Rhizome News: The Game of Life

As we hit the slower weeks of summer, take five minutes to play Jason Rohrer’s Passage, a contemplative art game created for last year’s Gamma 256 competition in Montreal, which challenged indie designers to create games with tiny, irregular aspect ratios of no more than 256×256 pixels. In its half-year of existence, Rohrer’s entry has become a micro sensation on its own, garnering kudos in scads of the most widely read games blogs as well as mainstream press. In Passage, you play a character who travels across a narrow horizontal corridor representing nothing less than the passage of life itself, from childhood to old age. Since it’s very much a game about exploration and discovery, to say any more about what happens would spoil the impact — so with that in mind, don’t read Rohrer’s heartfelt statement on the game until after you’ve played it. Rather, prepare for ingeniously low-res visuals and minimal but meaningful interactivity t...