Jason Rohrer’s Passage is a very simple game. The game is short, it lasts five minutes, but often has an emotional impact on people who play it. The game abstracts a lifetime into a five-minute journey through a landscape. As a player you have very few choices, and the choices you do make have very little effect on the final outcome. Knowing this doesn’t change the emotional response. Reactions on forums was mixed but some had the same emotional response I had, others didn’t. It was described by one poster as “Haunting. Also seemingly one of those things without much discernible meaning beyond what you infer yourself.”1 I was very interested in the emotional responses the game causes in players and I wanted to get a record. I developed a survey to be filled out before and after the game was played.
Several of my questions referred to inferring narrative. I got some interesting feed back but nothing specific. This could have been due to the way I asked the question or the nature of the game. During my own play experience I found myself deriving myriad stories about how a life might unfold. The survey may be found in appendix A.
1.Mewd : http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showthread.php?t=2457
No comments:
Post a Comment