Magical Rohrer

From watching a few of his interviews and playing his games, I must say that Jason Rohrer is a guy I would like to sit down and have a beer with.

Rohrer is thirty five-ish, blond, square-jawed, and has startling blue eyes.  His hair seems perennially sloppy, as if it won’t be tamed no matter how long or short it’s cut.  It’s the look of a natural grunge musician.  His surprisingly large head sort of floats about over his thin neck like the head of a marionette, bobbing and weaving about with his words, which bunch together in quick spurts.  It’s a manic dance of excitement.  He speaks quickly about infinite recursion and creativity and biased data sharing and the lower limit of what we would call communication, and by the end you find yourself bobbing along with him a little bit too, because his enthusiasm is infectious.  Or maybe it’s because you're a little intrigued...

Jason Rohrer is an artist and a computer game designer, although I would emphasize the former and say that the latter is simply his medium.  If you’ve ever turned your nose up at video games, or you don’t see the value in them, I beseech you to try the ones he made.  You still may not like them (and I warn you, these games aren’t designed to be fun), but I guarantee that they’ll at least make you think a little differently.  The games I recommend you to play are these:

Passage is about life.  Will you travel through it alone or with a partner?  Will you take an easy road or a more tricky one?  What kinds of challenges will you take, and what will you give up in the process?  And what’s the point of it all anyways?

Gravitation is about creativity.  Have you ever had moments of genius, and then the times when it all crashes down on you?  Have you ever struggled with the tradeoff between work and play, brainstorming and implementing, taking on more exciting challenges versus finishing the ones you’re immersed in?  So has Jason Rohrer.  I bet you’ve never experienced it like this before.  

Sleep is Death is about…?  Okay I admit, I haven’t played it.  But I watched the cool intro slideshow, and I’m intrigued enough that I want to.

These games (at least the first two) are free and quick... they’ll take you less than ten minutes to play.  They’re purposely philosophical and exploratory rather than entertaining.  You can collect points in these games but really what you’re going to want to do is to understand the nuances of their mechanics, because, well, that’s what the games are really about.  It’s not the contents nor the graphics (don’t expect much) but their physics through which the games build into allegories.  

And when I say that you’ve never played games like these, I really mean it.  There’s very little else I’ve seen to compare them to, and I feel they have more in common with Avante Garde art than with other video games (although admittedly, I’m not really a gamer… perhaps there is other stuff like this out there?).  

There's something else about these games.  In an age when all of our technology is tremendously slick, it can be shocking when we encounter something that isn’t.  Rohrer cuts right to the heart of it.  He doesn't waste a spare pixel.  His games show that beauty is in the crafting and not in the polish, for of polish there is none here, but I don’t feel these games miss it.  Take a few minutes to check them out and I think you'll be glad that you did.