Games are a very difficult medium when you try to compare experiences, and that is part of what makes those experiences so compelling. The player is presented with choices and tools to interact with the virtual world around them which creates an experience that unique to the player.

In almost all games (there is certainly room for a game where any lack of action, in addition to action, will change the direction of a constantly progressing story) it is entirely possible for the player to ruin the intended experience. Conversely, it is also possible for players to create moving experiences where none were intended.

Gravitation has a strong message at it’s core, as well as several mechanisms in place to help deliver that message to the player. Still, I hold the opinion that the only strength this game holds is an overwhelming ambiguity which gives the player room to fill in the blanks as they see fit. Your interpretation is perfectly valid, but there’s nothing in this game to say that other far less favorable interpretations aren’t equally valid.

That is what bothers me. The experience is more about what you put into the game than where the game takes you. Look through responses to this game in various forums and you’ll find that there is no shortage of people who did not walk away with the intended message. At that point, many games are capable of having profound, unintended messages to the right player under the right circumstances.

If we are going to applaud a game for doing what no other does, it should do so without question- not just for a group of people who looked at it from the right angle, at the right time of day and with the right shade of glasses. The game that we applaud for this achievement should not have to hide behind arbitrary interpretation.

First some basic symbolism: the maze is your mind, the room at the bottom is your house/family, the stars are creative ideas. I think these are fairly unambiguously intended interpretations.

In a way, symbolism goes no further than that. But we can treat these three things as *axioms* to our thinking about the game. First I shall apply these axioms to the examination of someone else’s, or your own, playthrough:

The maze is a maze of thought THEREFORE to spend the whole of the gametime trying to go further and further into the game is to become lost in your own mind.

The bottom chamber is your family THEREFORE to spend the whole of the gametime down at the bottom is to be a person who has no regard for their own creativity and who dedicates their life to their family (and if you play the game a bit, you’ll find that your child dies unless you do this).

There is a richer and more important way to use the axioms above though. The emotional punch/insight of the game comes from making strategic connections, like I said. There are many dozens of such connections. I have a highscore of 123, and every single one of those points required another tiny modification to the way I react to things – every single one of them told me something new about Rohrer’s statement. Am I saying that he consciously put every one of these insights in, assembling a dazzlingly concise master statement/impression? Actually, I suspect not; I think he took these axioms as we do, and then tried to combine them with strategically interesting level design.

I shall now list some of the connections that come to mind, and what I think are some reasonable interpretations of them

1. The maximally fast way into the main body of the maze is the passage up the right; the only way to get through this is to be maximally “happy”. (symbol: Rohrer’s best inspiration comes from recognizing peaks in his familial love)

2. If you make too many blocks fall down to the bottom, you can make it difficult to impossible to reach your child (symbol: filling your life with too many projects can suffocate your relationship with the people you love)

3. The amount of points a block gives you degrade in value if they are kept around too long (symbol: inspiration for a project can be lost. Combine this with the fact that different blocks descend to different distances from the fire and we have the idea that different projects can have varying levels of potential to begin with, even though they all seem equally brilliant to begin with [they give a score of 9])

4. In order to yield the most points from a block, you must bring the blocks down one at a time (symbol: you should only work on one project at a time. This is a particularly interesting one – it stands out, in that it helps you get a *lot* more points than you could without it. It provokes in me a very important question: did Rohrer design the game around the making of this statement, or did it emerge from the axioms and the level design?

5. (4.) has a very crucial exception: just after your child has disappeared, it is a good idea to stockpile blocks (symbol: creativity provides solace in grief. This is the breakthrough that is required to make it to 100 points. It is very poignant. We are treated to the image of this sprite jumping around his empty house, no-one to play ball with. His first project after the death of his child yields many points, but the rest get less and less value – it is clear he is pushing these things out solely so that he can occupy himself.)

Is “creativity helps us through bereavement” an original thing to say? Not really. But there are so many of these details that embroider it, that I won’t mention for fear of boring you. And because this realization comes from within the player, and it comes from looking at something they have been seeing all the time but had to mull over… well, it is an awe-inspiringly structured thing that gives a… feeling. It gives a feeling. An important… intricate…. pervasive… oh, I don’t know, how on earth can I put it into words?

It made me cry. Gravitation is the second greatest game of all time (Braid is the greatest).

Uh, I don’t know if you read this or if, like my previous post, you liked it, but if you did and you did then you can read my proper reviews by clicking on my name. Happy trails!

At this point, I need it spoiled and spelled out for me.

I want to believe that there is something significant to be found here but I’m not given much of anything to work with. There’s no clear goal, no motivation other than my own curiosity and no clear sense of success or failure. There is nothing to guide me or let me know if I’m on track to the type of experience the game is trying to offer.

I’m not alone on this. All of the discussion surrounding Gravitation, positive or negative, seems to cover the same ground I’ve already covered in previous posts. If you really feel that Gravitation is one of the top 5 games and wish to dismiss the notion that it’s a matter of “to each their own”, now is the time to explain your position in detail. I look forward to reading it.

First of all: Gravitation is in my top five games of all time. And I’m not interested in a “to each his own” argument: I believe very strongly that this game is a step towards humanity expressing itself better and thereby improving itself. Now I’ll say why, and why I think Korey, through no fault of his own, missed that.

Korey expected the child to behave like a normal videogame character. This wasn’t impertinent: he was playing a videogame! It’s not about mood or characterization, it’s about a system and a feeling.

You’re *supposed* to play ball for a couple of seconds, and then realise that that is all the child does. What is *supposed* to then happen is that you get some stars, and you realise the strategically deep mechanic that links your jumping ability and sight (and, eventually, your score) to the amount you play with the child. I realise you probably don’t want to, but you have to trust me on that one! If I were to explain anything more about it, I’d be spoiling it for you, because it is realisations about the jumping mechanics that make the emotional depth of the game.

Your expectation that the child’s behaviour would eventually change completely was not what the game expected you to expect! And because you called the shots about which parts of the game you were going to see and which parts you didn’t, in your state the game was unable to tell you anything. Hello, Roger Ebert!

Seeing the “000” in the top right corner is meant to move you to want to raise the number. If you feel like playing the game again, try to get a good score, and you’ll see what people are talking about. The world-breaking part, for me, was what you have to do to raise your score to 100. It’s a strategic realisation as well as an emotional one: that is what makes this game great, its fusion of these two things.

It isn’t that I dislike Gravitation. If I were a student in a class and looking at this game, I’d be quick to point out how successfully the visual, audio and physical (change in player movement) elements combine to create an undeniable change in mood. Sure, the controls are poor, the game is rough and I would argue that establishing a clear motive to leave the child behind needs a lot of work but considering what the game is (a play for free game that one person put together in their free time), it’s still very much worth a look.

The problem for me is when you have high profile game critics like Winda Benedetti of MSNBC saying that this was the only game to ever make her cry. While I love that these people are being moved by video games like I have been in the past, to suggest that this game stands apart as a significant milestone in the 40 or so years that video games have been a part of the popular culture is extremely troubling to me.

As someone who played ASCII character driven games as a child, mastered pixel perfect jumps and wrote down continue codes, I can’t help but feel that the people showering Gravitation with praise are doing so simply because it stands apart from the experience of your average World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2 player. To call Gravitation groundbreaking is no small claim and I can’t help but feel like it belittles the accomplishments of many older and less popular titles.

There are simply too many rough edges (the player’s limited ability to interact with the child), design points that lack focus (the lack of player motivation when it comes to exploring or completing other tasks undermines the subsequent consequences) and previously explored themes (environmental moods, the emotion of relationships and loss) to call this solid seed of an idea a step forward, unlike any other game before it.

I like Gravitation but I feel that the amount of publicity sent its way is not in line with the advancements it delivers. There are many other old games with moving qualities if you approach them with the same kind of open mind that makes Gravitation successful.

Those who like the game can point you at a lot of specific reasons they liked it. You don’t like it because … the child is not a complex simulation? I am not sure what you are saying, really, except that you just don’t like the game. But you sure used a lot of words to say that.

I found that Gravitation did provide a groundbreaking experience. So did a lot of other people. So it doesn’t much matter what you claim is impossible or inconceivable — plenty of people do conceive it, as it is their direct experience.

Let’s be honest here: The child has no emotion, is not really affected by your actions in any meaningful way and you have to be wearing some very, very thick rose tinted glasses to develop any emotional attachment. It would not be out of line to say that the child in Gravitation was far less successful in conveying emotion and establishing a relationship with the player than a Tamagotchi.

Sheer boredom of having to deal with a “child” that lacks the emotional complexities of a toy key chain is really the only thing that motivates the player to explore the rest of the game and it is only after succumbing to sheer boredom that the moral is discovered.

But to each their own, right? Sure, I felt more emotional pangs of guilt after locking a Sim in a room and watching him starve to death as punishment for wetting himself in a house that happened to be missing a bathroom but it’s in the eye of the player that we reach this emotional meaning on an individual basis.

Still, when critics start throwing around words like “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary”, you have to qualify that. You are talking about a form of art that has been celebrated for decades at this point. Gravitation simply fails on every conceivable level to offer a new or noteworthy game experience. If you enjoyed the game, more power to you. Just be respectful of the countless titles that have far more elegantly navigated this well beaten path.