the meta commentary about what we as a player are experiencing, but by keeping it within the fiction we get a whole new type of story, only to realize, sorry it isn’t your story after all. It is there for the narrator to again abuse the player in another way for going off track. He uses the fiction itself to go against you. It’s not passive aggressive like other parts, that we’ll get to, are. It’s creative and within the fiction making it that much more of a kick the shins. Players are the driving force behind their games. They are used to being the main characters, for everything revolving around them. And things have so far, but now the ending is ripped away from you. The narrator tells you, sorry, it wasn’t your story Stanley it was this woman’s and you were just an odd event on the way to work for her. Here the designer goes out of his way to create the strange mindscape and way out both for you and for himself for not following the story.

The fourth play through is the original choice with the two doors. We defy it at the very beginning and again by not getting back on track. Only at the elevator do we acquiesce to the narrator and push up on the elevator. There is no trick; there is no sadistic streak in the narrator this time, he’s not being passive aggressive anymore in fiction or out. He outright tells us that by going up in the elevator we are headed for punishment. (Though he does say Stanley does it to punish himself.) The trap is obvious, but there is no escape, we are told so. Until the person writing the story breaks the 4th wall’s 4th wall and tells Stanley to escape from the narrator whom she is writing. Because her entrance is in narrating what the narrator has done to Stanley. No we understand there are four people here, not three. She is the designer and the narrator is her avatar in this digital world, yet she acts as if Stanley is real by telling him to escape and quit out, for it is the only way. And she is right, but she is still talking to the player. The narrator has no power and neither does Stanley, they are pawns of the designer and player both. And when Stanley is dead and the narrator gone because he has no story to tell, you will stare at a black screen, until you press “ESC” and quit out. It is the only way out of the program.

The next playthrough is where you go down the elevator and then acquiesce by going through the red door instead of further defiance. The game takes us back to the office we originally left. Here I was subjected the mind numbing work of pushing button prompted on the screen for the rest of my life. Except it wasn’t on the blue screen in the game, it was on my screen. It was the white, semi translucent writing of game instructions that pop up when you are learning the controls in the beginning or maybe a quick time event. We are the monkey at the computer pushing buttons when prompted to. We are playing a video game and the narrator finally expresses it as the final cruel truth. You are not free, not while you are in the game. You can’t be, because everything created is only a prompt to push a button and in the end it is utterly meaningless. In this case it is meaningless. There is nothing else beyond this room and pushing the button that is prompted (which doesn’t do anything anyway.)

The final playthrough is to disobey till the very end. Here is where the narrator who by this time we should all understand to be the allegorical stand-in for the designer. You go against everything he has made, tried to break everything he has spent so long in working towards all for your enjoyment and eventually you reach the end, you have achieve freedom by stepping beyond the conventions in the nadir of the digital existential existence only to find nothing. There is nothing to be had, nothing to the meaning for you end up in an empty sky-box. The narrator boots up the opening to Half-Life 2 only to put on display how artificial it all is. We are put in the mindset of breaking the world and how we don’t belong here and it doesn’t fit us. Here we see the designer finally admitting his frustration and “hopes we are happy with what we find.” The scary part is once we as Stanley think we have gotten away, somehow broken beyond even the existential nightmare of nothingness, the narrator/designer pops back in and says, ‘no I’m still here, you are still in my world even though you tried to break it.’ But he is conciliatory, because though he made the game, it is your story. The best he can do is make sense at the end of whatever journey you chose to make.

Here is the only ending that actually gets a “The End.” The first playthrough got the credit roll and the ironic use of Frank Sinatra’s My Way, which normally signifies an ending, but here it is outright told to us. This is the end of the allegory for this is where we are as players and designers. The designers have poured all this time to craft experiences for us, to tell us narrative tales as if they are books or movies, but now they have to admit we as players are part of the equation too. This is the full conclusion of the game.

The writing of the narrator is so sharp and full of detail and subtext that I’d love to get a transcript and do a close examination someday and pick out all the details. But I have to end it here. Why? Because I’ve gone on long enough and besid…

Note: WordPress controls your writing. Hope you backed it up.

(Indie Game Spotlight is an irregular feature, trying to be a regular feature that I haven’t done for almost a year and finally got back to. I highlight and talk about an indie game as opposed to the AAA titles that usually dominate the critical conversation.)

One Chance is a flash game over at Newgrounds that you must play, but a note before you do. The title is more than that; it is a warning of what you are about to play. You have only one chance to play this game. There are no restarts or replays. Refreshing your browser does nothing. Keep that in mind when you make your choices.

It is a game of note, also because it is notoriously difficult to write about. I could soliloquize its themes and how it conveys them, but there is no challenge in that, nor would it enlighten anyone. It is an emotionally powerful game, I say powerful in the same way a sledgehammer is powerful: you can help but feel the impact.

Play it now.

Before you read on.

I find it difficult to talk about the game without entering into a state of gonzo criticism. I doubt I can even do that well. I gave the above warning, because I didn’t have it when I played the game and it was slightly unfortunate. The game hit me hard in my emotional gut and I didn’t want to start over because I felt I failed or because of curiosity in what other options presented. (Something that may have run counter to the point of the game.) I wanted to play the game again and again so I could ferret out the thematic commentary of the designer. There is something in here to say about time and how we spend it. Unfortunately it was only after I finished my play through that I found out that is all I got.

A secondary note, while it is admirable that the designer chose this method to make sure his player had one shot, I feel this is the strong-arm method. There is no subtly to the design. I wasn’t guided into not wanting to play again, I was flat out told I could not.  I said above that I didn’t feel like I failed, or at least not completely. I’m not sure if my path was optimal or not. The point is, were I not a critic, nor someone trained to nitpick and read closely I don’t think I would have wanted to play again. I would have the experience and I would be satisfied with it.

One Chance was satisfying unto itself and its delivery was comparable to a short story. (This is where I have further troubles talking about the game in an intelligible manner. I cannot play it again, so I cannot remember many of the details.) You play a man, a scientist, who has just discovered the cure for cancer. He goes into work and there is a celebration going on. You are offered by one of your female coworkers to go off somewhere. You are blocked off from the roof and the lab is open to continue your work. That is the first day. Subsequent days have the word turning darker and bleaker. We find that the cure has some very nasty side effects in that yes it kills cancer cells, but all other cells along with it. As the days tick down to total oblivion you make your choices to spend time with your daughter, taking her to the park, you see the fate of your co-workers as they kill themselves by jumping off the roof or in a more grizzly fashion and you can go to your lab to try and find a cure.

If I sound vague it’s because I have little choice. I have no reference material to see how these choices matter, or what specifically were choices, or effects. Things happen, but do they happen because of me, or were they going to happen anyway because of the situation. All I can be certain of is the end. That was the direct result of my actions. Every day I would go to work and enter the lab. Every day a large red X would appear on a computer terminal. The world was becoming a lonelier and emptier place, one night I came home to find my wife had slashed her wrists and left our daughter all alone. The next day she was so frightened she clung to me. I took her to work with me, over the corpses of my former coworkers, the message “Sorry” painted on the wall in someone’s blood. She plays in the corner of the lab as I see another red X. Finally the last day comes. Why I went home and not stay the lab seems a bit odd to me. I take my daughter with me again. Our skin is gray and the man moves slower than before. She is so tired I set her down in the lobby to close her eyes for a bit. I head into the lab and am greeted with a green check mark. I inject myself and then head into the hallway. I make it to my daughter, my own skin bright pink again and inject her. The final screen shows us both with pink skin sitting on a park bench. That is it. I have found the cure and saved both my daughter and myself to live in a lonely world.

That was my one chance and beyond the visceral emotional impact it had on me I have little else to say about it. Because the game only gives you one chance to play it makes it difficult to evaluate as a work or cultural artifact. I know how it makes me feel as a story would, but then this is merely the result of my actions. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book that would burn itself if you hit an end. A lot of the possible and authored content is lost. Any message therein doesn’t exist to the player and themes are muddled if not outright denied to us because we can’t play the game again.

It has been nearly a week since I’ve played One Chance and I’ve lived with the effect of that game. I’m sure it’s had an effect on at least one dream this week. But now it’s faded. I have a few mental screenshots, but like life memories they aren’t strong or concrete. It’s like I am missing some piece of the whole. As a piece of art I cannot double back to look or dig any deeper. It is a paradoxical work in that it presents itself as deep, possible is deep, but denies you from exploring it on any level but the surface.

Repeatedly at the beginning of each day I am told I have one chance to save the world and on the last day it changes the message to I had one chance. Of course that was the day I found the cure and saved my daughter and I. Was there some path I could not see? A single event that could avert catastrophe, or a series of choices from the first day onward in the game that I may or may not have had access to as the game went on? I ask these questions and wonder, as the designer wants us to. He wants us to think about what may have been or could have been in the face of total annihilation. We are supposed to be thinking these questions as we play, but I did not know the main rule of One Chance, the one hard coded into the game: you get only one chance, one play through. So I did not roleplay; or did I? I wont know now, can’t ever know now.

As an experience it is a sledgehammer, one that is still affecting me as I am still thinking about it. But without the ability to go back and relive the experience it will fade and be a one-time thing. No further inspection is available. Of course, by the time it really does fade from memory, maybe, just maybe my cache will have cycled this flash game from memory and I can live it again. This time knowing in this game my choices matter and this log can be left behind so that I may take the road not traveled.

Over at the CreativeFluff design blog I spotlighted Today I Die, an indie game that came out around April of this year from designer/developer Daniel Benmergui. Go play it before reading anything below. It’s a short game and worth it. Today I Die is a game that firmly wears the arty badge and wears it proudly. It’s a simple puzzle game that has an interesting take on the point and click adventure game genre. Using floating words to alter the poem, you change the world and your avatar’s state of being. There is no challenge to the game itself and is very short. The game is about the experience and your reaction to playing it.

I wouldn’t call it a seamless meshing of game and story, because there really is no story. The game is an allegory. The meaning is wrapped in the symbolism and imagery.

The most obvious place to start is with the three lines of poetry.

dead world

full of shades

today I die

The poem tells us three things. The first line tells us where we are. It’s not the name of the place, but rather the state of the world. In the dead world, everything is dead. The jellyfish, float to the top crumpled, lifeless. The shades themselves do not move, they too are lifeless. The background is gray, probably the most lifeless color in the spectrum. The dark world is just that, dark. The art direction paints the world nearly black with the shades layering black figures on the black background. Incidentally, this is the only world with a ceiling, meaning there is no escape and like the darkness, the world exists only for itself. Then we have the painful world. This world has a background of red and six figures whose only purpose is to keep you there. They will not react, except to your attempts to swim away. Then they grab you and pull you down, further into the pit. At the end of the trials you are given the final world, free world. The background has changed to blue and the shades are once again inactive. The music changes to a soft hope filled melody and the game ends.

The seconds line, the only one that does not change, notifies you of the presence of shades. These shades are antagonists, obstacles and enemies. They exist and behave differently in each world, but they always exist, even in the free world.

The third and last line is about the woman herself. In gameplay terms it tells us what she is doing, but it also reflects on her state of mind. We see a woman, at the beginning of the game, in full depression. She does not move or react in anyway to the world around her. She is in a fit of depression; “today I die.” She is the same in each world so long as die remains in the third line. The other options are “shine” and “swim.” These three words are her character arc. “Shine” shows her changing and her hope. It is also her instrument of fighting back against the shades and depressing worlds around her. It keeps the darkness at bay. “Shine” would be the transitional element in her character arc, the instigating event. It pushes back both the darkness of the world and her personal darkness. Then finally she can swim. She lives underwater, swimming is her life and she can now return to it. Though the shades wont let her go easily. With some shining help she escapes and is free.

Furthermore when one new action word is gained, we leave behind one of the worlds. When we gain “shine” we leave behind “dead.” When we gain “swim,” “dark” disappears. The game is an allegory of hope and moving forward. It’s representative of any dark time in a person’s life, when they felt there was nothing left to live for. Today I Die speaks to a spiritual vision of hope and being able to overcome the world’s shades. The shades from before remain, but no longer try to drag you down. Like in life, even in the brightest of times, the shades exist, it depends if you let them rule you or not. In a way it can also be seen as a representation of growing up. The emo poetry of adolescence soon gives way to more life affirming poetry, if ambiguous in nature.

The Killer 7 Argument -noun- the reason and reasoning that despite a video game’s flaws, inconsistencies or other failings the overall package is so utterly unique that it simply must be played for the sheer experience. First coined by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw.

It took a while, but I’ve played another game worthy of the Killer 7 Argument. I just finished playing through Braid for the second time after my first complete save was lost to a corrupt hard drive. The second playthrough was a huge help in getting my head around what to make of the game and figure out what I specifically thought of it.

Braid is the indie puzzle platformer by one Auteur Jonathan Blow. Regardless of what some other critics may say, he is the author of the piece and that is not a bad thing. He is not only the game designer, but did everything else save the beautiful art which was passed into the very capable hands of David Hellman.

(If you want to get nitpicky about the term Auteur, yes it is technically wrong to label him that given he’s only made one game.)

I bring up the Auteur factor, not just because of the intense control that some feel from the game designer’s hand in the text and puzzles, but also because of the intrinsic way that the game is woven and layered.

While thinking upon the game I could not help, but call it literary. It is game that works on any level you wish to examine it. On the surface it is a bunch of mind-bending puzzles that sometimes have deceptively simple solutions in a colorfully cartoon world. And if that is as far as you want to look, the game will not penalize you for it. The game works on that level. If you delve deeper into the different facets of the game you have a picture of a man trying to figure out what happened to the princess and how to rescue her in true Mario fashion. Again if you delve deeper you come into the problem of Tim being an unreliable narrator and that the puzzle worlds are not real at all. And you can continue delving deeper and deeper into the symbolism and intricate interconnectedness of the different elements to the themes and message of the game.

At no point does the game punish you for stopping your analysis. It is a work that is meaningful and can be recognized as such even without a degree in literature, philosophy or game design. Braid also doesn’t rely on a single or few elements to convey all it’s meaning, but rather uses all of them. I hesitate to bring up the comparison and please call me out on it if you feel the comparison or connotation of it goes too far, I wont fight you on it, but in this fashion Braid reminds me of Citizen Kane. Like Citizen Kane all the elements of the work come together to present a singular vision: the art, the music, the mechanics, the story, the text, the symbols, the level design and the puzzles. I cannot say I have seen this unified nature so tightly packed together in any other game.

Braid does have marks against it. The puzzles as mentioned before are mind-bending and you can spend forever trying to get your head around what you were suppose to do before you give up and check gamefaqs. The text is baffling at first when put in conjunction to the rest of the game and the epilogue throws everything through a loop. Braid invites inspection and analysis and it almost seems part of the game to do so. It is complex and can seem incomprehensible at first; hell most of us critics are still trying to figure it out.

While all of those can be counted as flaws, they can also be counted as assets to the game. They are intricate parts to the braid of meaning, twisting and wrapping each element around each other. It’s one of the few games that tie its mechanics directly to the themes of its story and vice versa.

Is Braid going to tick you off? Will it make you throw your hands up in frustration? Is the designer Jonathan Blow a big enough prick to warrant not playing the game? I honestly have no idea. But if you have the money and the time give the game a shot, it’s on Xbox Live, Steam for PC and now the PSN. I say give it at least a try and if all else fails, try a walkthrough.

The game was made for Casual Gameplay’s design contest #6 with the parameters to incorporate the this content’s theme: Explore. Were I to judge in the contest I would look to how well it incorporated the theme, as a critic I am looking at what that means within the game. I recommend playing it here before continue reading.

Small Worlds is a simple game. It has three buttons: left, right and jump. And that’s all the game needs. You are in an environment that you cannot see until you begin to move around and explore. The more area you cover the more black pixels disappear and the camera pulls back so you can see everything at once. From the initial hub world you travel through four portals to four different worlds where you start the process again in revealing the new environment. You only go back to the hub world when you find a glowing square that is then taken back with you to the space station/ship.

That is the entire game. There are no enemies, there are no obstacles beyond the basic platforming and there is no fail state. The game’s entire focus is on the worlds around you. The five worlds are very different in setting, but evoke the same basic premise and overarching theme. I’ll go world by world.

The hub world is a derelict station or ship; it is never made clear exactly what it is. All we know is that it is heavily damaged, with collapsed ceilings, a broken glass dome and flickering lights. We also know that it is in space somewhere. It is meant to evoke the emotions and sense of danger reminiscent of Dead Space and Alien. Something terrible happened here, but we don’t know what and will never definitively find out. All we know is the facility is wrecked; possibly beyond salvage and we are alone. The more we explore the more that is made apparent. The only places we can go are through the four teleporters.

In the white world we begin in a place of caves and snow. It is someplace in the wilderness among evergreen trees and endless snowfall. We travel through a system of caves, covered in both dirt and ice, moving underground. We soon find man-made structures, large shafts made of metal stand, but appear to have to purpose for being there. Some of the ceiling has caved-in. As you travel through to the other side of the local you come upon a screen with a map on it with several yellow dots blinking. You keep going and find more shafts, two of them this time still occupied by missiles. Suddenly you realize it is not a normal winter outside, but nuclear winter and the glowing dots were the targets hit, their number corresponding to the number of empty missile shafts.

The blue world transports us to the middle of a cityscape with water streaming down endless waterfalls. The water falls and flows over a number of platforms and we once again travel downward into an underground reservoir where we see a stream of green ooze flowing and mixing into the blue water. Traveling further down you find a water elevator that will take you to the top of the world where you find this contraption is bringing the water to the top so it can once again flow down back into the reservoir in an endless cycle. Going the other way at the top we find the gears that run the system and more carved out underground shelters. The environmental poison having taken all life.

The green world is less obvious than the others. All we can see is a bunch of floating rocks on a green background. As we move around you continue to find floating rocks spread out in every direction. This time we start at the bottom and have to make our way upward. The higher we travel the more rocks we find, bigger than the ones below. The green background fades into bright white and then back into green. The white light is a white sphere exploding with all the smaller rocks around the rim and the larger rocks in the center. We are witnessing the destruction of a planet. The white light is the explosion and the rocks the shattered ruminants. This world no longer exists.

Finally the red world changes things up by having the background being a plain black. Now we are unsure at certain points if we are pushing back the veil of pixels or not. The path is narrow and creates a spiral pattern. The walls are purple and we have no idea what we are in until we hit a white rib. We are traveling through the innards of some large monstrous space creature. It’s dead now.

All five worlds evoke the dead. Each world is dead each in its own way. Which paradoxically goes against the opening line of the game “There is too much noise…” The only noise in the whole game is the ambient music and single sound effect of reaching the glowing box. The character makes no noise, and neither do the worlds.

From this I have two theories about what happened in the game and what its meaning is.

First, we have a man alone on a space ship looking for life. The noise is all in his head. He is alone in the void of space, everything he knew and loved destroyed. It has driven him mad and he wants to relieve the pain and anguish. Traveling from world to world he finds the same thing everywhere in different forms. Nuclear winter, toxic environmental disaster, an exploding planet, and a creature’s corpse. Death and destruction follows him everywhere as does the silence of worlds. He gathers the power sources to activate the pod and releases it, with himself inside, into the sun. “Silence” the ending screen tells us. In death he finds silence; he finds peace from his own madness. Maybe he was the cause that destroyed his ship, perhaps he went mad and killed everybody, or maybe he was just a survivor of the disaster and cannot bear to be alone.

Over at the Creative Fluff design blog I’ve started a new, hopefully weekly feature called, in case you couldn’t guess, is Indie Game Spotlight. I’ve decided to highlight a different indie game each week. These games don’t have the huge marketing push of the AAA titles so they can use any and all attention they can get. These aren’t reviews or critiques, just bringing attention to a title I think deserves some attention.

A note to the future of the series. I’ve done cross concept posts between this site and Creative Fluff. I hope to make as many of the Spotlights such posts. Highlight them there and then do a critique of it here.

For the first Indie Game Spotlight I decided to use No More Fun’s Norwegian Wood. Game helped come into existence thanks to the middle circle’s own Quixotic Engineer.

As for Norwegian Wood, there’s not a lot I can say about the game itself. It has solid and challenging gameplay and the use of the song is inspired. It only uses one song, so I can’t really call it a unique new way to experience music like Guitar Hero and Rock Band were. I did notice something every interesting emerge in the community after it was released. Several people that are on twitter got a little obsessive of the game. They played the thing relentlessly trying to get the high score (which has since doubled in the last week). Even with only one song, it wasn’t the music that kept people coming over and over to the game, as good as it is. Nor was the gameplay in itself addictive to the point that it was the main draw. It was the leaderboard. Even after all these years and innovations it is still a huge motivation to play. To systematically and numerically prove that you are better than everyone else. Except now with the internet it is not longer about being the best in the arcade, it really is about being the best in the world. Though my score has since fallen off the top 30, I see many familiar faces. There are many repeats on it. Nearly all the scores there are new since I last checked about a week ago. People are still playing the game. It only lasts a little over two minutes, but since no one has mastered it the scores will continue to accumulate.

I wonder if that would have been true had they chosen a longer song. Does the briefness of the experience allow the player to be more willing to try again? People on twitter noted the fact of it being limited to a single song alters there experience. Ben Abraham noted how there would have to be multiple learderboards had there been multiple songs and even a second leaderboard would have ruined some of the competitive nature. Each arcade cabinet had only one leaderboard, because there was only one game and that what everyone was playing. Aristotle talked about unity of time and unity of place for the medium of theater. I wonder if, for critical purposes, games should add their own: unity of rules. Not just that everyone has to play by the same rules in an argument of fairness, but within the game structures themselves there should be a unity of rules, as a manner in which to fight against the complexity curve that games have fallen into.

Then again that is all well and good to talk about simplicity when it concerns a simple game about avoiding notes when it comes to song choice, but a very different one when it comes to epic RPGs or tactical shooters. Audiosurf also proved that multiple scoreboards can exist for many different modes and songs. But then the best Audiosurf stories have been about very obscure tracks being played by only two people trying to one up each other. It’s the same there. Everyone is trying to one up each other on a single track. It isn’t all about competition, but the close knit community that get formed in that competition. So in the end I’d have to say, yes the game has one song and is better for it.