Art In Videogames

Last year, at gaming focused art collective Kokoromi's Gamma 256 event, Jason Rohrer presented his game, Passage. If you follow the blogs you've probably heard about Passage. The five minute game, displayed in 100x16 pixels, made such an impact on gamers and bloggers that even the Wall Street Journal couldn't ignore the it.

If you don't know it, Passage is what Rohrer calls a "memento-mori game," designed to remind players that someday they will die. Players take control of a small, pixelated character resembling someone out of an 8-bit RPG, and guide the character through a maze. Along the way you can find a wife (a woman who will follow your character), open treasure chests, some give points and some are empty. After five minutes your character dies. You can't avoid it; you can only watch it happen.

As a game Passage wasn't that exciting. The gameplay or mechanic or whatever we're calling it these days, wasn't much more than 'move the character left, right, up or down.' Even searching for points quickly becomes meaningless; this game is not about high scores.

What made Passage great was how the life developed on screen. Over the course of the game the character, who starts at the extreme left of the screen, slowly creeps to the right and as he does the map he just traversed is blurred and compressed behind him. You can see where you've been but can't focus on any one point. The message is obvious but more in a "why didn't I think of that" kind of way than obnoxious pretension.

If you haven't it you really should. It's definitely not a universal favorite, but it's worth looking at just to see what everyone is talking about. Right or wrong, almost no one discussing art and videogames fails to mention Passage.

If you like it check out Rohrer latest game, Gravitation. The message with this one isn't as clear, Rohrer thinks it's about mania and creativity, and I'll take him at his word because Gravitation doesn't offer nearly as clear a point as Passage did. What Gravitation does well is the way it uses space to communicate to the player. Rohrer changes the visible area to tell the player what they should do and when they should do it (play the game, you'll see). Compared to Passage his latest game offers much more gameplay and greater understanding of how to communicate it to the player.

You can download Gravitation here. It runs in Linux, OS X and Windows so you shouldn't have any trouble with it.