Gravitation

Gravitation is a free game (with downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux) by the guy who made Passage. Go play both if you haven’t; Passage takes roughly five minutes and Gravitation takes about eight.

Passage is pretty straightforward in its message— I don’t think you could possibly play the game and not see what it’s trying to say. Gravitation is a bit more abstract, though. You start the game by playing with your child, but after doing that for a certain amount of time, your view is extended to the point that you can see there is an exit from the starting area and a star sits tantalizingly outside. You can go up and collect it, upon which you discover that this outside area continues on with more stars waiting to be collected. Over time, though, your view shrinks and your ability to jump decreases until you have little  choice but to return home. It’s also worth noting that while collecting a star expands your viewpoint like spending time with your child did, that increase in view shrinks much more quickly than before.

By collecting the stars, you can return home and push the collected stars (now turned to ice) into a fireplace to gain points, but when the ice melts it extinguishes the fire in your home a bit. Spend too long away from the home in the last third of the game and your child will leave, no longer interested in playing with you. You could stay in your home the whole time, but your score will be zero when you finish. But at the same time, there’s no high scores, no leaderboard, no judgement of your score at the end, so what’s the point of collecting a score? Why, on my second and third playthroughs, was I still drawn to collect stars and cash them in for points, knowing that it would decrease the warmth in my home and I wouldn’t have a chance to find out what happened to my child?

Another interesting outcome that I still can’t decide whether it was intentional or not was when I decided to go up the passageway where the stars are as quickly as possible, ignoring the stars on the way up and just climbing until my jumping skills had gone back to normal and no longer allowed me to go any higher. On the way back down I collected all the stars I had passed, taking care not to drop into any recesses that would trap me. I returned home to find that the collected stars (now in blocks of ice) were stacked so high that there was no way for me to push them into the fireplace and I was cut off from my daughter, who sat on the left side of the wall of ice, preventing me from leaving my home again during the rest of the playthrough. I just sat on one side of the wall of ice, her on the other, with nothing for either of us to do.

It’s not a particularly mysterious game, even if the message isn’t quite as blunt as in Passage. It’s definitely about the balance between work and family life. I think the ambiguity comes from what he’s trying to say about the message— while Passage was a pretty simple two-factor choice between breezing through life and receiving nothing in return or working as hard as possible but being rewarded more with the one added complication of a relationship affecting your ability to put yourself in positions to gain reward, this game is a little more nuanced. Should you spend all your time at home? Should you work to gain a few points, but make sure to stick around so as not to lose your family? If you care about points at all, doesn’t it make sense to get as many as possible?

One detail whose significance is still not entirely clear to me is the point value assigned to the stars. When they fall down to your home they turn into a block of ice and that block has a number on it which counts down from 9 to 1. When you manage to push the block into the fire, you may notice that you get the number of points displayed on the block at that time, my best guess being that you can’t spread yourself too thin in your accomplishments or there’s a decrease in the return you get from those things. If you devote yourself to fewer things at a time, you stand to gain more from them.

Overall I think both games do a great job of giving you the opportunity to feel something by interacting with a computer in the simplest of ways, via the arrow keys and (in the case of Gravitation) a few buttons. The presentation in both is just complex enough to make clear to you the metaphor, but from that point on the results of your actions are left up to you to decide.

Can you “win” at Gravitation? Probably, but whether you did or not is only something that only you can decide, and it’s not necessarily just about the score. I’m not sure I’ve won yet and I’ve played it five or six times. How about you?