The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls

Media Platforms Design Team

What if, back in the day before TVs were in every waiting room and bedroom and bar, before the perpetual buzz of blue background noise changed the way we think and speak, before the easy escapism of M*A*S*H and Wolf Blitzer and Ice Road Truckers, before our leaders began to speak to us like third-rate voice-over actors -- what if some influential genius had recognized the threat and stood up and yelled Stop?

The next dominant communications medium in America is undeniably even more potent than TV. It presents our brains with beguiling tasks. It commandeers our circuitry. And we can actually issue commands back.

That's the promise and the terror of this new form. We can interact with its entertainments. We can summon new layers of noise and color. The American video game is enabling us to live out deeper escapist fantasies than TV ever has. Right now we're mainly using this new medium to imagine that we are space aliens and NFL quarterbacks and mercenaries with hearts of steel. But it doesn't have to be this way.

A naked kid and a freakishly tall man walk in a meadow. The meadow is their front yard. It pokes up from among the sheared lawns of upstate New York's Route 11B like a Mohawk, purposeful and defiant. The kid's hair is long and blond and, on first glance, feminine. He wears orange rain boots, his uncircumcised penis free in the breeze. The tall man wears military-style cargo pants and a red T-shirt that says MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL GAME SUMMIT. He's barefoot. His dirty-blond hair is spiky from not showering. A cop pulls into his driveway. The man chats with the cop. The cop says he just got a call about a "tall guy and a naked girl down by the gas station" and dropped by to investigate.

The tall man is amused.

The cop -- burly, bearded, the sitcom essence of small-town cop -- doesn't need to ask the tall man what he does for a living. He already knows. Everyone in this town knows. The tall man is famous here in Potsdam, New York, an aging hamlet near the Canadian border, because of his meadow. The meadow inspired a court case and made the front pages of the local newspapers. The tall man fought a village ordinance that required him to cut his meadow to a height of ten inches. He represented himself in court, and it came out after the trial that this man earned a living by making video games. Which didn't make much sense to the town's inhabitants, like this cop here, who's got to be having a hard time reconciling the tall man's career in computers with the apparently Luddite lifestyle on display: the meadow, the tiny ranch home it obscures, the naked hippie kid, the wife standing on the porch with the red hair and freckles and fiery green eyes, and the baby in a cloth sling. Later today, the tall man will hold the baby off the front porch, above the cedar bushes, and whisper "Pssssss, pssssss" in his ear, and the baby will pee into the bush, on command, just like that. Pavlovian.

The cop seems to be buying what the tall man is saying. He gets back in his squad car, pulls back onto 11B, and drives away, satisfied that the tall man is weird, yes, but harmless.

In 2007, the tall man, whose name is Jason Rohrer, uploaded a free game to his Website. It used a mere two megabytes of disk space and a thin horizontal stripe of color on the screen. So simple. In Passage, you're this little pixelated guy. You live in the stripe of color. The stripe is twelve pixels tall. It's green. All else is blackness. Your job is to move up and down and left and right through the stripe -- the "forest" -- in search of treasure chests, sort of like in the Legend of Zelda.

As you walk, the stripe shimmers and flickers, the fuzzy pixels in front of you scroll into sharpness, and the pixels you've already traveled blur in your wake. The stripe is your whole world. But soon you have to make a choice: share the world or keep it to yourself. You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You're in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It's a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your "wife" and you earn double the points for every step you take.

If you're like most people, you'll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness.

Also: At least I won't be alone. Somebody loves me. Ha-ha-ha.

Then -- thwack -- she dies.

Jesus. Weren't expecting that. There's a tombstone with a little cross.

Then -- thwack -- you die, too.

The first person to cry playing Passage was Rohrer himself, as he was programming it. All that summer, he watched one of his neighbors die of cancer. She was a nice old woman with a beautiful garden. "Her whole life, she had said if she ever got cancer, she wouldn't want to go through chemotherapy," Rohrer says. "But once it happened to her, she changed her mind....We watched her go through chemotherapy, and she essentially just rotted away. And she died in six months anyway." It wasn't only sad. It was irrational. So Rohrer, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, made a game about the inevitability of death. "Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible," he wrote in a twelve-hundred-word creator's statement, "but in the end, death is still coming for you."

Some players didn't know what to make of Passage. The video-game blog Kotaku wrote, "It's a weird little game, but sweet, and worth spending a couple of minutes with. But weird." For others, though, it was a revelation. Games don't have to be bloated and huge and violent. They can be small and quiet and deep. Writers struggled for metaphors; to the tech blog Boing Boing, Passage was "a pregnant, forlorn sentence" of a game, while a reviewer from Wired opted for "a superb and tightly crafted sonnet," gushing, "More than any game I've ever played, it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition."

Passage was sad, it was sincere, it was personal, it was mysterious, it was existential, and for all these reasons, it was new. The big boys of gaming, a universe away from Potsdam, e-mailed it to one another. Clint Hocking, a designer at Ubisoft best known for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, was so blown away by Passage that he made it a focus of his Game Developers Conference talk earlier this year. In front of an audience full of the industry's most influential game designers, Hocking growled, "Why can't we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know? We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here's a game that made me cry. It did. It really did."

He put up a slide of Passage.

Then he put up a slide of another small indie game, the Marriage, coded by Rohrer's friend Rod Humble. The Marriage uses brightly-colored circles and squares to model...a marriage. Humble claims to have made it after going through "a really heavy Kandinsky period."

"I think it sucks ass that two guys tinkering away in their spare time have done as much or more to advance the industry this year than the other hundred thousand of us working fifty-hour weeks," said Hocking.

Here was a cute video game that made jaded men weep by commanding a sophisticated and rare power that lay -- where? Where in those two megabytes, those twelve pixels?

Media Platforms Design Team

"I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging, and visually wonderful," Roger Ebert, the world's most famous film critic, wrote in 2005. "But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and composers...video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic."

This is what the video-game industry lacks. Not money; it rakes in $40 billion globally per year, even more than Hollywood. Not influence; it's got a lock on the hearts and minds of America's eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old males. What it lacks is legitimacy. The video game in 2008 is a ghettoized creative form, more ghettoized even than comic books; at least comics have their hipster auteurs, their graphic novelists, their Chris Wares and Daniel Cloweses and Brian K. Vaughans. But there are no video-game auteurs whose names ring out in the wider culture.

According to Jason Rohrer, the reason for this is simple: "Ebert's right." Games suck. Game companies have spent so many years trying to make skulls explode complexly and water ripple prettily that they haven't invested any time in learning how to make games that are as emotionally dense as the best novels and films. Most games are a waste of time. Soulless. Empty. Rohrer is far from the only game-maker who believes this. In fact, a growing number of game-makers in positions of power at large companies -- Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc. -- aren't interested in continuing to defend the industry against its critics. Because, one, it's hard to see how the critics are wrong, hard to see how Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV aren't what they seem to be. Murder simulators. Really fun murder simulators. And, two, if you're a middle-aged game-maker and you're going to see Children of Men on the weekend with your wife and kids and getting your mind blown, you hit a point where you want to do something better, more important, than making blood flow realistically.

In truth, ambitious game-makers want it to be true that games are polluting the minds of our youth, because that means games really are touching our brains in sophisticated ways, and therefore games have room to grow. Like Passage, they can be art.

And if this new breed of emotional game can also rake in the cash, well, all the better. Under way right now is a high-stakes race to create the Citizen Kane of video games: an "AAA" title (the industry's equivalent of a big-budget summer movie) that also pushes the needle forward artistically. The best current contender is a project code-named LMNO, part of Stephen Spielberg's development deal with Electronic Arts, which has been described as North by Northwest meets E.T. Your character in the game will be a spy who encounters a mysterious, sexy woman. How much help she offers will be dependent upon how well you cultivate her as your partner and guide. Essentially, LMNO aims to be the first major video game whose action will not pivot on jumping puzzles or twitch-reflex fusillades but on a nuanced relationship.

As it turns out, the expert that Spielberg's partners hired to serve as an "idea guy" -- a guy who "sort of instinctively thinks this way," according to the project's creative director at Electronic Arts, Doug Church -- is Jason Rohrer.

And Rohrer's happy to do it, of course. To consult for EA and Spielberg. Who wouldn't be? But while he thinks the game is "very, very cool," ultimately it's just a gig. Because it's not Rohrer's goal to make big games. Because making a big-budget emotional game now is a lot like trying to run before you can walk. Premature. Because the video-game industry lacks something even more crucial than respect: a basic grammar of emotion. Film has it, novels have it, songs have it: heroes to idolize and imitate, codified bodies of knowledge you can soak up over a lifetime or try to have dumped into you at an M.F.A. program or film school. But a game-maker is in a different position altogether. Nowhere to look. No place to start. "We just have no idea," says Chris Hecker, who spent the last five years working alongside gaming god Will Wright on the hugely ambitious, sprawling Spore. "The question I have is, Are games in fifty years going to be recognizable? Is there a game we'll look back at in fifty years and say, yeah, that was the model?"

Here is Jason Rohrer's audacious bet: no. The models don't exist. So he's setting out to build them.

"I don't know if you can smell me yet, but by the end of the day, you will probably be able to."

Rohrer doesn't use deodorant. He washes his hair only twice a month. He doesn't put on a new pair of clothes in the morning, because he gave most of his clothes away years ago. He owns four pairs of boxer shorts. If he owned any more, he or his wife would have to spend more time washing them, which would make them both more reliant on electricity to run the washer. He keeps his fridge unplugged for the same reason. No fridge, no meat; no meat, no spoilage in an electrical storm. Open the fridge and all you see are vegan grains. "There, that's quinoa. You had quinoa before? It's really good." He bakes a loaf of bread every other morning and feeds it to his family at lunch, along with lentil soup. Every day, same lunch. For weeks at a time. The alternative is to starve. Despite his consulting fee from EA, the family budget is $14,500 a year, the income pieced together from PayPal donations from his Website, freelance writing consulting, occasional speaking fees, and monthly checks from his "patron," a wealthy software-industry figure who has taken a liking to his games.

To some extent, Rohrer fits the profile of a game-maker: a computer dork who is more seduced by comic books and movies than by dreams of becoming a legendary hacker or a dot-com millionaire. And Rohrer, who studied artificial intelligence at Cornell, is a dork through and through. But even within the small yet growing dork vanguard of indie game-makers -- a vanguard that includes Rohrer and Rod Humble and a guy called "Cactus" and Ian Bogost, an associate professor of digital media at Georgia Tech, and Jonathan Blow, who pumped $180,000 of his life savings into Braid, a game about the nature of time and existence and quantum mechanics -- Rohrer is "pretty fringe," according to Bogost. The other indie guys don't live in meadows.

But there's a deep logic to the way he lives. If he didn't live this way, he couldn't make the games he makes. By carefully constructing an alternate reality, bit by bit, Rohrer has been able to make the same creative leap that many artists have made in the past. His games start with an emotion, an observation about the poignancy of a certain set of trade-offs inherent to being alive; Rohrer then figures out how to abstract and encode these trade-offs using math and images. This is why Rohrer's games, while sharing a common aesthetic -- often pixelated, retro cute, allusive to video-game hits of the past -- feel so different from one another.

At dinner one night, he asks his wife if she thinks it would be fun to be immortal -- she says she thinks it would get boring -- so he makes a game, Immortality, in which you're this little stick figure who has to build a tower to the heavens; the game grants you the powers of immortality, then makes you yearn to have those powers taken away. He's surfing online and comes across that YouTube video of the "Don't tase me, bro" guy, and he's so freaked out by the tyranny of the police that he cries, and when he's done crying, he codes a game called Police Brutality that puts you in the room with the "Don't tase me" dude and challenges you to organize an unarmed insurrection. He makes a Super Mario Brothers -- type game called Gravitation about his relationship with the kid in the meadow, his five-year-old son, Mez.

And it's hard to see the art in these games unless you play them and struggle with them and try to figure out what the games mean. It doesn't help to watch over his shoulder as he codes a game on his beat-down Dell laptop, in his humid home office with the peeling linoleum floor and the window overlooking the arcadian wilderness of his backyard meadow. Watch him code his latest sketch, a game about regret, and what do you see?

Tuesday, there's an idea on a scrap of paper: "Mistakes you make, early on, haunt you through some game mechanic later." Thursday, there's a map of a maze. Later that day, the maze is populated with bunnies and squirrels; in the game, you have to feed the animals from a pouch full of different foods, and if you feed them the wrong food, they die, and you "regret it." Rohrer adds some additional texture; the dead animals come back as "ghosts," and you can either feed them or avoid them. If you feed them, they just come back later. Lesson: Regret is pointless. Move on. Friday, there's a nearly completed video game. It doesn't give an inch. It doesn't tell you how to play it, how to get a high score, how to win. You have to figure that out for yourself. The game, in its own small way, is trying to reverse decades of infantilism in video games and culture, in which you get coins for doing stupid shit. It's not going to coddle: awesome job!

And when you do figure it out, it's a tiny epiphany, and maybe you understand something about regret that you didn't understand before. You're seeing its inner workings laid out before you, yet you still can't figure out how he's doing it.Ian Bogost calls this "procedural rhetoric": It's the art ghost in the machine. Asking where it comes from is like asking Hemingway, Papa, why'd you put the comma there and not there? Papa would turn around and punch you in the nose. The game is art not because it's beautiful like a poem, but because it's as difficult to explain as a poem -- some ungraspable mélange of pixels, sounds, characters, and your own brain's response. And if you don't get it? Well, you're lost. So maybe you log on to Kotaku or IndieGames.com and chide Rohrer for "this little slice of emo pie." Or maybe you really unload: "Jason Rohrer is a pretentious jerk. Now, to be an indie art-film maker, you have to be pretty pretentious. To be an indie art-game maker is another thing entirely. You have to have your head shoved so far up your own ass that you can eat your heart. Wow Jason Rohr. I hate you."

Rohrer is trying to make art in a medium that most people don't even think is capable of art. He can create this space of pure freedom, as artists have done in the past -- isolation, introspection, ascetic poverty. But ultimately he has to send these works out into the world, and people have to respond to them. And right now the audience doesn't know what to do with them.

This is why video games need a figure like Rohrer so badly: an auteur. A person of great energy, courage, ego, and, yeah, pretentiousness -- pretentiousness with a purpose -- to just show up every day and sit in his broken office chair, the one held together with the rubber band and the clothespin, and read the nasty comments about him online, and laugh so hard that he almost scissors his chair into plastic confetti, and then open the coding window on his shitty laptop and conjure that image of a disapproving, cranky cultural critic, "cracking the whip in the back of my mind," before launching into work on his next game, a game that's itching for a fight -- difficult, heady, a game inspired by the philosopher W. V. Quine -- a game about "consciousness and isolation and some other things I can point at desperately but cannot quite name."

On the first day of work on Regret, while Rohrer and his family are inside eating lentil soup, somebody comes tooling along Route 11B with a riding mower and cuts down a ten-foot strip of their front yard's natural meadow.

Rohrer calls the cops. "I'd like to report a serious act of vandalism," he says.

A lawn has a wound response. Most people don't know that. Cut a lawn and it emits harmful hydrocarbons, like a car. "Here we go," Rohrer says, flipping through his files. " 'Air Pollution and the Smell of Cut Grass.' I have a scientific study." In fact, he has a whole stack left over from his 2005 court case. That year, the Village of Potsdam arraigned Rohrer for an ordinance about lawn height. Rohrer pleaded not guilty. He recruited an expert witness to testify to the salutary environmental effects of natural meadows, and he wrote a nine-page brief enumerating how the village was violating his right to free expression. The prosecution asked him if he couldn't just grow the meadow in his backyard and not in the front. Rohrer said, no, that would defeat the whole point. He argued that "our ability to speak with our landscape would be drastically reduced if our desired landscape was restricted to our backyard, since very few people could see it."

And he won. The village was forced to leave his meadow alone. They couldn't have known what it meant to him, because they didn't know his history. How he'd never liked the smell of cut grass. That riding mower. Just murdering and murdering the lawn of his Bath, Ohio, home every week, on his dad's wishes. Begged his dad for a meadow. Dad said no.

Then Rohrer met his wife, Lauren Serafin, in Ithaca. She was just like him, the daughter of wealthy business owners, harboring similar dreams of escape. A heart exploded. They searched a Web site listing the food co-ops across America. They crossed out the co-ops in towns with expensive real estate and landed here, Potsdam, a place where they could focus on the experiences of their lives instead of their materiality, and where Rohrer could finally have his meadow, assuming he could make the people of Potsdam trust that this meadow was a legitimate and good and dutiful and logical thing and not some lazy indulgence, not a deadbeat's excuse not to mow, not an eyesore, at least not to him, because he cared about it, cared enough to carve it out and defend it, fight for it, believe in its potential, this odd form of expression he had chosen to love -- the weed smells and the insect noise, the butterflies, the berries getting ripe and fat and falling and staining the ground purple, the smell of the compost pile spoiling, the apples and peppers and banana peels dissolving to mulch.

Christ, can't you see this? This lush green atmosphere dying so gorgeously all around him? And Rohrer with a laptop, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, inventing a new way of showing the world what it means to be alive?