Here’s my distillation of 2D-Boy’s Global Game Jam Keynote Address. It’s been sitting in a text file on my desktop and deserves to be here (for myself and for you).
Videogames are most often approached as entertainment; like any medium, however, they can raise critical questions through their formal structure. Survive/Progress is a twin game made as a response to my own constraint: Make a game about the waiting. This constraint came from my simultaneous discomfort with and longing for waiting and stillness, as well as an interest in the strange half-life that is programmed into videogame characters while they wait for input.
What you see is two games that differ by one central parameter: the game’s response to the player’s movement. By pairing them I want to generate a dialogue about a cultural obsession with videogames, productivity, and progress. The games are intentionally basic, broken down into movement, control, and challenge; this is an experiment in making meaning through simple adjustments of rules.
Download links for the two games below. They might run slower on older machines. I’ll post source-code after some cleanup.
