This Little Game (and Why To Love It)

Day 2,596, 15:50 • Published in USA USA • by Silas Soule


This Little Game



A powerful and emergent game depicts the two opposing sides of the Universe. I was (once) enthusiastic about the (potential) quality of this little game. It was not a game about people talking in virtual space about random stuff. Not a game about life-travelers engaging in ongoing arguments about the human condition(s). It was a game (I imagined) about the quality of life. Not the meaning of it but the quality. The details in its design. What a certain type of religious person might call the internal clockworks of true valor.


As a general tenor, the duality of belief is analyzed completely when various e-protagonists debate over the serious and dangerous issues raised by the game. It is about dying of boredom and rescuing players from dying of boredom, right? Not really. It promotes the religion of ceaseless warfare while at the same time teaching players to endure the stifling nullity of a dull life un-lived in service to the spectacle of zombified global capital. Right? Not really again.






This game has a greater meaning than just that. We play in an e-world filled with pathetic lies, corny truths, raised flags over white buildings and big letters superimposed on or over the dark ones. We play in a space where prostitution is not only legalized but embedded into the cultural state of the society. We pretend-live in a virtual world where rejection, where pain, where slavery and failure are common attractions for the atrocious tourists.


We hope -- rather hopelessly -- to free this world from the hands of the manipulators and selfish dictators, we (pretend to) organize revolutions, we fight for freedom but in the end we all get trapped in the same positions as were before. This is what this game is about.


It's about the ongoing fight carried to win our faith back. Faith, science, culture, logic, mathematics, metaphors, feelings, achievements... They are all the same. They are content. They are the ingredients and thoughts that player-kind must have in order to survive the greatest threat of them all.







The threat which is not the monetary or economic system, the threat which is not the harsh e-un-reality, the threat which is not the solely figurative place of the person in the world, but the threat that is represented in the lack of faith in ourselves.



We are our own guides because we rule this world. This is why this little game once captured my attention completely. It's not a masterpiece of a game. It's not a grand scale epic strategy game, nor an immersive, encompassing role-playing getaway. It's not a studio banking option. It will never be turned into a film.



At the same time...it was simply great at times. I loved it because it really balanced amazingly well the truth revealed in the denouement of all adventures in samsara. It is identical in form and content.







The little details like the utter uselessness of standard political endeavors, the erasure of intellect and depth-of-field from popular literature, the absence of TV and the mindlessness of radio, the many virtual locks on the many phantasmic doors and not to mention the biggest detail of them all... the fight button. Just think about the fight button vs. everything else. Order vs. Chaos. Even in a messy world we can find the neat, systematic order of click (bang), click (boom), click (kill), click, click...



Going further to the execution, the game is well structured, the dialogues can be haunting at times, even the horrid cliches fade away because even when you find them they tend to leap off a virtual cliff by the time you log out. The acting is, in many cases, impeccable and the technical aspect of the game, all things considered, though disappointing in many ways, has a steady, consistent, reliable feel to it. Like a job you don't really like, or a welfare check you don't really wish you needed, but must have in order to avoid starving.



I can't talk too much about this game because I don't want to enter into the details... I would end up writing a gigantic tome. I just hope people can see what a good game this really is. I'm pretty sure few games have ever captured my attention as this one did.


Like Ward and Jaquet's Gamma World, this is a game about content and... containers.










Bye for now,
PQ