In which I digress at length about using systems of rules to create meaning in games before coming back to the point and discussing Passage and The Marriage.

Games about Life and Love

Rob Humble’s The Marriage and Jason Rohre’s Passage both caught my attention at about the same time. Broadly speaking, they are similar games. Both touch on life and human relationships. Both are abstract and open, leaving us to do the heavy lifting as far as interpreting the meanings. Most importantly, both are minimalist art-games that use the rules of gameplay to impart some kind of message.

I love both of these games just for existing. Both games give you a space to play in and ask you to sort out what’s going on.

The meaning of the game is pulled not out of the storyline, art or sound but out of the rules. It’s in the rules of play that you find attitudes about life and relationships. This stands in sharp contrast to most games which use cutscenes and other trappings of film or books to get across story and meaning. On his site, Humble explains “The challenge as I saw it was to have the primary medium of expression something unique to games.”

If games are a system of rules with which you interact, then inherent in those rules is a kind of ethical system structure around the rewards and penalties that are applied as you play. This isn’t a huge insight. Ethics and laws are systems of rules with carrots and sticks to encourage one along the path of compliance. The ethics of Tetris aren’t that complicated. Filling the screen is bad, clearing lines is good, clearing lots of lines at once is better. The virtuous get high scores while the sinners stare at a game over screen.

You should download and play both games before reading more.

(Download: The Marriage. Download: Passage)

Using Rules to Construct Meaning

The key idea in both projects is that the rules of a game can carry with them an agenda or message. This isn’t new either. The Soviet Union banned Monopoly, fearing that its pro-free-market gameplay would corrupt the public, while today moral crusaders continue to go after violent games on the grounds that they are youth-corrupting murder simulators (Hi Jack!). But in most cases the ethical message (if any) is a side-effect.

News gaming’s September 12th is a pretty pure example of a game where the agenda is explicitly build right in to the rules. There are civilians and terrorists. You are trying to kill the terrorists. If you kill a civilian, then nearby civilians are likely to become terrorists. You are armed with a hopelessly inaccurate and slow missile, and everyone runs around randomly. The sum total guarantees a steady stream of botched air strikes and a growing army of enemies (or you can choose to do nothing, which leaves terrorists running free anyway).

The game is by no means a simulation and the message is clear and simple “trying to kill terrorists creates more terrorists”. Sledgehammeringly obvious? Yes, but no less simplistic than Rainbow Six’s game rules which in essence say “a sufficiently skilled elite strike force can heroically shut down whole armies of evil-doers”.

Because there is so much plot in there, a game like Rainbow Six is almost inevitably criticized as if it had been an action movie starring an elite strike force that heroically shut down whole armies of evil-doers. September 12th, stripped of just about everything but gameplay, forces us into arguments around the rules themselves. Don’t we have access to more accurate means of dealing with terrorists than clumsy air strikes? (Maybe the Rainbow Six crew are available?) Don’t terrorists recruit other people into their ranks even if we do nothing? Why is there no mechanism for terrorists that give up and drift back into the civilian population? What about car bombs?

Back to the Games!

Which brings me back to Passage and The Marriage. After playing each game through a couple of times and reading the artists’ statements, my first critical instinct was “wait a sec, I don’t agree with these rules!”

In The Marriage, the blue square (the dude) loses size whenever he gets pulled back towards the lady (pink) square. When they ‘kiss’ the dude further shrinks and grows a little more transparent. The lady grows and gets more opaque. She loses opacity with the passing of time. Both of them gain size when they touch coloured circles and the dude gains opacity as well. Shrinking to nothing or going totally transparent ends the game (the marriage).

The economy is pretty simple. The dude gains life force through interactions with the outside world. He loses it when he’s pulled back in to the relationship. The lady on the other hand grows a little when she encounters the outside world but otherwise relies exclusively on the dude for her opacity. Without reading too much into Humble’s personal life, the implication that the blue square would be JUST FINE if he didn’t have to keep tending to the whiny pink square paints a pretty dismal picture of a marriage.

Where I in charge of making The Marriage 2.0 I’d propose the following modification to the rules: Both squares shrink and fade constantly (though each at varying rates during different phases of life). Both squares gain opacity when they kiss and gain size when they encounter coloured circles. If this proves too easy them we add a rule where if the squares have just kissed, they temporarily lose the ability to absorb coloured circles.

I might also throw in some other squares that can be randomly kissed, resulting in an opacity boost for only one of the partners (and maybe an opacity loss for the other?) but that would be maybe getting too far into the world of friends outside the marriage or even open relationships.

Passage goes beyond the simple primary relationship, being an entire life distilled down to 5 minutes of exploration. Early in the game you meet a lady, with whom you can travel for the rest of the game. She speeds up your movement, giving you a great deal of extra freedom if you want to explore east. The cost is that together you are a lot less manoeuvrable, making exploring to the south much more difficult.

On my third run through the game I started wondering: If this game is presenting relationships in the context of a life, why do I only get one shot at a mate? Why do I have to marry so young? Why can’t we get divorced?

If each game says something about the game maker’s attitudes towards relationships, Passage seems to see the mate as someone that lets you see further but that prevents you from going “deep” into things and blocks you from material success. You only get the one and the relationship is a yes/no proposition.

Here are my proposed alternate rules for Passage 2.0: Populate the world with multiple potential mates. Give each of them different attributes. Some speed you up, but make manoeuvring harder. Some slow you down but extend your reach when you go after chests. Some let you pass through walls. Some pull you against your wishes in different directions. Press D to get a divorce.

More Power More Problems

Passage is very calm. You always live for the the same length of time, and there is nothing you can do to accelerate or delay on onset of death. You have one main choice to make (life-long commitment or go it alone) and then some smaller choices about where to wander with varying degrees of meaningfulness, depending on whether you are playing to go as far as you can or as deep as you can or to get the highest score. In Passage there’s not much you can control about your life except where you go and the overall effects is of pleasantly wandering through a garden.

The Marriage, on the other hand, is STRESSFUL AS HELL. With an extremely fragile equilibrium staving off failure, the game ends early and often. You are in charge of the movement of the squares, so when things go wrong, this is clearly your fault! The Marriage gives you a lot more agency. The game can end sooner or later depending on how well you balance the fading and shrinking squares. You have more responsibility for how things turn out.

It’s interesting that The Marriage is the more frustrating game even though it’s the game that gives you MORE power over the events that transpire. More to the point, it’s the more frustrating game because it seemingly gives you more power while also putting you in control of a leaking nearly-doomed ecosystem. May I never view my own relationships in a similar light!