I have just come across the world of art games, a tiny genre hiding among millions of time wasters, brain teasers, and violence simulators.  I’ve been waiting for games to transcend the category of entertainment and become something emotional, meaningful.  For the first time I’m actually experiencing just that.  Here’s what I’ve come across.

Passage is a game which is absurdly simple, in which something extraordinarily complex has been accomplished.  You move a pixelated character around a screen, until he gets old and finally dies.  It’s minimalist, short, and somehow deeply powerful.

The first time you play it you spend half the game bored, exploring, trying to find something interesting, and then at some point you realize your character is aging.  It’s interesting to experience the impact an aging avatar has on the player.  Most games are structure around an endlessly repeating game play mechanic, but if a character ages, decays, then eventually he must die.  Still, the first time playing this game there is an expectation that something will happen, there must be some purpose, some goal at hand.  Prepare to feel disappointment.  In the beginning you find a girlfriend who, if you approach her, will follow you for the rest of the game.  That’s it.  Your characters grow old, you explore the territory, and eventually, she dies, and then you die.  Pretty anticlimactic the first time around.
But the second time around, if you’re still interested in playing, there is room for experimentation.  Now that you know that nothing is going to happen, you can make your own goals, play the game without expectation, and that’s where things get interesting.

The third or forth time I was messing with the game, I decided I was going to go exploring, so I ditched the girl and went off, seeing how far I could explore the more cavernous region of the map.  Then I decided it was getting late in my life, and I returned to the beginning to find the girl.  I had to hurry, I was very old.  When I finally made it back as an old man, the girl was gone, instead there was just a simple gravestone, and after a few seconds of surprise on my part, my character died of old age.   Never have I felt such a massive emotional impact from a game before.  And no film is capable of presenting such a personal experience.  There were no prerendered cut scenes or preconceived dialogue.  It all happened in that moment.

I want to see more games like this.  Now I’m not sure if everyone can have as personal experience play a game like this, maybe I was just lucky.  But there is something here.

Game makers have long tried to create a film like experience through video games, and to them I have these words:  Stop.

Stop creating cut scenes.  Stop sandwiching story in between slices of action.  Stop trying to develop characters, construct multiple endings, multiple choice dialogue.   The medium of games is different than the medium of film.  We need to back up, and create something with fresh eyes.
Linear game play turns into story time interspersed with interactive gun battles.

Sandbox games tend to be no better, and no amount of clothes, house, car customization can make up for the fact that you’re essentially playing in someone else’s shoes, buy someone else’s rules.

Art games tend to be unique, pretty, clever, or some combination there of, but usually settle for amusing us rather than impacting us deeply.

I’m not interested in game design, playability, or game play mechanics.  Someone make a game that’s meaningful, that changes us.

Games should be personal experiences, where game play isn’t seperate from the story,, instead, gameplay is the story.  How we play must tell us something about how we are.