It was the December 08 issue, so they had this whole section of people who are – or, in this case 6 months later- shaping the world in their respective fields.

One of the articles was about a computer game designer who creates these simple but adorable 8-bit games that have a whole deep existential flair to them. His game, Passage, was said to be by tech-reviewers as proof that gaming is in itself a type of art comparable to music or literature.

According to the interview, he lives in a hut on a meadow with his family, keeps electricity to a minimum and does his coding in a super old-school dell laptop. Like, super cool, kan?

Intrigued, I checked out the game, read the reviews and had a few rounds.

So basically it’s just this rectangular box on your screen where you have to keep moving on to get to somewhere you don’t know any shit about. The far corners of both ends of the screen is blurry, and only gets clear as you walk onto them. Your character is a super pixelated blue-eyed brown haired character. It’s possible to move up and down, step on some chests to get more points, but basically moving itself gets the number tally on your upper right screen going on.

Thirty seconds in, you will meet a girl with green eyes, and just as pixellated as you are. Walk into her, and a big heart will form and the whole game will go on with her being beside you. Being with her means you can’t walk into certain passages where you could get more points from treasure chests.

As you play on three minutes into the game, you realize your pixel-hairline is receding, and before you realize anything, your wife’s hair is turning white. The environment in the screen turns from yellow to red to blue to purple. Your character starts to bend double.

And then your wife dies and in her place lies a tombstone. You could move around a bit, but you too, stop and have a tombstone in your place.

There are no monsters to kill, no quests to partake on, and nothing to kill you; except inevitable death.

In the three odd trials I had of the game, I tried marriage. I tried being single. Then some other strategy came to mind. Do any of you remember in one of the old Mario games, in the first 10 seconds of the game, if you don’t land or jump on the turtle-shell, then you won’t ever have the chance to go back and do it?

Well I tried that out. I avoided the girl, ran on in the game, collected about 300 points and jumped on every goddamn chest I could get my square little legs on. Then I ran back to the yellow environment to get to her. It worked.

We fell in love, though seconds later we grew old. Our hair turned white, we bent double, and she shortly died thereafter. My points were about 500+.

I was reading the reviews and there was this really sweet comment from some guy who said when his game-wife died he merely left his character beside the tombstone and died beside her. He played the game with his real-life wife nearby and couldn’t bear to think about leaving the tombstone.

So Passage tells us that it’s possible to go and run after ‘having it all’, to go back and fall in love. That it’s possible to get great points by chasing treasure chests alone, but that 4 minutes in, it just gets boring and pointless.

That at the end of our five minutes, we will all have to die.

That it actually feels better to die knowing you have loved and lost.

Than die alone with nothing but 700 points you will lose anyway.

And yeah, before you have to ask me about the cryptic past posts, and the new Facebook updates in between, I did meet someone with slit brown eyes. We jumped on treasure chests and hid behind library shelves. But our five minutes was up. And we let go.

Passage by Jason Rohrer is available here. His personal page can be found here.