From Lindsay Grace's game Nurture-Extinction

A few days ago the 2011 Global Game Jam ended, and Miami University wrapped up its second successful year of participation. Since then I have had the pleasure of checking out the games created by the 42 participants (many of them Miami students and some AIMS faculty to boot). They produced twelve different games, either individually or as part of teams. Frankly, I am amazed by the breadth of creativity and innovation demonstrated within this vibrant collection of games, and all participants should surely be proud of their endeavors and impressive results. Moreover, all the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors deserve hearty accolades for a job well done.

The games created at the Miami Jam orbited the general theme of this year’s GGJ, extinction, an apt choice for a game jam topic given that the term could mobilize ideas from the environmentally conscious to the violently apocalyptic, from the literal to the literary. One tile-based RPG entitled Herbedca (still in its nascent stages) is based on the wacky premise that ancient, extinct plants have returned to terrorize the world, and it is the player’s goal to save his or her loved ones from this little “gamestop” of horrors. Another game created at Miami envisioned the extinction of the human race carried out by an army of Snookybots (obviously beginning their assault from the Jersey Shore). This humorous shooting-gallery game reminded me a tad of Cory Arcangel‘s mod I Shot Andy Warhol, though updated for MTV‘s Gen-Z. In another shooter entitled Extinction Level Events (E.L.E), the player plays Earth herself as she spins around the Sun, using various mechanics to thwart the destruction of the Earth’s population by hurtling asteroids, solar flares, and alien attack. You will fail. Earth will be destroyed. But, you can try to rack up as many points as possible before the “E.L.E” gets the best of you. At first this spinning, digital orrery made me dizzy with its intense action, but after forty-five minutes (yes, it IS that addictive) I was mastering my force-fields and nukes while trying to tweak my score one notch higher.

Shadow

Meanwhile, such irreverence and wicked fun was matched by more ethereal ideas such the game Shadow, a beautiful adventure style game where you play a shadow trying to find the human host that it has been detached from. Sneaking through the city streets you dodge bright lights which will extinguish your form while sticking to darker nooks and crannies for sustenance. The premise is eerily imaginative, and the artwork convincing through its refined simplicity. Similarly ethereal was the game Nurture-Extinction created by the principle organizer of Miami’s jam, Lindsay Grace. In this exquisite artgame a line of delicate flowers grows toward the sun, each emblazoned with a letter from the world “Extinction” shining from their flowery faces. The player simply attempts to keep the blossoms alive by pressing the letter on the keyboard that matches the letter on a flower that has begun to fade. The goal—almost impossible to achieve when playing alone—is to keep all the budding flowers from fading (which would eventually spell the word “extinction” on the screen, perhaps keeping the demon at bay by naming it). The game’s difficulty reminded me of how challenging it is to prevent the loss of fragile nature in an industrialized world. We cannot nurture nature with our two hands alone. It will require many hands to save the natural world from extinction. I also thought, perhaps, that the game could be appreciated as a slightly subconscious expression of Grace’s roll in the game jam: nurturing the event, tempering it with just the right atmosphere, fertilizing it with energy, and helping to coax the budding games into the light of day—these are no small tasks and certainly laudable, as is the game he created.

Freeword

Here and there, words kept popping up in the games produced. Thus, the intriguing game Freeword slightly resembled the Google Image Labeler game, but instead of mobilizing my fun to do tedious work for a large corporation, it sparked my individual creative juices and challenged me to vitalize my own vocabulary. Presented with bizarre images of unidentified technologies and objects I was asked to describe these images with individual words. A nearby flame was “fueled” by the unique words I typed and “diminished” when I became lazy and tried to use the same word twice. As I played, the strange images of human technology dovetailed with my desire to create clever and unique descriptions, trying to keep the flame of human ingenuity alive. Then there was another game for “wordies”  entitled Growth and Decay: A Head-to-Head Word Game, a two person lexical battle made for the Android. Here, the players scramble (or “scrabble”) to create a word from an array of letters that each is given, then try to take apart or “decay” the word their opponent created by removing letters from it in order to create another word. Phew, a mouthful indeed. Words fail, you just have to play it. It’s devilishly fun. Instead of spending a three hour flight flinging birds at blocks in order to kill pigs, you might find yourself turning to the bloke sitting next to you and asking, “Growth and Decay?” Knowing the rules, hopefully he will respond with a simple, “Go.”

Though not a word game, MEchine is 2D-platformer which should satiate the meta-gamer in all of us. Jumping here and jumping there, you soon meet your co-conspirator in play: the game itself. Redefining the “cut-scene,” after you complete a few levels you will come “text-to-text” with the self-conscious entity which is the game. In these ELIZA-esque moments the game’s convincing personality will ask you questions about how things are going. Then the game will change “itself” (its mechanics, its “look,” etc.) based on these conversations. Self-reflexive innovation at its best! Look for this one to appear soon on Armor Games or Newgrounds.

MEchine

One of the best parts about the GGJ, in my opinion, is its openness to game creation beyond the bounds of the digital. Indeed, Miami’s jam saw the creation of two fascinating multiplayer card games. Okay, the game Vanished is digital through and through since three players work collaboratively (awesome!) with their mobile phones (awesome!), attempting to save the interconnectedness of human knowledge from extinction by linking disparate spheres of information through the jungle of wikipedia (again, awesome!). So, for example, starting with cards that send you to the wikipedia pages for Lady Gaga, James Joyce, and The Kansas City Chiefs, can you and two other players work together, following links from these pages in order to arrive at a common page, say, Grand Theft Auto? Yes, you can! Of course, there are other mechanics at work in this sophisticated game which will derail your efforts. In another card game, Dissolution: A Space ‘Venture, you vie against other players in a resource hungry colonization of a new planet. Earth, after all, is faced with extinction. The Settlers of Catan jumps to mind, but Dissolution is equal to that famous game in terms of the tightness of its game mechanics. It’s truly an amazing feat that a team of individuals can gather for 48 hours and create a fun, challenging, multiple-player game with such a stunning balance of rules (the same goes for Vanished as well). So, if you and some friends are thinking about what to do on snowy evening, print out those .pdfs, scissor them up, and settle in for a social gaming experience where nothing will be extinct except your boredom.

Rubicon

Then there was Rubicon, a captivating and fragile artgame which provides a nice closure to my post. Rubicon is meant to be played by an individual only once, where he or she initially controls a bubble ascending from a body of water. As the journey unfolds the player can merge with other bubbles within the water, thus becoming larger, or instead choose to avoid other bubbles, and thus remain smaller. At a certain point the bubble erupts from the water and becomes airborne; the player now attempts to avoid blowing leaves that will burst the bubble that he or she has evolved. Depending on your choices in the water stage you end up with different movement skills within the air as you float. The game is perhaps a wonderfully distilled version of the first stage of Spore (and, in my opinion, packs a more meaningful punch than an aesthetically similar award-winning game, flOw). When you finally—inevitably—strike a leaf and “die” the game records a phrase that describes how you lived your fleeing, effervescent life (so-and-so was “curious at an early age” or “explored wide and far”). Future players can read these brief descriptions of prior journeys before they begin their one play-through.

A “rubicon” is defined as “a limit that when passed or exceeded permits of no return and typically results in irrevocable commitment.” Is this not a nice description of the Global Game Jam event, a threshold participants cross, irrevocably committing to the production of a game in 48 hours? Each individual or team chooses how to design their game, their innovative bubble of creation, eventually releasing them into the world. Each journey is different, each exploration unique, but all leave a mark that others—like me, an unknown, distant player—can encounter and enjoy.

If you haven’t yet played these excellent games, fortunately they are not threatened with extinction. In fact, they are alive and well, right over here. Go play.

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