Passage

Every time I start to ask myself why I waste money on a magazine like "Esquire" they produce an article so brilliant and interesting that it makes me cling to "Man at his Best."  

A couple months back Esquire published an article about an obscure video game programer named Jason Rohrer.  The article describes this man's fight to turn his yard into a wilderness refuge, but its really about art in the most unlikely place.  The following blue text is a series of  excerpts from the article:

In 2007, the tall man, whose name is Jason Rohrer, uploaded a free game to his Website. It used a mere two megabytes of disk space and a thin horizontal stripe of color on the screen. So simple. In Passage, you're this little pixelated guy. You live in the stripe of color. The stripe is twelve pixels tall. It's green. All else is blackness. Your job is to move up and down and left and right through the stripe -- the "forest" -- in search of treasure chests, sort of like in the Legend of Zelda. . . .

The first person to cry playing Passage was Rohrer himself, as he was programming it. All that summer, he watched one of his neighbors die of cancer. She was a nice old woman with a beautiful garden. "Her whole life, she had said if she ever got cancer, she wouldn't want to go through chemotherapy," Rohrer says. "But once it happened to her, she changed her mind....We watched her go through chemotherapy, and she essentially just rotted away. And she died in six months anyway." It wasn't only sad. It was irrational. So Rohrer, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, made a game about the inevitability of death. "Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible," he wrote in a twelve-hundred-word creator's statement, "but in the end, death is still coming for you."

Passage was sad, it was sincere, it was personal, it was mysterious, it was existential, and for all these reasons, it was new. The big boys of gaming, a universe away from Potsdam, e-mailed it to one another. Clint Hocking, a designer at Ubisoft best known for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, was so blown away by Passage that he made it a focus of his Game Developers Conference talk earlier this year. In front of an audience full of the industry's most influential game designers, Hocking growled, "Why can't we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know? We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here's a game that made me cry. It did. It really did."

He put up a slide of Passage.

Then he put up a slide of another small indie game, the Marriage, coded by Rohrer's friend Rod Humble. The Marriage uses brightly-colored circles and squares to model...a marriage. Humble claims to have made it after going through "a really heavy Kandinsky period."

"I think it sucks ass that two guys tinkering away in their spare time have done as much or more to advance the industry this year than the other hundred thousand of us working fifty-hour weeks," said Hocking.

Here was a cute video game that made jaded men weep by commanding a sophisticated and rare power that lay -- where? Where in those two megabytes, those twelve pixels?

The article continues to question why a medium that makes absurd amounts of money each year has not been able to create a single video game with substance.  Sure video games allow us to kill and destroy, but why can't they make us feel and share?  What Passage was able to do in five minutes with four arrow keys proves that interactive media such as video games could be incredibly powerful tool to elicit emotion and growth.  Imagine, for example, the therapeutic potential of an interactive simulation to help soldiers returning from war in Iraq or Afghanistan cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The internet is changing the way we process information in a way not seen since the creation of the printing press.  This power is certainly awe inspiring!  Computer simulations  allow us to become more intimately intertwined with a story than other forms of media.  In television, books and movies, we become intimate with characters through commonalities, but in video gaming we are instantly absorbed because we make the decisions; WE are the characters.  It can heal us, but it could also indoctrinate us in ways that are very dangerous.  For example, have war simulation games desensitized young Americans to the violence of war, or the sacredness of life?  What if that same technology was used to indoctrinate young men and women in other parts of the world to the virtues of terroristic acts against America?  What if a simulation was created to allow terrorists to be trained via the internet.

My own church runs a college for educating young men to become pastors.  This college also has a campus at its sister church in another state.  They use teleconferencing technology and the internet to allow a professor to teach at one campus while streaming audio-video to students at the other campus.  This is an educational revolution, but imagine the potential for evil that this same technology could reveal.

Final word: I believe the next step in the evolution of art will be interactive.  We say a picture is worth a thousand words, but imagine if that picture was able to change based upon the person viewing it.  Video games allow us to modify the worlds in which we play.  In their infancy they have not touched us on an emotional level, but in the future I expect to see artists like Jason Rohrer emerge who create emotional interactive experiences that adapt to each individual user.

Websites of importance for this posting: 

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/future-of-video-game-design-1208?click=main_sr

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/