I’d heard of Johnathan Mak’s game in the context of “independent things worth playing”, but I didn’t think much about it until I heard it discussed at a lecture on “art-games”, up against games like Ico, Braid, Bioshock, and Gravitation. In all honesty, I don’t remember what position the lecturer held: if this was truly a piece of art, or just something arty, or a game with nice graphics (which it is). Looking at it myself, I’m struck by how much it feels like I’m playing through a piece of visual art.

In presentation, the game feels like an album, actually: a series of musical tracks in a particular order, through which I’m allowed to play with some beautiful visual pieces for my enjoyment*. Not much of a message here; the game doesn’t require much of myself, doesn’t have a clear statement on what it means to be a human being, not does it come across as an important (by which I mean self-important) game. On the other hand, it also doesn’t offer the sort of contemplation and questioning that much of modern art does. I’ve always felt that you have to bring a lot of yourself to a Rothko or a Paul Klee before it means something to you, but with Everyday Shooter my mind is caught up in the simple pleasure of shooting, gaining points, and surviving. I come out of it relaxed, happy, and entertained – which for small games like this one is highly underrated – but I don’t feel as if I’ve learned something momentous.

Much of this can be summed up in what I think of as the artist’s statement, Mak’s notes on the game. Paraphrased, his original work involved the “new game”, art, innovation, meaning, profound statements, and was, as he discovered, absolutely a mess, and not fun. Lost in “a ridiculous concoction of self-indulgent, games-are-art-theory-innovation wankery,” he decided to return to the games that got him into games in the first place: the simple, everyday top-down shooter, where “even the simplest of things can be the most beautiful of things”. And so we end up with a small, quirky, fun game.

I don’t think art has to be serious, certainly. If the message here is to take ourselves a little less seriously (whether you read the artist’s statement or not), he’s certainly succeeded. Everyday Shooter is a game I’m actually quite bad at (so far, I haven’t passed Level 3), but it’s one I keep returning to, every day since I installed it, a few minutes at a time. And it makes me smile. On a Monday morning, that’s all really need.

A note on the music as well: I haven’t yet found a game that lets me really interact with the music, and most of the heavy lifting in the game’s soundtrack has already been done by Mak himself. Each level has some simple guitar riffs and pleasing chords, which isn’t much in music theory. But I like that every action you take in the game adds something to the soundtrack, and makes it feel a little different every time. It’s a far cry from interactive sound, but it’s closer to dynamic sound than most games get.

Everyday Shooter is available on Steam and elsewhere. Go on – support your indie artists. It’ll make your morning.

*As someone not very good at this game, I would like the ability to shuffle through the other tracks. Happily, I can unlock them with the points I’ve earned. Unhappily, it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000. Can’t have everything…

I’ll start with the obvious: this is a wonderful game. I love that it’s indie, DRM-free, full of physics, and that one becomes so emotionally attached to the adorable, delicious Goo. (Say “Delicious Goo” out loud – it’s a lot of fun). Aesthetically, this is a beautiful, detailed game: a bit Seussian (more stripes would help), a bit “dark wacky” by way of Tim Burton, and with some of the best accordion music I’ve heard lately.

I also love that the game was created nearly in total by only two people, both Carnegie-Mellon graduates. Apparently, most of the work was done on laptops in coffee-shops – an enviable way to write games, and a far cry from the EA Widows.

But I’ll admit that as much fun as I had with World of Goo, it didn’t quite live up to my admittedly-high expectations. The game failed for me in one very small, ultimately important way: a lack of cohesion.  Honestly, these two game developers have so much to say about consumerism and corporate society and technology and the cult of the young and who knows what else…. I felt like their ultimate message was nearly incoherent, more a collection of witticisms and sly, sideways references than an actual point or message. Very much in the same vein as Braid, but with Jonathan Blow’s game, I found more substance the deeper I looked. Here, despite my worries about where my beloved Goo is actually going once I’ve sent it up the pipe, I’m not convinced that something has been said. And that’s unfair of me. Not all games need to have a clear point or a deeper meaning. Maybe pointing out the hectic, everyday existence of a mall-driven, beauty-obsessed culture is enough for this game. But just pointing it out isn’t the same as making a statement, or making me think: my reaction at game’s end was literally, “Yes, okay. And?”

Again, it’s a fantastically fun game. It’s absolutely worth playing. But it feels to me like the harbinger of things to come. I’ll be interested to see what these two developers come up with next, after they’ve grown up a little bit. They’ve gone after some easy targets here, particularly for an indie game audience. I can’t wait to see how they tackle the hard stuff.

If I had seen this game in an art gallery, I might have thought, “I don’t understand this; I must be stupid.” Had I found it online with no explanation, I might have thought, “I don’t understand this; it must be stupid.”

I don’t think The Marriage is inherently stupid, perhaps because it’s been presented to me by the artist as not only an art game but a failed art game. With that caveat, I’m suddenly far more willing to overlook the game’s weaknesses and to look for deeper meanings in its structure. I don’t know if that would be the case had I stumbled upon it without warning, or could download and play it without first having to read the artist’s statement. He even begins by saying, “This is a game that requires explanation. That statement is already an admission of failure.”

I didn’t play this game for long, but I did feel that the longer I played it, the more I began to understand the deceptively complex rules, not to mention the space I was in. My main concern was the lack of defined goals; I figured out quickly that both the blue and pink cubes needed to “survive”, but I didn’t get the sense that there was an end in sight, or a reward for keeping them “alive” for x number of minutes or turns. Does that make me a shallow player? At the least, it seems to make me a story-driven player; The Marriage is so abstract that I feel the need for constrained goals, small achievements, duly meted rewards. I’ve also become accustomed to games that explicitly teach you their rules and then let you decide what to do with them; this is the first game in a long time that has asked me to discover its rule set as I played. (In a minute, I’ll probably be driven back to the shiny simplicity of Lumines II).

I’ll also say that, watching these abstract joined cubes float by more and more dangerous objects on screen, I felt that I did better the less I interfered. On my first few playthroughs I touched, moved, or clicked on everything I could, and never lasted more than a minute; just sitting and watching, and rarely moving an obstacle out of the way of either cube, I could at least make the background change color.

I can see intent here, and a definite purpose, but so far the general meaning remains obscure. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we could use games that ask as much of their players as modern art asks of its viewers. Or maybe I’m thinking too hard about a failed experiment.

Or maybe it’s that I’ve never been married. What could Significant Tim and I possibly understand about the subject?

**Update: Having now read Rod Humble’s full explanation (and spoilers) of the game, I feel that I understood more of it than I expected to. Of course, it’s easy to agree with the “correct” definition after the fact, but it’s nice to have my random thoughts about possible meanings verified (intentionalist fallacy be damned). I do like that the game is deliberately made fragile, obscure, easy to break.

It’s also interesting that one of Rod’s players assumed – correctly – that the designer had never been divorced. I wonder what that game’s rule set would have looked like?

The Marriage can be downloaded and played here.

I hadn’t heard of Jonathan Blow’s Braid until it was pulled from Slamdance over the protests about Super Columbine Massacre RPG – and I forgot about it until Penny Arcade mentioned its release a few weeks ago. At the moment, I consider it the most worthwhile reason to own an XBOX 360 (which may or may not tell you something about the state of my XBOX Live account).

I’ve been saying for days now that Braid does for time what Portal did for space; it takes a familiar game mechanic, makes one fundamental change, and all of a sudden we’re dealing with a whole new animal. It’s not just that the player can reverse time – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time used that idea extremely well, as have other games – nor even that time can be unwound all the way to the beginning of a level. It’s that each area depends on the player to use time itself as a game mechanic, and then says: once your actions can be rewound and replayed, what else can we ask you to do? And goes on to treat time as yet another interactive puzzle piece, not just a mechanic to be outraced or taken for granted. It’s a simple change that completely transforms the way we look at the game world – and I found Braid deceptively hard at the beginning for that reason, for as long as it took me to wrap my head around the idea.

The plot, while almost too writerly for my taste (I couldn’t handle an entire short story in that overly-poetic style, although it does work in short bursts), wraps up nicely at the end: ambiguous but satisfying, and without a pat “here’s what happened” finish. In a way, it’s a nice solution to one of our problems with gamey-game endings: how can you tell meaningful stories in a medium where the player has to “win”? In Braid, winning isn’t the same as earning a solution, and it’s certainly not a ticket to a happy ending. Instead, it’s the beginning of an understanding, something I’ve always felt to be a cop-out in traditionally written stories, but that worked well for me here.

There’s a book called Einstein’s Dreams, in which a young Einstein about to send his theories off for publication has a series of dreams, each describing a world in which time works differently. In one, time moves slower the higher off the surface of the Earth you are; in another, time is an emotional state; or time stops at a certain point on the earth and only lovers and new parents travel there; or time loops, but only for certain people…. I’ve wondered, since playing Braid, if Jonathan Blow has read it, or what he would think if it. This is a game, in all respects, for adults, but for adults that grew up with games. It certainly takes our past into account, from the familiar construction of the platforming puzzles to the variations on “our Princess is in another castle” at the end of each world, even to the names of individual areas (“Jumpman” and “There and Back Again” come to mind). I wonder how long it will be before games like Braid are seen, in the most mercenary and practical terms, as salable products for a thriving demographic, rather than just a lucky find.