Should You Get - 9.03m

Should You Get... 9.03m 9.03m is meant to be a virtual memorial for victims of the tsunami that hit Japan in March of 2011. You wander a San Francisco beach, discovering the belongings of the departed washed up on the shore and marked by a shade that vanishes as you approach. On each item, you search for a butterfly. When you find it, it flies off and you go to the next memento. You do this for less than fifteen minutes and the game ends. The music is lovely, the visual presentation somber, the intentions admirable... But I cannot say that this game succeeds, for a number of reasons. Let's step back a bit before we go any deeper. Any game can ultimately be reduced to a series of goals, divided into sub-goals, with those goals divided into sub-sub goals, and so on. It varies between games. A game's goals may be as simple and abstract as "explore the world, discover the story" or as complicated and involved as a full crafting and survival system. You may need to explore and make sense of a vast world or proceed in linear fashion from room to room, whether facing enemies or obstacles or little at all. A game gives you something to DO, and allows you to take intelligent actions to achieve that goal and all the goals leading up to it, whether the game tasks you with following a linear path or demands you master some specific set of skills. This is a pretty big topic and one we'll have to explore further in the future. The point is this: In 9.03m, you walk onto the beach. There is a line of glowing dots pointing you to your next goal. When you get there you perform an effortless token find-the-butterfly game. When you do, another line of dots appear, leading to your next goal. And so on. You move so slowly any attempt to explore is punishing. If you go back the way you started the game fades out and sends you to the title screen. If you walk into the water, it fades out and puts you back where you were. The game punishes you for not taking the path it wants you to take, rather than making that path the most natural, interesting, and desirable thing to do in the first place. Even when not giving you something traditionally "game-like" to do, even when, technically speaking, the game doesn't require much skill, a game can still engage, immerse. It can still give you AGENCY and present you with meaningful choices, even if they're just a matter of what to look at or where to go and how fast to get there as you explore the world. Here, however, I was not presented with any meaningful choices or actions. You can move and look around, which is surely more than Dinner Date allowed... but it gives you nothing to look at or go to- except what it has layed out for you. And what it gives you isn't very interesting in it's own right. Just a flat beach with a few rocks and mementos scattered across it. There's nothing immediately arround you to warrant your attention. I found myself looking around, wondering if there was something I could go look at or explore- but I wound up going where the game told me to, BECAUSE it told me to, rather than out of my own curiosity or because the choice to do so was compelling of itself. If you watched a youtube video of the game, all fifteen minutes of it, you would have everything this game has to offer. To put it bluntly: the "game" part of the game is completely superfluous. Whereas that's not the case with other adventure and exploration games, where the power to explore the world and discover what's going on, the state of inhabiting this world rather than just looking at it, are precisely what elevate them above being a movie or a graphics demo. Games are just as capable of arousing emotion, creating empathy, as any other medium, and I think we'll see a lot more to come in the future. And what a game can do, how a game can be built, is a broad, broad spectrum of possibilities- and granted, not everyone is going to like linear narrative experiences, or, at the other extreme, open-ended, in-depth gameplay. But wherever it lies on that spectrum, a game has to offer you choices and actions of SOME kind. 9.03m doesn't give you anything. To put it briefly: you could watch a video of the game played through from beginning to end, and you would have everything it offers. What few elements of interaction it offers are totally superfluous. Again, the music is nice, the visuals are interesting, and the goal a decent one- but they can't carry the game. We build memorials to remember people who died in tragedies. And remembering them is good, it's important. But memorials often come across to me as... kind of shallow. It feels kind of like when someone says, "I'm sorry for your loss." Their intentions may be good, but it feels shallow and trite. And that's kind of how this game feels to me.