Passage

On Wednesday, we played a game in class called “Passage”. This game was created by a single programmer for a competition that limited mechanics to a bare minimum; the game spans a total of five minutes, is extremely pixelated, and the game screen is the size of a banner. Yet even with these limitations the game is successfully able to narrate a story and has won many awards for doing so. The space in which the player is placed in itself helps represent the story the game is trying to tell. The banner sized screen and pixelated appearance help communicate how one might see life: blurry and only focusing on certain aspects. The designer has built the game to tell the story of life by making the background fade into different colors, having the character slowly age, and having the previous screens gather on the left side to symbolize memories of the past. All this is communicated not through writings like in novels or set videos as in movies but through the space in which the player is allowed to wander and interact with. The game has translated a concept, the life of a man, and translated it into a narrative through the use of environment. It connects with the player through evoking associations from him or her as in “the balding must signify getting old” and even draws on emotion, like when we see a gravestone that symbolizes the death of the “wife” or entering light at the end (heaven).