I'm on microholiday: ambient games
There's a whole genre of games going around at the moment that aren't really games at all.
When described, they're so droolingly inane that they ought to be instantly repulsive, or at least, you know, for kids. And yet: I see full-grown adults being played by them (don't pretend that you're in charge) everywhere: and some of them (like me) are under the control of games like Boomshine. [AppStore Link]
Occupying a fuzzy hinterland between games of chance and pattern-matching, naive programming experiments (art-school Flash of the geometric, subpsychedelic kind) requiring neither skill nor logic (and it takes real balls to strip out both, leaving no nutritional value at all) these are toys rather than games (more on this distinction later), bubblegum for your head, fascinators like gyroscopes (objects with desires), a form of crude interactive jewellery, or just an IQ test for toddlers, perhaps.
Needless to say, I'm a big fan.
I've often speculated about a viable digital equivalent of Silly Putty (the ur-toy; faecal wonderstuff) and maybe that's where we're heading.
There's no question that what we think of as casual time-killing pursuits are space-killers too. Maybe you thought you'd check your email on the train... or maybe you should just, you know, leave Earth for a bit now, and scratch at a glowy thing for fifteen minutes instead, your entire being now reduced to manipulating a dot, your mind now willingly, blissfully reduced to that of a dutiful earwig.
Still, it's somewhere to be.
And the totalising experience of even the most trivial puzzles (if you will yourself in a little) is what makes games like going away for a bit, to an oasis of simplicity away from Other People and all that hateful, stressful being-in-the-worldness. There's a whole lotta nothin' going on in there; and you're missing out by being out here, dealing with all these somethings.
In addition to the self-inflicted self-hypnosis, these games (or more precisely, the absence thereof) also provide a kind of addiction loop (let me party with the dots again, just one more time) not dissimilar to the German idea of an ohrwurm (earworm): an insanely catchy tune you can't seem to get out of your head.
Exhibit A as mentioned is Boomshine (pictured) now ported to iPhone. Originally, it was a Flash app, but having poked at it via a keyboard I can say definitively: ignore the web version. (You should also turn off the music at once, and never turn it on again).
Boomshine is an entirely perfect use of the iPhone form-factor, eg finger-food or nothing: totally dependent on the touch or in this case, prod. In this case we have a combination of spatial awareness puzzles and all that's missing is old-school rudimentary sound-as-haptics (the more rudimentary the better): but either way, it's a splendid new kind of abstract irritainment.
Boomshine is not just brilliantly dumb, it's a blueprint for a whole new category of brilliantly dumb, superminimal toys.
The hair-shirt Maeda/ Iwai graphical restraint is another plus for low-church casual gamers like me, but I think we could do with even fewer colours here.
What I'm most taken with is the whole pause and wait, chain-reaction/ cascade effect which constitutes this game's moment of agony, the helpless few seconds that makes it feel like it can be played strategically; which as far as I can tell, it can't.
But what's really new (to me) is the fact that Boomshine more or less plays itself. You get one guess, and then stand back. Again, as far as I can tell, your involvement could hardly be less important. There's no way to be clever. This is guaranteed to anger proper gamers, as a bonus.
So perhaps, like me, you'll be vaguely ashamed of yourself for even playing it, perhaps more so for liking it. The ultimate crime however, is to recommend it to strangers. And here we are.
By the way, if you know of a dumber way to spend your precious seconds on planet Earth, let me know: I'm there.
