Games as Art: Jason Rohrer’s Passage

As the cold winds of autumn herald the dark frosts of winter, which bring death to the green landscapes and azure skies that spring hath wrought, let us contemplate our own demise, lest we forget the ephemeral nature of our lives and fail to seize every byte of meaning from this glorious opportunity of conscious experience. I want to use some subset of this opportunity to talk about Jason Rohrer’s ludoartistic masterpiece: Passage. There exists much temptation to devote many printing characters to discuss Rohrer’s auteuristic brilliance. However, I will forgo that and try to make this essay as concisely minimalistic as the game itself (it should take the reader about five minutes to read this and a bit longer to absorb it, just like Passage). This game is a digital memento mori and, to the best of my knowledge, the first intentional reminder of the terseness of life encoded in playfully interactive software—though later artistic games implement a kind of permadeath which is better emblematic of the finality of death.

The game’s environs have been described as a maze. However, they are more like a labyrinth in that all paths essentially lead to the same place. This unicursality is just like the life of a person, isn’t it. Negotiating this labyrinth is coextensive with playing the game. In before “it’s another walking simulator HURR DURR!” Only the most base of Philistines could think that there is a conformal mapping between playing this game and appreciating its artistry. What is most essential to parsing the meaning of the gameplay is the recognition that no matter how one maneuvers about in the 2D movement space and which treasures one pursues, the meta-experiential nature is one of pure linearity—the line of temporality pushes one ever forth to that final state. This is the source of the game’s poignancy. Life gives us multilayered and multidimensional phenomenology, but the central layer and highest order of experience is that of life as a uni-directional vector along a straight line from the first step to the grave. The journey in space and the journey in time are co-occurrent, but the journey in time passes in only one way. In Passage, as with the passage of time, there is simply no going back to a previous state without replay via reincarnation. Would this even be the same experience? The system’s memory truncates at n - 1. In spatial terms, the relative placement of the highest order bits—the avatar’s pixels—becomes more right justified. The closer we get to the end, the deeper sense that we have of the constraint of no going back allowed.

There are other facets to the journey than the journey itself, but of course, namely that of relationships. There is an ostensibly female (though I do not suspect this to be any traditionalist commentary on heteronormativity on the part of Rohrer, rather mere autobiographical representation) NPC with whom the player can interact. If the player comes into physical contact with her she becomes a betrothed companion for the rest of the journey. One single first touch leads to a (remainder of a) lifetime of connection. Yet, there is a tradeoff which the player must bear as a consequence of freely entering the implicit bargain of this contract: the encumbrance of any additional body makes the labyrinth less navigable and limits access to certain passages as pathways. This encapsulates wisdom about life in an interactive spatial logic in a way that only games can. This draws out the additive relation between the numerical and spatial in the logic of life, which is to say the more we increment the number of party members in our familial nucleus the less freedom we have to conveniently explore the play space of the game of life (the lower case is precisely so as not to conflate this with Conway’s Game of Life!). Would we be content maximally exploring the corridors if we must do so with the knowledge that we will reach the end alone with our score as our only companion? In the end, we are covering exactly the same linear ground. In the final analysis, no network of choices leads to any divergent outcome. Passage represents convergence: spatial divergence is a distraction, temporal convergence is essential nature of the experience. The last step is always the step into a solitary grave, even if our tombstone is accompanied by a proximal one playing a silent contrapuntal melody for those willing to listen to the notes not being played.

When I first played the game, I must confess it wasn’t a deeply emotional experience. I was moved by the rudimentary midi music more than anything. The notes were hauntingly bittersweet. It was only after a few playthroughs that I began to appreciate where the game was taking me. At the moment the realization struck, I thought of my children and my partner. I put the game down and went off to spend time with them. It is almost as if the game does not want to be played beyond what it takes to understand its message. The book The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer has a quote from the man himself about the game on this very score, “the game asks the player, ‘Now that you’ve been reminded of your own mortality, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?’”

One important point invites debate, whether by design or not: does reaching the end of the journey constitute a victory condition? Is playing the game itself a victory condition? After all, every moment is part of the experience and there are no failure states. The only way to achieve immortality is to leave the game running endlessly, which would take an infinite amount of energy, even at a rate of 1 kWh per annum. Though the game itself is now permanently in collection at the Museum of Modern Art. So there is some permanence to be had, for what its worth...