09 IGF Winner for Innovation
Between is the latest full game from Jason Roher, done in his idiosyncratic style of OpenGL cross-platform and bit-wise read .tga files. The game requires you to play with a friend, and generally plays with your expectations of multiplayer interaction. At first you'll experiment with the controls, trying to get an idea of what it's all about, as you do you'll begin to create new patterns, building a great structure in a multiverse between dreams and waking life. As you do a sense of creeping solitude is fuddled by the strange adjustments to the landscape, things you did not plan, and the sense that the person you had to network with as a requisite for starting the game is lurking around like the Christian God or a more mischievous sort of invisble man, depending on the level of altruism. You then realize that Instant Messaging functions as both a philosophical sutra and a transhuman sort of prayer.
The puzzle seems logical and yet complete mastery of the mechanics eludes the rational thinker - you need to think outside your own models and include the ineffable chaos of another person's mind in order to build your tower of babel. Even so, after you catch on to the big clue that the join code you dropped into Gtalk was just the precursor to an interesting conversation, the mysteries may allude you. I had this experience with Tembac, he described the game as a "pretentious Yoshi's Cookie". That comment, while accurate, clued me in to the notion that a big motivation for dismissing a game as pretentious is when it is designed to confuse as well as teach. To me that's not pretension, that's clever mischief, and maybe the bitter icing of another sort of lesson. Results may very depending on the level of hilaritas you possess.
As usual with Roher's work, there will be a small legion of aesthetes hailing the nuances and newly broken ground in this game, and there will be the proportionally larger crowd typing "Fail". But what's significant about this game is that it gets you to talk with someone as you experience an odd melange simultaneously. It's cheaper than buying four hits of acid (two for me, two for you) and the purity is verified.
Exclusive Host, My Ass
I am sourly amused to note that Esquire's page boasts that they are "proud to be the exclusive host" of Between, when in fact the URLs they provide link to files on Sourceforge. Meaning they aren't actually hosting it at all.
Therefore, I hereby announce: Since we, like Esquire, link to the Sourceforge files, we too, are proud to be the "exclusive host" of this game also!
The dictionaries will have to catch up with our new modern definition of "exclusive" (not to mention "host"), but there's technological innovation for you.
This makes me think of table
This makes me think of table top gaming, where mutally different agendas are sort of clash (in a possitive way) to produce what are unexpected gameplay elements BUT at the same time they are not random elements, they can be traced to quite sensible and thought out lines of thought. Sort of like when the palladin finds what the rogue hid in the saddle bags...sort of a butterfly effect, but to do with peoples intentions.
I'll see if I can get a friend of mine to try it with me some time...
Cute puzzle, but: multiplayer what multiplayer?
This is a cute little puzzle, which gets a little tedious after a while. Making some of the more complex blocks is rather laborious, and doesn't really involve any new insight.
I have not seen the multiplayer coordination that everyone is talking about. There have been a couple of unexplained events early in my game (particularly the appearance of the CMY blocks), but nothing that I could attribute to another person. Maybe that's what you get when you partner with a random stranger.
Jeez, that makes me even
Jeez, that makes me even more interested. In table top roleplay whether people get each others moves depends on how well they know them. This game may be some useful demonstration or something about where you see meaning relative to how much you know a person.
A word of warning...
It's worth mentioning that most of Rohrer's games are over in a short time period (Passage was 5 minutes, Gravitation was 8), but that is not the case here. A friend and I played for well over an hour.