
During GDC, Rod Humble presented The Marriage, a game about the dynamics of a married couple and the evolution (or breakage) of their relationship.
This experimental attempt has an unusual approach that I liked a lot: It’s a non-representational experiential game.
Representational elements and verbs are those that resemble real-life objects and actions. A character is representational even if it is cartoonish, alien or abstract. Headbanging bricks to make them pop mushrooms might be wacky, but the action is still representational. The Marriage’s entities are concepts like commitment, sacrifice and cuddling. The visuals are made up of squares, circles and flat colors since there’s no much room for graphical improvement.
Unlike puzzles, there are no objectives, scores or tutorials. You are supposed to feel the game, and I did during Jonathan Blow’s Nuances of Design session, where I spaced out and started empathizing with my own experiences until I started feeling that something was missing, and that’s why I asked Humble if he’s been married only once, which he was, which tells that I somehow resonated with something from the underlying experience. Which is enviable for a quickly made experiment.
Despite other flaws that are easily corrected, there is something I didn’t like about Marriage that is deeply embedded into the interface: the spatial juggling. To keep the relationship going, I had to influence the “egos” to hit or avoid random events in the screen, so the entities became physical objects in my mind for me to be able to predict and control the collisions, forgetting about the experience in the process. In the end, I decided not to influence the spouses to hit them and let randomness drive to take the spotlight from physical movement back into the core experience. I wonder how Marriage would be without this mechanic.
In any case, the best part is that Rod did all this on purpose, so it puts intention of expression behind the game, which I understand is necessary and sufficient for something to be considered art. But whether it’s art or not is not my personal battle.
Purists won’t consider it a game for the lack of goals, and indoctrinated gamers will think it’s crap. But that’s irrelevant, since this proof of concept open new paths for exploration and (self)discovery. Which is the point of experimental gameplay.