Water Cooler Games - Reflect, an Art Game

Reflect, an Art Game
June 6, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Reflect is an art game created by Mike Treanor as his MFA thesis at UC Santa Cruz. In Treanor's words, the game offers "the ability to see the perspectives of other creatures." I've argued before that one of the powerful features of videogames is their ability to put the player in different shoes. Reflect hopes to take that idea further, with an experience of how other creatures look and move.

That said, this isn't a game about the challenges of being wildlife -- in fact, the experience of mimicking creatures is very abstract, representing only one or two gestures that can combine to create different forms of locomotion. Instead, the game uses a natural setting with familiar creatures as a way of defamiliarizing movement itself. Treanor explains in his artist statement:

A goal of this game is to increase one's appreciation and awareness their environment and body movements. By focusing the gameplay and rules on movement I bring the player's focus to that which they normally take for granted. While performing the movement styles (mimicking the creature's perspectives) the player will be looking at the world from a different way and thus seeing areas of the worlds which are normally ignored (e.g. the underside of a rock). The overall goal is to raise interest in the mundane in an effort to bring wonder to the everyday experience.

In the game, the player first observes movement from the creature's perspective, then attempts to mimic. Once successful, the player gains the movements in question, which can be used in combination to traverse physical obstacles in the world. The creatures progress in complexity too, from inchworm to human.

The thing is, mimicking process is very, very difficult. No feedback provided for individual gestures, only a message of success or failure after a short duration of time. I can understand why Treanor doesn't want to disrupt the free form, exploratory movement, but the result for me undermines his claim that the game offers a "meditative experience" capable of creating "a feeling of tranquil engagement." As I've argued before, I find most games that claim to relax, especially through the fluid, expressive movement of game characters, actually frustrate. My own effort at such a goal, Guru Meditation, relied on total inactivity as an alternative.

That gripe aside, I think the game does succeed at eliciting movement patterns alien to both human action and game convention, especially when compared to the sorts of actions common in 3D game worlds, both as conventions and as abstractions of movement in the world more generally.

Comments (0) | Post a Comment

POST A COMMENT

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)