LOVED by Alexander Ocias

Play it at Kongregate. (About 8 minutes per playthrough for experienced gamers.)

Today something (masochism?) had me rereading discussions about Roger Ebert's idiotic* declaration that video games were not art and never could be. As wrong as people like Ebert are, it's true that we're just barely leaving the time when it would take someone maybe a week to get familiar with all of the games that might get mentioned in any games-as-art debate (play Portal, Bioshock, Braid, Katamari Damacy, So Far and something by Jason Rohrer, and you're prepared for 50% of those conversations). So it's cool that short-short games which add to the discussion are flourishing now.

The first time I played Loved, I thought it was a little heavy-handed. After reading the discussion at Jay Is Games, I had to change my mind-- Ocias did an excellent job of making the game genuinely ambiguous, even if most people, like me, didn't initially see any readings other than their own.

One interesting bit is the radically different interpretations people had for hard parts of the game based on different readings of the 'death' mechanic. I still think of video game 'death' as being death-in-the-story (or at least failure); it's just that the medium allows you to try until you reach the end of the story. Some other people, though, interpreted a section which took multiple tries to get through as the protagonist learning to perform a difficult but not impossible task. And under the latter reading, since the game is not actually that hard, when the voice sends you toward the more dangerous of two paths, it's teaching you something for your own good.

(Since I can't help seeing Loved as about an abusive relationship, I find the "for your own good" reading upsetting. But by almost any conception of the designer-player relationship, I am happy when designers do unpleasant-seeming things for my own good. It matters, of course, that they aren't taking my autonomy away, just, at worst, wasting my time.)

It used to be rare that I thought a game was worthwhile without being much fun (and indeed, Loved isn't much fun, though it depends for its power on some of the yay-i-did-it satisfaction that provides the fun in plenty of games). Now it happens a lot! These are interesting times.

* Strong words! I was chastised by a friend yesterday for having a narrow view of the world when it came to things I feel strongly about. But there are at least a dozen insupportable things about Ebert's essays on this topic, and come on, the man is a professional art critic working on a medium that was considered inherently worthless in living memory. That he doesn't understand what's going on speaks really, really poorly of him.