By Kieron Gillen on July 13th, 2010 at 9:32 am.
Wow. Just wow. Wake up with several people having contacted us about the wonder that is P0nd. DIY Gamer picked up on it first, making it their browser game of the week. Yeah, week and all the rest. This is a short artistic meditation on beauty and life via zen-like one-button breathing controls. In its five minutes, it’ll show you exactly what’s so wonderful about this medium of ours. If you play nothing else today, play this.
EDIT: WEBSITE CRUSHED UNDER THE MIGHT OF RPS (And/Or other places). Will update if mirrors emerge.
Posts like this make me wish you were not affiliated with this website.
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Oh come now, this was brilliant, and it’s notably more brilliant because of an introduction like this.
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Play it, Edge, and then come back here.
KG
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Oh, I guess it becomes “clever.”
Kind of just as sick of these joke games, honestly. Really not much of a difference between the game it pretends to be and the game it actually is–both trade in being a decent game for some misguided punch.
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Was that a purple tentacle…? Breathe dammit, breathe!
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BREATHE HARDER, YOU BASTARD.
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“Indie games picked up on it first”
Actually their article has a source link to DIYGamer.
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Nitpicker: Thanks!
KG
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I hate it when this happens :(
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I enjoyed that. It demonstrated the inherent duality in the quest for good gaming. A game must relax you, draw you in but a game must also excite you, provoke you into action. Furthermore the game encompasses so many different conflicts. Right from the beginning you’re struggling, not against an external enemy but against the self. You’re fighting for every breath you take. Then the game provides you with an external enemy and you almost delightfully take up arms against it, anything to escape fighting against one’s own nature. Only when that battle is over does the true cost of such externalisation become apparent. The desolation of beauty and the loss of innocence. The game transcends the conflicts it presents at this point and ends with a simple yet effective message that is as easily applicable to real life as it is to the gameworld.
Then again, I may be wrong…
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Yours is a very interesting interpretation, although I’m more inclined to say the game alludes to dealing with problems of addiction and infatuation. The struggle to breathe I actually see as a struggle for moderation. The player’s character stands before the beauty of the outdoors and needs to take it in, to experience it. However, one must advance gradually from the point of inexperience or suffer the consequences of trying to take in too much, in this case represented by choking. With every breath, new possibilities arise, and there’s even more to be experienced. Now, each screen represents a different walk of life. The first three are normal, everyday people’s lives. The fourth symbolizes the life of an addict. See how early (we’re taught before that life begins at the left part of the screen and ends to the right) the character starts to breathe in so much of the glowing orbs? The monster represents the oncoming addiction and the fight with it is actually a race to experience more and more without thought of the consequences (hence why fighting is done with the same button as breathing). Here we have two possibilities. Either we fall victim to the monster or we “HOLD IT!” as the man in the white coat says, and through the help of a cosmic event (outside influence) we survive, only to see that the world around us is destroyed and there’s no more beauty in it. We crawl back to our house (the bare essentials of our being) and sever our connections to the outdoors, relying only on television to feed us with it’s pre-chewed imitations of experiences. As for the Ebert quote – I wouldn’t say that the man’s an addict. He certainly has devoted his life to the art form of movies, however, and I think they can be considered his variant of the monster. It’s because of the aftermath of his own battle that he is unable to see the wonder that are videogames. His world has suffered, he has closed himself off in his little house and he is afraid of the things outdoors. Deep down, however, there’s an arising suspicion in him that what TV tells him about the world outside may be untrue, that there still could be beauty left somewhere…
…I am ready to remove my tongue from my cheek now, thanks for the patience.
Hope my face doesn’t stick that way for the rest of my life. Ugh.
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The game made me anything but relaxed while playing, slow, annoying and repetitive I thankfully closed the browser and I’m now much happier.
I guess is that the point to troll people into thinking it’s some xen thing but really just meant to annoy you.
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If you didn’t play to the end you can’t even begin to comment on what the point of the game might be.
The game might have a comment about you, however.
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With or without the end, it’s still a game where you press a button only when allowed in order to collect abstract and pointless doo-dads. The whole thing doesn’t get a free pass because it shouts “boo!” at the end.
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@negativedge
It’s not mechanistically solid, nor is it trying to be. I don’t think anyone is saying that.
It doesn’t get a “free pass” from being a bad ‘game’ by its ending, it doesn’t need the pass. That is… it’s like saying that N really good dramatic movie (I’m not going to name a particular one, because tastes differ and I don’t want to get bogged down in an irrelevant argument, just imagine it’s a dramatic movie that you like and think is good) is getting a “free pass” from not being very funny because it’s got emotional scenes or whatever.
Also reducing the ending to “it shouts ‘boo!’ at you” is missing the point somewhat, and I really don’t think this is some constructed point I’ve given it by being unnecessarily analytical. The juxtaposition between the general bulk of the game, and its end is very intentional; it’s saying something, it’s meaning to say something, and it picked this method because it thought it was the best way to say it. The quote at the end is there to confirm to the player that, yes, the creator had an intentional meaning in the piece, she/he wasn’t just messing with you.
The game doesn’t work as a ‘game,’ but it also doesn’t work as anything other than an interactive piece framed as a game, and it is talking about games.
Now, it’s totally understandable if it didn’t work for you, I can see why for a lot of people it wouldn’t. But having played it through to completion you’re at least properly equipped to talk about what you think the point of the game was, whether it worked or not, or whether you think it had one at all, or indeed was just a load of crap. My issue was with the mentality that plays maybe a minute or two of a five minute game, gets bored and quits, and then decides that they are able to converse on the merits or meaning of the game. I can understand “it didn’t hold my interest” or “there may be a good part but it shouldn’t be after such an impenetrable slog” as fair enough criticism for a much longer work, but for something that takes literally all of five minutes? The amount of time you are willing to sink into something to see if it might be going somewhere is literally that little?
I can understand that mentality if you came across this in the wild, but this was actively recommended on a site that clearly anyone here respects at least a little, or else why are they here? It strikes me as similar to having a book recommended to you by a friend and then giving up after the first page because it wasn’t immediately amazing. I just can’t understand having that little charitableness towards things.
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@negativeedge
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@Hidden_7: Why the over-analysis? Because the game was posted on RPS and they couldn’t possibly make a mistake of thinking a hilariously stupid idea is excellent? IMO, it’s happened to them before.
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The analysis is because I think the game warrants it. I don’t personally think it’s over-analysis, but one person’s ‘thinking about a thing for a few minutes’ is the next person’s ‘pointless navel gazing.’
I don’t think RPS is perfect, and they’ve certainly linked to some games in the past that I just didn’t much like. This however, regardless of the way I heard about it I think is quite good and worthy of thinking about for a minute. I’ll grant that had I not heard about it from RPS I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to play it, since the initial (necessarily false) description didn’t really peak my interest. It took the suggestion that there might be more too it to give it a go, but I’m really glad I did, because I really quite enjoyed it.
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I’ve now developed a sense of paranoia when it comes to games like this. Little depressing for it to be justified.
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Yup. Reminds me of high school and the inevitable mockery after playing one.
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It is the ‘smell the cheese’ “game”. The message I took from it was “HAHAHAH YOU GOT PUNKD!!!1!”. I’m now convinced that all games are horrible and Ebert was right.
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I think I might be missing something, possibly because I played on my netbook.
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Wait, a fight with a Kracken? Are people just being silly, or did I REALLY miss something.
I walked through about three screens, remarkably slowly. The game only seemed to acknowledge my breathing when the little glowy dust things were visible. It also didn’t seem to like letting me hold my breath, as about half a second after inhaling the last dust bit, my character made a grunt and exhaled sharply.
After about three screens of this, the screen went black, displayed a quote of some sort, and dropped me back to the title screen.
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It sounds like you were having trouble getting the game to play properly, perhaps the netbook was the issue. If you don’t do it right you don’t progress, and the quote you got was the failure to play the game right screen.
Ideally you want to hold space until he’s sucked in all the glowy dots, and then let go. Don’t hold it for any longer than you need to.
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Wow. That was phenomenally stupid.
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Absolute genius.
It also shows exactly why I hate going outside. Every damn time I open my mouth to breathe in, a bug just takes the opportunity to fly in there.
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Oh god, exactly! I’m not even joking about this one. I’ve got some nice woods near my house that have great trails for running, but doing so in the summer when there are bugs about means I am absolutely going to end up swallowing some bugs. It’s unavoidable. Best case scenario I don’t end up choking on them, because it’s never a fun time to start choking when you are already hard up for breath as is.
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What I’ve been thinking since I played it: I believe it’s a snide jab at people who believe games are art.
It vindicates Roger Ebert’s point that games are just about jabbing a button rather than experiencing the magic.
Then again, because people are getting such varied experiences from the game, then maybe that *is* art. Genius.
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Yeah, that was absolutely my reading. Basically it saying “this is what games look like, do you really think they have artistic merit?”
The fact that it used a game format to say that however is I think a hopeful statement. The author could have just said in essay format “Look, games are all just bauble collection that’re needlessly addicted to action and violence. Of course they don’t have artistic merit,” but instead it tried to say that through the medium of game. This fits very well with the quote at the end, which I think is at once chiding and hopeful.
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Utterly pointless.
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Weird. This feels more like a practical joke, than a statement about this medium of ours. I let myself in on the experience (which imo is a very important part of playing games these days, one that especially Indies try to get behind) and get slapped in the face for it. Feels more offensive than clever to me, maybe because I took the “breathing part” serious and thought they actually had something going with the visuals and the idea.
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I don’t think it’s just a practical joke, though I can see why you might think that. I also got into the breathing, and was startled some, so I’ve got every reason to feel bitter towards it.
The way I see it, it’s commentary on games’ inability to even reach the point of confidence enough about itself to even start being art. A game can’t just be a game about relaxing and enjoying scenery, it needs to have Action! Combat! Excitement! It needs to be, in other words, a game. The absolute ludicrous mish-mash present in games that try to have Ideas or be Arty, but can’t find their way clear to shed the traditional trappings of games is what this game is talking about (by being a completely insane version of that).
To me this game is talking about games like Bioshock. That want to be serious, they want to say something, but they just cant find themselves clear to get rid of the gamier bits, and thus ends up a contradictory mess.
To me the quote at the end is there to basically remind gaming that if they ever want to prove Ebert wrong they need to grow up and stop acting the way they always have been. Ebert MAY be wrong, in the future, but he’s not right now.
I also find it amusing, and I’m not sure whether this was an intended effect or not, that a lot of criticism is basically confirming the stereotype about games that the game is doing. That is, the idea that this is a “poor game” because it doesn’t have good gamelike mechanisms. As long as that’s all a game is ever “supposed” to be, it will never be able to grow. In a way the game has anticipated the response to it, and held a mirror up to the respondies, saying “look at yourself; this is why this is all games can be right now; this is why we can’t have nice things,” but that might be giving the game too much credit.
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Thanks for the post, I think I understand the authors intention a bit better now. (I thought, getting killed by the Kraken was the intended ending, because the game stopped responding shortly before that). Bioshock is an interesting example. I agree, that it is plagued by many conflicts.
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“I also find it amusing, and I’m not sure whether this was an intended effect or not, that a lot of criticism is basically confirming the stereotype about games that the game is doing. That is, the idea that this is a “poor game” because it doesn’t have good gamelike mechanisms. As long as that’s all a game is ever “supposed” to be, it will never be able to grow. In a way the game has anticipated the response to it, and held a mirror up to the respondies, saying “look at yourself; this is why this is all games can be right now; this is why we can’t have nice things,” but that might be giving the game too much credit.”
I think it’s a poor game, not because “RRRGGG no gameplay!” but because it failed at its initial concept for me from the start. When it comes to soaking up the atmosphere of environments player control is generally important to me, as I prefer to enjoy the scenery at my own pace. I also thought the screens didn’t have enough of a sense of progression between them, so it was like the game expected me to be immersed in screens rather than an environment , which is an important difference for me. So setting aside the “twist” and judging it as its given concept I’d say it failed not because of “lack of good gamelike mechanisms” but because by my criteria of what makes one, it’s a poor “soak up the environment” game.
So if what you gave really is the message it’s trying to give it failed for me from the start as it didn’t give me enough to get particularly drawn in in the first place (and by extension, many other games have drawn me into their environments infinitely more in the same time duration).
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IF RPS had mod points I would mod up Hidden_7′s response to Ricc above. Having played the game through to the bitter end my initial response was to cry bullshit but having read Hidden_7 maybe, just maybe I could accept there is more going on here.
Its a bit like Andy Warhol’s soup cans. If you just look at them as a picture then there isn’t a whole lot of art with a capital “A” going on but if you take the whole context of the society in which the picture was produced it becomes a work of art.
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What you did there. I see it.
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Is there any other ending to the game, beside the “you are dead” screen after the final fight? I don’t have the patience to play it once more and I’m curious if there’s anything else to it. Please share. Thank you!
Also I wouldn’t mind if you walked me through the other possible ending! Thanks.
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Yes there is. Spoilers to anyone who doesn’t want the ending spoiled, obviously.
You beat the Kraken and a giant meteor comes down from the sky and obliterates it. You’re left standing in the completely ruined pond area, desolate, bleeding and breathing heavily, but alive. You’re then walk back to your cabin at night and go inside. Light and sound coming from the windows suggest that you are watching TV. The quote “but I may be wrong” from Roger Ebert is displayed on screen and it fades to black.
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No matter how long I look or how hard I try, that Emperor is still naked. A pity really, cos it sure sounds like I’m missing out on some real fancy duds.
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Wow, that was the biggest waste of time I’ve experienced in a week. I “played” through about five times and never made it to the end – it just went back to the title credits. Each time was different though:
(1) Confusing – how exactly does this work?
(2) Frustrating – what did I do wrong??
(3) Boring – why am I doing the same thing over and over again?
(4) Broken – wait, what? did I encounter a bug?
(5) Irritating – nope, it happened again. why did I waste my time with this drivel again?
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Well, I LOLed. And died the first time as well. I would advise anyone to replay it and finish the last bit.
To all the complainers: if 5 mins of your life are that important, what are you doing whinging on a comment thread? Lighten up. Breathe. It’s not like it was a Rickroll…
- Chris.
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Goodness, my sentiments exactly.
The people that moan so heavily when a super short little internet distraction turns out to not have been of much value to them are the people I imagine just absolutely screaming at some fast food clerk (they don’t have time for anything slower) because they have to make more fries and they’ll just be a couple minutes.
I’m not saying any of you people do that, it’s just the image that pops into my head when people go on and on about how terribly their time has wasted because they played a five minute game that they didn’t like very much.
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The breathing mechanic is annoying, especially when the website implies that you can just breathe “normally” when in fact the game wants you to only press the space bar at very particular times. I didn’t mind doing it once, but I’m not going to do it again just to see the ending any more than I’m going to watch a lame cutscene twice. Five minutes of something unfun is fine if there’s something nifty at the end. Five minutes of the exact same unfun thing twice or three times in a row is not something I thankfully don’t have to put up with in games anymore.
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well, I’m playing through Mirror’s Edge at the moment, so doing an un-fun thing 20 times in a row is becoming second nature :)
- Chris.
PS: Not that there’s anything wrong with ME: just my inability to reverse-walljump. Or something. There’s probably a pun on ‘me’ there, please feel free to add it yourselves.
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If I believed that anyone had as much fun breathing their way through these p0nd levels as I had replaying the final sniper level in Mirror’s Edge 8 times (enjoying racing across the rooftops, getting faster and more fluid each time) just because I kept missing that final jump, I never would have made my original comment.
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@Urthman, fair enough – I’m loving ME, it’s just certain points that break that flow that are frustrating (plus the lack of quick save for scumming the gunfights as I’m playing non-lethal). However, I am prepared to sacrifice a few mins of my life to get the complete WTF moment that came with the kraken’s first appearance. Not instead of ‘real games’, but as well as.
Right, back to level 6…
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I wish these games would make their trite point quicker.
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Like YOU.
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I was interested in this but not 38 megs interested.
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Oh god, not 38 megabytes!
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I totally agree. It’s been going near 15 minutes and it’s still not done. I feel like I’m back in 1999, but not partying.
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Well, that was good, but… what if you could /talk/ to the monsters?
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GWAAAAARGh.
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GRAAAAAAAGH! It took me ages to even get the game to start! Now I can’t do the first bit. How can a game with one button be difficult?
Is this worth the massive amount of frustration it’s causing me?
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Well I was enjoying the end and I died. I really can’t be bothered to play it through again for that. Youtube anyone?
Also, I can’t help but think the main character is Keanu Reeves and that this is why he was so sad on that bench.
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Hahahaha… hahaha… wow.
What I get from this? There’s a hallucinogenic substance leaking into that forest, apparently one that can be airborne, too. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. ACIDTRIPKRAKENAAAAAHH! STABSTABSTABSTAB! Woaaah, duuude. It all went boom. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Home, lie down. ACIDTRIPBEDAAAIIIEEE! STABSTABSTABSTABCHOKE! Holyshit, what a dream… Breathe.
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I want to visit that forest, now. It seems like fun. D:
*ponders working such a forest into his own bizarre sort-of-fantasy-but-more-weird world, one which has a particular species of plant that naturally produces airborne hallucinogens.*
“Yar lad, there, o’er yonder, behold, the forest of dreams!”
This is an entirely hilarious concept for me.
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I read this as a comment on a -specific- type of “Art Game”. One in particular.
The clue is in the name of this game and the logo: pOnd
Anyone remember flOw?
I’m not sure that the argument here is that games can’t be art at all.
But, rather, that the ones that often get touted as “art games” are often nothing more than very prettyily abstracted and less adrenaline fueled as is the norm.
They tend get touted as ‘art games’ by people with very narrow cultural references (journalists included). In reality, all they have is a very distinctive stylisation in game and graphic design.
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Good point
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What the eff?
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I am choosing to believe all the apparently angry people in this thread are in fact being archly ironic.
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Well I am just angry at my incompetence at a game that only requires me to press the space bar! Other than that it was hilarious.
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Look, John, nobody likes to wet themselves, but we can hardly admit /that/’s the reason we hate something, so we come up with excuses. This is why I maintain that Alien is an awful, dull film, nothing more than a haunted-house-in-space. That wet patch from where I spilled tea. Earlier. No, before you got here.
(in other news – heh; amusing stuff. Have to admit I really liked the auld digitised graphics style, too. Sort’ve makes me want to play Under a Killing Moon. Well, that or C&C)
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Oooo! When a sub-thread is started by one of the hivemind, all the posts are surrounded by the hivemind’s warm glow, as if we were all nestled in John’s belly. So warm.
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That’s probably the closest John will ever come to giving birth.
Joking appart, I agree. Guys around here really have to stop bitching about all and everything, it’s getting old.
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Whatever you may think of it as a game it’s definitely art.
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I didn’t get it. Nothing happened.
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Note you need to breathe in everything before the pond to get the “real” ending; so no, if you played and thought “nothing happened wtf?” the people talking about weird shit aren’t making it up.
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This has me even more convinced that hallucinogenics were involved, and they become more potent in larger doses. So those who don’t get dosed up enough don’t have the wonderful adventure that us deep breathers did.
Haaa.
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Haven’t laughed this hard in a while. I do breathing exercises/meditation in real life, which probably made it even more of a surprise, since you’re used to actively relaxing yourself with this sort of stuff.
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My space bar mashing seemed to have no effect on the Kraken, so I let it kill me.
It wasn’t interesting enough to bother with the nonsense to get back to the Kraken to see the “proper” ending.
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” The Flash plug-in is required to play pOnd. ”
But I can access the file directly:
http://www.peanutgallerygames.com/blog/pond/pOnd.swf
And that one don’t work (It ends on a white screen after the menu screen).
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You probably have to update flash to a newer version?
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That. Was. Brilliant.
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Good lord, I had no idea half the people here had no sense of humour.
Good stuff though. Just when a medium perhaps starts to take itself too seriously, it needs to poke fun at itself.
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“Sometimes a Giant Kraken Fight is just a Giant Kraken Fight”.
KG
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but maybe the kraken is Ebert or the negative public opinion of games in general. The knife, the cutting edge of arty indie games. Repeatedly pressing space signifys posting rubbish on forums trying to support your side of the argument and the meteor is…….uh
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That… didn’t do much for me. Admittedly I grasped the breathing thing quickly and then noticed that when you, uh, successfully breathe is perhaps the best way to phrase it, you are “rewarded” with some kind of animation representing nature. Lovely! Then the last screen made me think that there was no way my little man would be able to breathe in all the orbs, so he would die.
Then the kraken, the meteor, the bleeding, the total lack of understanding… As others have said, is this game trying to say games are art, or not art, or by having this real lack of strong meaning show that they are? To create more discussion is one of the primary aims I guess. So, that’s certainly succeeded :)
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I may be wrong, but I think the prime objective of this is a laugh. It’s a clever joke.
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It refuses to work for me (Safari 5, OS X), when I hold the spacebar to start it just begins to stutter as if there was a keyup event injected every dozen of microseconds or so.
FLASH!! *shakes left fist angrily*
APPLE!! *shakes right fist angrily*
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Stand-alone download works fine, though.
The fight reminded me a bit of CRAB BATTLE.
I ALWAYS WANTED TO PLAY CRAB BATTLE, THANKS p0nd!
TH0ND!
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The game, at most, has two checks on user input.
Is key down?
and
Is key up?
yet still it manages to screw up for some people, HUUUUUH!
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that was a reply to the above.
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You see, this is why I stay indoors.
(Also: No “Dig p0nd” jokes? For shame.)
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But does the game have the potential to shock its audiences?
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As others have said, if you’re doing something like this, then at least make sure it works properly. People are only going to be arsed to plod through it once, so if you want them to see how jolly clever and richly ironic your game is then is make sure that it bloody works properly and that the people who’ve gone through it get to see the ending. Simples.
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I’m using a debugging version of flash and I get a bunch of errors when I get to the pond if I’ve breathed in all the thingies correctly. I was going to look into it further but now when I go to the link I get a page saying ‘This Account Has Been Suspended’. Suckiness.
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I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming even when he used so many unnecessary e’s in words. Anyway it says the account is suspended now I guess the hipsters are trying to bring him down.
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Account Suspended …
Link’s been farked (or is that now rps’d?)
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Where’s the “art wank” tag when you need it ?
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This is the best ACCOUNT SUSPENDED I have ever played!
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Wow! It seems the game has shifted into a variation of 4′33″ now! How exciting!
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I downloaded the file, sucked in some glowy things then got to a pond and the screen faded to black before giving me a fancy quote. Yay videogames! (I’ll try again later)
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Re post of the pc executable.
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Click on my name, baconismidog, to get the page.
http://sites.google.com/site/p0ndtemp/home
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Thanks for the file, that was hilarious.
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Thanks!
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that was meant @baconismidog
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This was nice. And frustrating. And reflective. And funny. And stupid. And clever. And brilliant.
First try, I choked. Second try, I didn’t get past the first screen. Third try, I got to the pond but failed to breathe good enough. At this point, I was annoyed by all the e’s at the end of words and had a solemn “WTF?” in my head.
So I took a deep breath and told myself: just relax and see this thing through. So I got to the pond again, but “died” just as the music changed. Another deep breath and on my fifth try, I breathed with the character. In…out…
Got to the pond. And BAM! “WTF, a boss fight? I have to button-mash? Ok then…” And defeated the Kraken and saw the desolate place (that scene was a bit short though, didn’t realize it was the pond but destroyed until I read comments here). And then I thought the final quote was unnecessary and pretentious.
Until I remembered the Kraken fight and how surprized I was about it and now I could see the entire experience.
Which was nice. And frustrating. And reflective. And funny. And stupid. And clever. And brilliant.
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Y’know, if you do this shit, we’re going to start ignoring actually interesting games. You’ll be the “little blog that cried wolf.”
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Is the alternative to not post things they like because they’re worried that people might not like it?
If you never recommend anything then your recommendations carry no eight because they have no history.
If you recommend everything you see (regardless of whether you perceive any merit in it) then your recommendations carry no weight because you are indiscriminate.
Recommendations shouldn’t, in my opinion, try and “game” people’s reactions. You shouldn’t carefully cultivate the things you recommend to someone because you want to be able to, at some point down the line, “trick” them into experiencing something you think really needs to be experienced.
You just recommend things you like and think are good.
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Aspergers syndrome is a terrible condition.
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I think the problem is that anything interactive on a computer with some kind of goal is still considered a ‘game’, maybe the label needs to diversify a bit. The point of this was pretty obviously as a brief interactive project to poke a bit of fun at overly arty games, and why not? The point wasn’t to master it, and completing it is hardly a challenge; it isn’t primarily a ‘game’, the point is to use the interactivity allowed by a pc to make a point about games, and a funny one at that. Same as the ‘do games have to be fun’ argument; of course they don’t, just as there isn’t anything fun about reading ‘the road’ or going to a Francis Bacon exhibition, another thing games can do is be meaningful, to create meaning and narrative for the player, to express something to them.
The real unique feature of computers is interactivity, and this can lead to some powerful experiences if we move away from the idea that anything on a computer that a person interacts with is a ‘game’ and constrained by the same values and criteria as pac man or half life. The power that being made complicit in an act through the interactivity of PC has been made mainstream in ‘no russian’. Anyone who hasn’t already should go and play ‘Edmund’ and then ask yourself why you did it.
Just on the games as art argument (nobody asked but I’m going to give my opinion anyway!). Games are games, but I think they can also be art because anything that expresses meaning can. A friend of mine has a chair designed by Makintosh, it’s a shit chair, really uncomfortable, but my designer friend can go on and on about the cultural history that influenced the design and is communicated by it to him. I own a copy of Delia Smiths cookbook, really good, nice recipies, I wouldn’t call that ‘art’ like the book of Phillip Larkin poems it sits next to.
And if a shit chair can be good art and a good book bad art then I think we need to accept that there is no reason an interactive experience on a computer can be a shit game but good art or good art but a rubbish game.
(PS: Osmos is fucking brilliant, just buy it)
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I can’t download it from Google Docs. Any other mirrors ?
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To me it was just a heartwarming tongue-in-cheek look at where games really are when it comes to “art” right now. I mean its very very in-joke but still, it pushed the correct buttons.I like that wether he agrees with Ebert isn’t important – the game is a satire, right?
Also, chill the fuck out dudes. Seriously dudes. Seriously.
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So this doesn’t really tell me anything about beauty, it certainly doesn’t tell me anything about life, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t tell me anything interesting about “this medium of ours,” but that’s par for the course I guess. The interpretation that makes the most sense to me (giving the creator as much credit as possible) is that it’s a snide commentary on art “games.” I guess that’s called for, but is it really news, and does it have to be done with an art game? Isn’t everyone basically just wanking each other here? I look forward to the art game that makes an ironic commentary on how games, art games, and games journalism is largely made up of ironically self-aware mutual masturbation.
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To butcher a Douglas Adams quote:
I like it when ideas meet peoples’ heads. I like the whooshing sound it makes when they go over top.
That was a funny thing, that pOnd. Or is it p0nd? I can’t tell. The file and url are pOnd, but it looks like Kieron’s written p0nd.
Maybe the problem is that little word ‘game’? Except that it was a game. There was a boss fight and everything. But would Computer-Based Interactive Player-Directed Experience be a better descriptor?
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I don’t see what there’s not to get?
It’s a joke about art games, it’s news because it’s pretty funny, and it’s done as an art game in parody (parodys do kinda have to be similar to what they’re parodying!). The overblown introduction to it by RPS is in the spirit of the joke. I just don’t see what’s wanky abot it?
It’s like asking why ‘Hot Shots’ has to be done as a war movie, and why empire would bother covering it!
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I think we have all been pwned by pOnd, in different ways.
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At first I thought it was some pretentious art game and I was FURIOUS. Then I discovered it was actually a joke game and I was FURIOUS.
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I liked it and I’ve played a handful of the “art” games. Initially it felt boring and not particularly artsy, but I appreciated the humor and whatever point I thought it was making. I’ll just tag along and reiterate what others have said — Chill the fuck out, dudes. \:D/
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Awesome. Can’t wait for p0nd 2!
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Haha, yes! I spent most of the game thinking “Yup, this is why I don’t go outside.”
I get hayfever. What are you trying to do to me?!
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That was meant to be a reply to Moni’s comment about breathing in flies :\
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OK so I couldn’t get to the end. I’m sure I’m inhaling all the pollen or whatever perfectly, but can never get past the forest-y bit. Tried four times now. Before I read the comments on here I assumed I’d finished it as the same thing happened each time and I was doing everything right.
I’m calling shenanigans on this POS.
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Are you getting the poem or something else (i.e. crashing)
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I’ve killed 32 kraken so far without dying, when does the game end?
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Loved it! Made me giggle.
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Seems like a lot of you folks are bad at this game.
I guess a bad game is a good game to be bad at…
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Well that was terrible.
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This game annoyed me for the same reason guitar hero does; it’s a rhythm game where experience with what it’s supposedly about doesn’t help; this guy doesn’t breath when reaching the edge of a screen, and his breathing sounds suggest he breathes in slowly and out incredibly fast, what kind of weird person is he?
Bad ui choice, not very immersive, very artificial. Didn’t bother to complete it.
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Oh wow, this sure is a terrific fucking “game.” I hold space and the guy swallows something but nothing happens, and I’m asked to do it again. So I repeat it a few times with nothing happening, and then suddenly the game reboots and I’m back at the title screen. Yes, this surely is the fucking pinnacle of game design! If only the industry cranked out masterpieces like this instead of boring games like Saints Row 2.
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