Passage - A Video Game with a Heart

Can a video game be art? I came across this game reading Esquire a few months ago and it intrigued the heck out of me. The game takes about five minutes to play, it's small, rudimentary...but yet it's beautiful. This little game (that is a screenshot above) might actually make you cry. It was created by one person, Jason Rohrer.

I think the reaction to the game is pretty amazing:

Some players didn't know what to make of Passage. The video-game blog Kotaku wrote, "It's a weird little game, but sweet, and worth spending a couple of minutes with. But weird." For others, though, it was a revelation. Games don't have to be bloated and huge and violent. They can be small and quiet and deep. Writers struggled for metaphors; to the tech blog Boing Boing, Passage was "a pregnant, forlorn sentence" of a game, while a reviewer from Wired opted for "a superb and tightly crafted sonnet," gushing, "More than any game I've ever played, it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition."

Passage was sad, it was sincere, it was personal, it was mysterious, it was existential, and for all these reasons, it was new. The big boys of gaming, a universe away from Potsdam, e-mailed it to one another. Clint Hocking, a designer at Ubisoft best known for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, was so blown away by Passage that he made it a focus of his Game Developers Conference talk earlier this year. In front of an audience full of the industry's most influential game designers, Hocking growled, "Why can't we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know? We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here's a game that made me cry. It did. It really did."

He put up a slide of Passage. (read the full piece in Esquire)

Intrigued? Click here to download Passage

Not a gamer? You are in luck - some nice person has already posted a video of them playing the game with captions: