the truths of life and love in a rectangle, several pixels high

Oct 13, 2013 by bganter

Playing Passage was a new kind of experience for me. As an “artistic project”, it doesn’t compare well with anything I’ve ever played, so instead of evaluating it as a game, I’ll just talk about what I took from it during and after play.

On my first play of the game, I didn’t have a concept of the game’s “purpose”, and had no idea what was going on. I walked into a woman, fell in love, and kept moving. Am I doing that right? What was the increasing score in the upper right of the screen counting? Is it my age? It wasn’t until about halfway through the game that I realized that my character was being tracked by a “lens” that was moving away from the my character, pushing him to the right edge of the screen. My character and his love were getting older, becoming 27-pixel representations of middle age. Somewhere around this time, I realized that I could use my arrow keys to go downward and explore; I had sofar been using them to go only straight. I started to panic a little bit. My life’s half over and I’ve only just figured out what there is to do here!  I spent about a minute travelling down and around with my love, trying to navigate the maze and opening some treasure chests, before my aging love *blipped* into a tombstone. I shuffled a few more paces forward before becoming one myself. I was a little sad, and felt that I had wasted my chance to live this life to the fullest; I had spent all of it in a state of confusion. I had been unfairly thrown into a life that wouldn’t slow down to give me time to make sense of it all. I had to waste precious life time orientating myself to the goals and limits of this world, and by the time I thought I had figured out what I was supposed to do, I was already entering old age. Why didn’t anyone tell me what the point of life was at the beginning of the game?

I clicked esc and played a few more times.

Now I thought I had a goal, which I guess was to collect treasure. But what did the treasure represent? Meaningful experiences? Money? Each chest had a colour-code on it, and I learned that I could predict which ones would be empty, and which ones contained stars and confetti. I was going around with my love and trying to meet this goal, but still had no idea why I was here. Even the non-empty chests felt empty. When my love died, I pushed forward, reaching for one more chest of treasure before I died.

I stared as the word “Passage” inched across the screen, as if to replace “Fin” or “The End”; I felt bad for dragging the love of my life through a maze so I could accumulate more treasure. Why couldn’t I ask have asked her what she wanted to do? Why was I leading her? In my last play-through I decided that the treasure wasn’t that important. It frustrated me. I couldn’t decide on a reasonable real life counterpart that the treasure was supposed to represent, and I didn’t want to keep chasing it into dead ends. So I ignored the treasure on this last playthrough, instead staying near the top of the screen and dipping below just far enough to explore the scenery without getting lost. This time when my love died, I stopped, and I waited until I became a tombstone too and then there were two tombstones right next to each other. I was happier with this ending. I was still confused, but after a few tries I had figured out how I best wanted to live this 5-minute life.

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Reading around the internet on player’s blogs, I can see a lot of people were able to tease out boatloads of meaning from this heavily abstracted representation of  life. The consensus seems to be that (much like real life) you can play this game anyway you want. There is no correct “strategy”.  An interesting point I read commented on how there was a trade-off to choosing to fall in love; falling in love means that you take up more space, and are unable to fit into many of the spaces where treasure lies. I thought it was interesting how you could not leave your partner at any point in the game; for this couple, “divorce” doesn’t seem to be an option. So am I able to decide whether I love this person for the entirety of our relationship? Is is possible that I stick with her despite falling out of love?

That’s the kind of individualized thought that I think is supposed to evolve from playing this game. Interpretation really, really matters here. Passage is a game that pokes you into coming up with your own questions about life, and does so without suggesting any answers. Things are kept so visually and interactively simple that the most important part of the game is deriving your own motives, story, and meaning from the action of moving a primitive avatar back and forward, up and down. Which is kind of nice.