Passage, the latest art game hit
Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 15551 times) Game talk
Dec 072007
In the world of art games, “hit” means “it got a lot of press.” Well, Passage is getting a lot of press, and here I am giving it more.
Passage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason Rohrer
There’s an artist’s statement regarding what the game is about, but you can and should play it first, decide for yourself, and then read the statement.
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25 Responses to “Passage, the latest art game hit”
, a tiny game that has been making tiny waves in our tiny community. There’s not much to say about Passage. The game is available for Mac, PC, and Linux, and lasts exactly five minutes. In short, there’s no excuse not to play it. [ViaRaph Koster] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments [IMG]
, a tiny game that has been making tiny waves in our tiny community. There’s not much to say about Passage. The game is available for Mac, PC, and Linux, and lasts exactly five minutes. In short, there’s no excuse not to play it. [ViaRaph Koster]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments SPONSORED BY: Age of Empires III – Real-Time Strategy Game Control a European power on a quest to colonize and conquer the New World. AOE3 introduces new gameplay elements, as well as new civilizations, units,
I’m unimpressed. Yes, the presentation of the game is about Deep Meanings. But I’ve been studying Art recently, and I’m leaning towards the conclusion that we game designers still think in terms of kinetic sculpture, NOT games.
This game used interesting visuals and a poignant score to convey its message, but that’s what a movie does. What games have (that other art forms don’t have) is interaction and choice. Passage’s choice is mostly about exploring up and down, and finding “chests” to “open”. I DO find it kinda interesting that his X axis represents both space and time, to a certain degree.
If the author is trying to make a statement about futility and how nothing matters in the long run, he succeeded. If he wanted to make a game that is open to interpretation by making the UI sparse and obtuse, he succeeded. But his notes indicate that he simply wanted to make a game that would get you to reflect on the structure and choices of life.
I see two interesting things here.
1) Game “Art” should be about expressing things thru gameplay, not clever audio/visual components.
2) If the player doesn’t understand how to play and what the UI means, who’s fault is that? I’ve always assumed that it’s ALWAYS the developer’s fault, but a player can’t “interpret” the game his own way, if everything is already spelled out for him, right?
I’m the guy who made this game.
I toyed for a while with the idea of having no sound at all. No soundtrack. Like Rod Humble’s game “The Marriage.” But then I thought, games can use sound, just as they can use graphics. A game that doesn’t use all channels available to it is a bit incomplete, sort of like a silent film in a talky age. So I ended up adding music to go along with it, music that I thought would help set the mood that I was trying to achieve with the game.
I think what you’re saying here, in point number 1 that you raise above, is more about games that express a message only through graphics and sound and not through gameplay at all. Games like that are akin to movies that show no motion. In fact, the core of Passage is supposed to be the gameplay; the choices that you make when you play. The gameplay is the first thing that I thought about when I was designing the game — the graphics, and finally the music, came much later.
Okay, so what gameplay? You navigate a maze, and maybe decide to go after certain treasure chests, and try to learn which treasure chests are likely to contain rewards, or maybe decide to explore further to the east instead of going after treasure at all, or maybe decide to take a spouse, which offers both costs and benefits. All those mechanics were in my head before I painted a single pixel or scored a single note of music. These game mechanics, as simple as they are, are meant to be a metaphor. All other presentational aspects of the game follow that metaphor.
Granted, the game could have been presented with little squares moving around instead of pixelated people, and silence as mentioned before. Would it have been less effective this way? I think so. Does that mean that the game design is weak? I don’t know. Could you paint a painting that moves people using only black paint and a single brush? Maybe. But we don’t require other artists to limit themselves in order to make great work. There’s no reason that we, as game artists, should limit ourselves to gameplay alone. Without gameplay, of course, there’s no point to making a game as opposed to a movie, but thereR