![]() Of course, this is all meant to be soothing in practice. There’s an abandoned house, dusty photographs, vague suggestions of love and loss, and an elderly narrator given to such profundities as “Our ignorance was bliss.” Your puzzle-solving somehow compels him to confront his painful past and reclaim some “truth.” To which I can only say: How true to gaming culture to think one can engineer an epiphany. Zen or not, it’s strange window dressing for rather conventional movement puzzles. ![]() Though in this case, “zen” seems to mean sad, wistful, delicate (I guess “maudlin puzzlers” just don’t sell). Quell Memento calls itself a “zen puzzler,” which sounds slow enough. There are plenty of mobile games that aren’t particularly fast, but few that are purposefully slow, that seek a different relationship to time. ![]() Anything that leaves you rattled or run ragged. A waste of time.īut which mobile games might be considered slow? You obviously want to avoid the runners and anything with “Dash” or “Blitz” in the title. What else is there to then do but perish the thought and fast-travel across the map? Space is, after all, merely an inconvenience to be overcome in these games. The vistas may be stunning, but the game cannot truly bear your slowness. In truth, you can do about five things (variations on shooting and driving and shopping don’t count as separate things). How many other games can really claim this, especially in the mainstream AAA space? If you, say, stop to smell the flora in Far Cry 3’s tropical paradise, you risk exposing the still-repeated lie of all open-world games #8212 that you can do anything. But each invites deliberate slow play and is prepared to bear the attendant scrutiny. This is an unlikely group of games, each slow in its own way, and some more purposeful about their engagement with time than others. And the newly released Animal Crossing: New Leaf relishes its gentle pastoral consumerism the whole year round, encouraging players to check in every day and experience the real-time micro-changes of small-town life across the virtual seasons. One of the very best games of 2013, Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero, uses hypnotic sound design, evocative writing, and casually stunning visual transitions to draw out its haunted, contemplative mood. Indie games like Proteus and Dear Esther have defined the measured pace of the first-person-walker genre, while Japanese action-RPGs Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls employ suffocating atmosphere and the fear of death to terrorize players into slowness. The most important game of this generation, Minecraft, clearly knows that it takes time to inhabit a world of blocks and make it your own. Games that emphasize texture, tone, and the very experience of time itself, both in and outside the game.Īctually, there are a surprising number of video games that would already qualify as “slow,” though they appear to have little else in common. Why not slow games? Games that aren’t merely nonviolent or cerebral but that purposely take their time, that resist players and delay gratification, that reveal themselves only gradually and require more deliberate engagement. There are already movements for slow food, slow travel, even slow parenting. One that doesn’t encourage binging, but rather asks the player to inhabit time and feel its passing more intensely. Imagine a video game that doesn’t aim to pass the time but instead to slow it down. Time, after all, should be killed in moderation. We didn’t intend to get caught in the feedback loop and lose control like that. We feel embarrassed, perhaps nauseated, as if we just accidentally ate a whole box of Cheez-Its. We miss our stop the cart behind nudges us ahead our legs fall asleep. We play them to avoid waiting.īut then sometimes mobile games hold us in thrall longer than we intend. Perhaps that’s why waiting for more lives in games like Candy Crush Saga is so infuriating. These games let us get in, get out, get our fix, a temporary MacGuffin to focus our restless minds. The times between, when we’re not sure what to do with ourselves. The commute, the checkout line, the bathroom. So many mobile games seem designed around dead time.
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