Thoughtful Thursdays #1: Love

Love is a complex emotion, and it's even more complex to depict it in an interactive medium. With Valentine's day come and gone, I thought it'd be interesting to look at Love, a game lets you "play" its title emotion.

Love: It's squares shooting lasers

I'm sure you don't see much about romance in the above screen capture, but it's there. Love is another minimalist game, like Canabalt from my previous post, except it goes even further. It hits a level of pure abstraction that is rare in any modern games. You're playing a square that goes near other squares in order to score points. The creator of Love could have released this game without the philosophical thought behind it, and no one would know the difference.

However, it's the name that sets the tone for the rest of the game, and unveils its thoughtfulness. Love argues that love is a good thing, that it "makes your head spin" and gives you positive bonuses.

This is all well and good, until you dive a bit deeper. The game encourages you to switch between partners at a whim, hunting solely for your own personal gain. You're not to get too close to one of your partners, or you'll die. These are interesting takes on the concept of love, which the game tries to flesh out through its mechanics.

Then you add in the optional "Infidelity" mode, which lets the player control two characters at once, attempting to juggle two lives. While the idea is to make the game harder and, therefore, more stressful to play, Infidelity again sends a mixed message. By playing two sides, you get double your score in the game. Taken literally off its premise, living a double life is valuable, as long as you are skilled enough to keep in control.

What do you think about Love? Do you feel it depicts the emotion well? What changes would you make to the game to make it more accurate?

Urban Solitude, Canabalt, and minimalism

In art, minimalism is power. Artists strip an idea or a concept down to its absolute core components, using this starkness and simplicity to convey meaning to the viewer. The photo below, titled Urban Solitude, hammers home the isolation of business and urban life through this artistic style.

image credit: gdominici

There's not much there, really. There's no color. There's the mechanical platform, the guard rails, the floor, and the one businessman in the distance. That's all. There's no trickery. This isn't a visual feast for the eyes. Urban Solitude's minimalism contains just enough imagery to make its point.

Adam Atomic's Canabalt is a game steeped in this sort of minimalist design. This is the game that fundamentally shifted how I look at online games, to the point where I chose it for my avatar on this site.

With Canabalt, there's no story given. The player character, their actions, and the setting are never defined. The classic, 8-bit art style strips the game to its visual bones. Even the game's control scheme is reduced to a single button, and the game's goal reduced to "survive by jumping".

Canabalt's sheer minimalism focuses the player's attention on what's there: isolationism, oppression, and inevitability. The game world is stark, colorless, and empty. The only inhabitants the player sees are their character and giant, destructive machines. It's just you, the machines, and your run.

Those machines, never directly interacting with the player, are working to tear down the civilization. They stomp through the background, or throw bombs at the buildings the character runs across. The machines do nothing but destroy, placing them as an entropic force in the game.

The game is played with a single goal: Run. Until you die.

Death and failure is the inevitable end to this game. There's no finish line. There's no victory. There's only getting further, before you finally choke. This bleak view makes the game infinitely replayable, while driving home the lack of power the player and his avatar have in this world.

Canabalt is a perfect minimalist game. The themes it contains are well-represented, and stripped down to the core. From there, it's all up to the player to decide what the game means. What is the character's goal? Is he running away from something, or towards something? Are the robots violently destroying the city, or is this some form of strange, controlled demolition? From a scholarly perspective, should one interpret the game from a Marxist perspective? A tragic one? Historically? All of these huge interpretative options are open, because the game shows so little.

This is the power of minimalism. Canabalt challenges a player's mind more in ten minutes of play than Call of Duty does through its entire length. By presenting such a tiny window into a digital world, Canabalt asks more of the player. When I think of art and online games, this is the first example I turn to.

Go play it. See how far you can run before you finally die. See what meanings you find in Canabalt's minimalist skeleton.

How To Overthink Online Games: An Introduction

Since the Internet's beginning, there have been online games. From Pipe Dream to Farmville, it's likely that nearly everyone has played a game on the Internet before. After all, if I'm surfing the web to entertain myself, why not play a game? They make for excellent distractions and time killers (not to mention procrastination tools for college students), and that's how I viewed them for a long time.

As I've gotten older, I've started to view games as something more. Video games combine a spectrum of potential communication tools. They're a visual medium, offering tantalizing artwork for our eyes. They're a literary medium, providing intriguing tales for our minds. Most importantly, they're an interactive medium, giving us the ability to personally invest ourselves in the story and images. All of this, tucked away in something originally intended as an entertaining toy.

The Internet is a breeding ground for games that truly take advantage of this potential artform. By taking advantage of online game's low barrier of entry where money is concerned, individual creators design and release works directly to the public. These artists work magic on the computer screen, drawing gamers into worlds and delivering messages to them through experiences, not just through words or through images like other mediums.

These sort of games deserve far more publicity than they receive. They cry out to not only be found and played, but to be analyzed and discussed. By treating these works of art as works of art, we can begin to foster a respect for this growing medium and fan the flames of its potential.

Game artists deserve more. Playing Digital Art is an attempt to give it to them.