A Twitter link a week or four ago sent me to Creativity magazine’s list “The Creative 50.” (The content has since disappeared behind a subscriber login.)
Creativity—the magazine—is apparently focused on marketing-related creativity, and their list of 50 of the most creative humans was consequently full of ad agency folk. So, you know, whatever.
But there were (at least) two game designers on their roll, as well. One was Jonathan Blow, the designer of Braid, about whom and which more in a future post. The other was Jason Rohrer, who, I discovered, was the designer of a game called Passage. Attention gameplaywright.visitors: Why did no one bring this to my attention sooner?
In all of the articles I’ve since read about Passage, there is one point of near-universal agreement: You must play Passage before discussing it. The game is five minutes long. Play it twice. MacOS, Windows, and Unix versions are available for free download, and there’s now an iPhone version that’s $0.99.
First and foremost, what a fantastic work of art. We were talking about Humanitas games, in an earlier post. Passage is clearly the kind of game one would have to seriously consider for such an award, if it existed.
At the bottom of Rohrer’s downloads page he keeps a discussion log of places where Passage has been discussed online. Browsing some of those in preparation for writing this, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Clive Thompson, at Wired, had said everything I wanted to say and then some in his piece “Poetic Passage Provokes Heavy Thoughts on Life, Death.”
“More than any game I’ve ever played,” he writes, “it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition.”
Clive’s avatar got old, like mine did; he realized that that slow process had been going on for some time without his realizing it, just as I had; his wife died, just as mine had; his game ended when he turned, without ceremony, into a tombstone, just as mine had. “Which is when I realized, with a stab of pain, just what Passage is: It’s a game about life.”
Mr. Thompson has already written my impression of Passage, down to the stab of pain. Read it; it’s a worthy piece of commentary.
One development since Thompson’s article is the iPhone version of Passage. About a year ago, Thompson wrote:
“Sadly…there’s no commercial market for what Rohrer does. More than 100,000 people have played Passage, but he hasn’t made a dime off it. Seriously artistic games probably never will make any money; most ‘high art’ never does. Artistic games won’t crack the Top 10.”
It would be interesting to learn how Passage performs in the iTunes App Store. Roher has without a doubt made at least one dime, now, based on his split with Apple of the copy that I bought.
What Thompson and Wired aren’t all that concerned about—it’s not really their bailiwick—is this snippet, a quotation of Rohrer’s from the Creativity 50 piece that I thankfully copied down before it disappeared behind the subscriber wall:
“I’m thinking about developing a strict formal design structure for these types of game, analogous to a sonnet for poetry.”
The idea half blew me away when I first read it, before I had played Rohrer’s game, but playing Passage blows your mind the rest of the way open—wide, wide open—to the possibilities of a formal design structure for games that would let you appreciate nuanced variations, rather than having to understand each game’s unique superstructure before moving on to consume its subtleties. (On the other hand, maybe non-formalized but “force-of-law” genre conventions stand in for for formal design structures as far as this goes. You tell me.)
A Shakespearean, or English sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllables, and each line is written in iambic pentameter in which a pattern of a non-emphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.
Rohrer’s suggestion got me thinking: What would formal fences of similar scope look like for game design?
Passage‘s precisely five-minute duration suggests definite and inflexible length; that’s strong.
Passage also suggests—less directly—an intentionally limited color palate. Less strong, because it has the unintended effect of associating the game with that which is low-tech. A designer might want to suggest such a thing in a given work, of course, but it doesn’t seem quite right to me that the structure should force it.
A unified set of controls makes sense as a limiting factor with the desirable side-effect of allowing play on many/most/all platforms. By “set of controls” I mean “collection of buttons,” without an assumption of what those buttons do, or mean, inside the game. Different and inventive ways to make four arrow keys function in variations on a formal structure would be fascinating to observe, to see how designers introduce the ability to—for example—trigger the equivalent of a “shooting” action without a fifth button.
The more I think about it, the more I come to wonder whether perhaps Passage simply states the obvious format by example. I have in my notes for this post the exhortation to discover “Where else [i.e., not in Passage] could [gameplay] be restricted that has no analog in poetry conventions?”, and I’m coming up blank as to worthwhile formal restrictions I’d propose that are not also—and frustratingly!—already found in Passage.
In fact, my only additional deep thought on the subject falls outside the mechanical, and so departs from the sonnet analog. It was suggested by something else I was reading on the day I first played Passage, a list-of-ten style piece (talk about your formal structures!) by Trey Ratcliff on how an amateur photographer ought to think and work in order to produce a higher caliber of work.
Ratcliff’s item #5 is “Admire Impressionism,” in which he writes:
…Impressionist images go deep into viewers’ brains and evoke memories of shared scenes and events. The memory is…an Impressionist playground of fleeting colors, shapes and edges.…
Look at Monet’s work. Think about how the yellows of a sun in the distance is the same yellow as an up-close flower. But something about the colors makes the sun feel brighter than the flower. How does he do that?…
If you want to evoke the same sort of feelings, then consider how it was done without resorting to realism.
Evoke feeling without resorting to realism is the idea, but it infuriatingly falls down as a formal requirement. Perhaps it simply suggests one tactic an artist could take, or should take, inside the structure.
As a final note, and in case you’re interested, Rohrer has written a piece called “What I Was Trying to Do with Passage.”
But be warned: He opens it with the note, “Your interpretation of the game is more important than my intentions.” This admonition, when I read it, cemented my admiration for Rohrer. If you conversely find the disclaimer to be a frustration in your search for some actual-and-true meaning of the game… well… in that case, you probably didn’t like Passage all that much in the first place.
I enjoyed my time wandering through Passage, but I have to ask: is this a “game”?
Yes Adam, it is most definitely a game. It is driven wholly by the user’s input, and in some sense it is the first interactive piece of art I’ve encountered.
Passage only really conveys its message through interaction. It wouldn’t work any other way. Removing that element would undercut its entire point, and I don’t think it could deliver its message in any other medium.
Frankly, I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t spot this one earlier. I’m not paying enough attention.
Does the fact that the experience ends the same every time invalidate its gamehood? I want to say it does, in which case Prince of Persia and BioShock and a million other things aren’t games, either, so obviously I’m wrong there.
But Passage doesn’t meaningfully change based on player inputs does it? If I follow another path up or down, does anything change besides the course through the landscape? Not that that would negate its gamehood either — there are other beloved games in which the route to a fixed destination is the play.
Jeff, zoom out and you’ll see we have some of those structures and restrictions already, through genre. The market imposes some of them, but they’re there. Still, that’s a broad, diluted notion of what you’re after. But the idea of form, and then riffing on that form, is alive and well. The market just doesn’t reward it — much as the market doesn’t really reward Shakespearean sonnets, either. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t learn about them and play with them.
Mearls, I agree: I’m embarrassed I didn’t spot this.
But I want to add this into the mix when appreciating Passage and what it does: inevitability. Whereas many games have that looming ending — whether it’s victory or defeat — Passage gains a lot of its sad beauty from its inevitable ending. Like a game, you want to reach the end for some kind of victorious completion; like a great game, you want to linger.
(The other big component in that beauty is the realization that your character is changing — did you miss a previous change? What else have you been missing on the way to the inevitable end?)
Anyway. Wow.
Hm. I’m having trouble articulating what I want to say, so I’m just going to quote en masse from Costikyan and then try again:
(From “I Have no Mouth”) “According to Will Wright, his Sim City is not a game at all, but a toy. Wright offers a ball as an illuminating comparison: It offers many interesting behaviors, which you may explore. You can bounce it, twirl it, throw it, dribble it. And, if you wish, you may use it in a game: soccer, or basketball, or whatever. But the game is not intrinsic in the toy; it is a set of player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy.
Just so Sim City. Like many computer games, it creates a world which the player may manipulate, but unlike a real game, it provides no objective. Oh, you may choose one: to see if you can build a city without slums, perhaps. But Sim City itself has no victory conditions, no goals; it is a software toy.
A toy is interactive. But a game has goals.”
I’m seeing the same things in Passage. It just doesn’t seem to have any goals, unless you are establishing them for yourself (collect gold, get as far into the world as you can). And then you are creating a game, and using the toy (Passage) to play it.
Incidentally: Mr. Costikyan talked about Passage on his own site back in December of 07, and the same discussion came up in his comments.
I’ve quoted that comment by Wright more than a lot. I am 100% on board with the idea that The Sims is a toy, not a game. So maybe I’m wrong about Passage.
Frankly, though, I’m more interested in how it works, how it affects the player, than whether the label is on straight.
(Sorry this is kinda rambling)
What’s amazing to me is that Passage tends to provoke emotional responses only from people who are interested in looking under the hood of games. I’ve shown it to a few friends now, gamers all, but people who don’t care how system influences setting, or how a narrative experience etc, etc — people who just want to make a character, accomplish goals, and level up — and they don’t seem to care. They don’t respond to it. Most of them find it boring.
My filmmaker girlfriend, on the other hand, as well as anyone who’s ever pried the hood off of a game to see how it runs (and of course industry insiders such as yourselves and Mr. Costikyan), all find the idea quite compelling, and are drawn to Passage.
What I’m building to is that I wonder why someone who really loves playing games might hate Passage, or at least be turned off by the idea of an “Impressionist game”, but people who like thinking about games like it. Is it the same as people disliking abstraction in visual arts? Is it the same as people who don’t “get” poetry?
If so, in what ways can we take the lessons learned from Impressionist games like this and bring them back to the table for the common gamer? Or is that something maybe we shouldn’t be doing?
It’s an interesting question, whether Passage is a game or a toy. I’m inclined to say that the fact of a score makes it a game. But does it follow that any toy with a score becomes a game? Thinking about this question, I also remembered that one of my first GPW posts, I posited: “I draw the line between games and toys by segregating things you can win or lose from things you can’t.” I also wrote, “This may make RPGs toys; I may be willing to live with that.” If a level is like a score, it leads to the idea that RPGs are games.
But levels and scores are also different in key ways, I think. A level is something more like a status—like the levels of terror alert—while a score is more like a judgment of quality or achievement.
But your most recent comment, Adam, is really the most interesting to me: The idea that Passage is not particularly interesting to the mass of gamers who play games but don’t study them. It’s a completely foreign mindset from where I’m sitting, but is massively cautionary, too.
On the one hand, I really believe that a creator should first and foremost create products that he or she would love him- or herself. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way really great products get made. But on the other hand, I worry that that philosophy cedes all of the opportunities for massive commercial success to creators who essentially have no taste.
Is that too pessimistic? Is the underlying assumption baseless? I’ve been thinking about this one for a long time, to no clear answer.
I think by the definition you’ve posed, Passage is DEFINITELY a toy. You can’t win or lose at it. You can just play it. You can try to play it better than you did the time before (by whatever standard you are measuring “better”) but that’s no different than trying to beat your own 5K time, or do more push-ups than you did last week, and I don’t think anyone would argue that working out is a game (granted, it’s not a toy, either, but an “activity” wherein you can track your progress).
An interesting development since then: another non-gamer friend of mine gave Passage a whirl, and seemed to enjoy it, but was left more-or-less unchanged by it. It’s a VERY small sample size, I know, but my impressions so far are as follows:
Players’ reactions to Passage
1. Gamers who are designers or who have strong interest in design: very interested and often emotionally moved by Passage;
2. Gamers who are not designers but have weak interest in design: interested enough in Passage to play more than once, and share it with others; no emotional response reported;
3. Gamers who have no interest in game design: no interest or negative response to Passage. Most often describe it as “boring” or “pointless”;
4. Non-gamers who are otherwise creative and/or interested in arts and/or psychology: interest in Passage for its impact on audiences, less interested in the actual play experience. Minimal emotional response reported.
Of course, you can’t win Asteroids either. You can only try to do better than last time (or thab another player). Does that mean that Asteroids isn’t a game?
(For the record, yes, this is a reductio. Rules of Play actually addresses this, including a discussion of the function of the high score list in this respect.)
You beat me to the punch, Seth! I was going to use Galaga as my example, but nevertheless, the point is exactly the same, and, I think, valid.
I have a copy of Rules of Play, sitting on my groaning “to read” shelf since Christmas. Guess it’s time to get to it.
Yeah, I would say Asteroids and Galaga are more-or-less toys. However, I would also make the distinction that in classic arcade games such as those cited, if there is player input, play lasts longer. Passage is going to end with your character’s death after 5 minutes whether you are pushing the buttons or not. Therefore in their original contexts in the arcade, the inherent goals of classic arcade games was to play for as long as possible for as little money as possible. Even when you bring them home and put them on a console or cellphone, one could argue that the inherent goal is to play as long as possible without a restart. Again, Passage doesn’t even have that. No matter how much you play, or how much you practice, or whether you even look at the screen, Passage ends when it ends, and the outcome is
the same — you’re a tombstone.
I haven’t read Rules of Play. I’ll put it on the list!
PS (brief moment of fanboyism): Seth, I LOVE Polaris. It ranks as one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
I love Polaris, too, but it’s not my game. Instead, I settle for being the official biggest Polaris fanboy. 😉 I’ve written other stuff, but not that.
I’m on a mobile, so I don’t have quite the ability to rhapsodize about Rules of Play. So I’ll just say that it is a really helpful book for discussions like this.
Now I feel a right twat. Sorry. I -also- love Dirty Secrets, although I’ve only played it once. I bought them at the same time and so apparently my brain put your name on the cover.
This is apparently the thread of mis-thought books: I was thinking Game Design Workshop
when I said Rules of Play
.
I ordered Rules of Play and skimmed it at a previous job, and wasn’t particularly drawn to it. It’s a worthwhile read, though, Seth?
Very much so. I was pleased with it because there was a surprising *lack* of focus on electronic games. Instead, there was a sociological sophistication about the book that I found to be quite helpful. I particularly found the section discussing various types of play (e.g. agon, alea, mimicry, and illinx) to be quite helpful in my own ongoing design efforts. There’s a lot to digest in the book, to be sure, but it’s also chock full of Things to Think About Games.