Jason Rohrer’s Emotionally Charged Video Games

Esquire has published a poignant profile of video game revolutionary Jason Roher. The game designer has been helping to quietly change the common held notions of what video games are. Roher’s extraordinarily simple games are often hailed as art, little pixelated games that evoke emotional truths about life, and even drive players to tears.

From Esquire:

In 2007, the tall man, whose name is Jason Rohrer, uploaded a free game to his Web site. It used a mere two megabytes of disk space and a thin horizontal stripe of color on the screen. So simple. In Passage, you’re this little pixelated guy. You live in the stripe of color. The stripe is twelve pixels tall. It’s green. All else is blackness. Your job is to move up and down and left and right through the stripe — the “forest” — in search of treasure chests, sort of like in the Legend of Zelda.

As you walk, the stripe shimmers and flickers, the fuzzy pixels in front of you scroll into sharpness, and the pixels you’ve already traveled blur in your wake. The stripe is your whole world. But soon you have to make a choice: share the world or keep it to yourself. You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You’re in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It’s a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your “wife” and you earn double the points for every step you take.

If you’re like most people, you’ll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness.

(Check out all of Jason’s games at his site here.)

Esquire: “The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls”