From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to Artful Design Principle 2.6, Chapter 2, which states:
— technology should create calm.
This principle proposes that we design technology for experiential play, in which technology and its creative potential feed the soulful desire to express. In reflection, I am reminded of a game I made for CS377G: Designing Serious Games, titled “The Last Moment of Sun.” In my game, you are enjoying the last moment of your life with your lover before the sun explodes. In the story, you make time-constrained decisions between looking up at the sky and the novelty of the sun exploding compared to looking at your lover.
“The Last Moment of Sun” is a love letter to the love that I have experienced in my life, which is often quiet, unassuming, and deeply cherished. In the game, there is equal importance between the interactions that you have with your world and lover and the quiet moments that you have in contemplation.
The function of my story followed its form (Principle 2.3, Chapter 2), as my game’s mechanics evolved in response to my attempts to capture the sublime feeling of a fleeting moment. While the game has multiple branches to explore, every ending in a finite description of the sun exploding into a fantastical explosion. In reality, there are 10 core choices in the game apparent to the player — to look at the sun or look at your lover. However, there is a third, subtle choice — to wait, and the game will randomly make a choice for you after 5 seconds. In designing this game, I asked players to reflect on the praxis of choice. When do our decisions matter, and when do they don’t? And how do they matter in the context of banal finality, when we know our stories may end?
Through the gentle color-changing background and the desperate, nostalgic prose, your “death” as a player is paralleled with the burning brightness of an exploding sun. Like the windy fields and eternal sun in The Idyllic Video Game Sublime”, there is something about the raw power of nature that computer software has tried for years to duplicate. Our 3D rendering engines have become amazing at bending light and ray tracing it across a thousand objects to make them appear visually lifelike, but they haven’t captured the feeling of a sunburn or the endlessness of the sky. In my attempts to capture the sublime, I approached and circumvented the constraints of my medium, bending code and words to my will to hint at something greater.
