Survive/Progress

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)

Survive (mac/win)/Progress (mac/win)