Jason Rohrer's "Between"

Who am i to play with? You?

If i'm honest, i'm thankful for your attempts at arranging a play date... but i'm very shy so.... i'll just go hide over here for a while....

*hides*

I'm waiting for a stranger to join with. I'll get back to you once I've played it.

I think that when playing this game, it's important to begin with this (from the Esquire piece):

This seems to be the essence of the experience that Rohrer is trying to create here for his players: that moment of discovery when you're faced with incontrovertible evidence that you are playing the game with another player even though you cannot see or speak with that player.

The mechanics of the game seem fairly simple, but I'll add the caveat that I haven't played the game enough to know this for sure. Each player begins in one world, a gray world, and is able to produce blocks of three different colors. In the center of the screen is a doorway, of sorts, with space inside for four blocks. If the player stacks four blocks in the doorway and then presses the "W" key (for "wake," apparently, with its opposite control being "s," for "sleep"), the player will be taken into another world and will have the ability to create blocks composed of smaller blocks in an identical pattern to whatever the player placed in the doorway.

To the right of the doorway in all of the worlds is a tower made of differently colored blocks; in the game code, this tower is called the "target." The blocks in the target are either whole blocks of the size that the player can create natively, or are composed of smaller blocks like the player can create using the doorway. What's important is that the blocks in the target have six colors while the player can only create three. Placing a block on the target will cause it to flash red if the block doesn't match what's on the target and to stay solid if it does.

Each player seems to have access to three worlds total in the following order (that is, waking in one leads to the next, sleeping in one leads to the previous): a gray world, a brown world, and a green world. The target is in all of these worlds.

The green world seems to be shared between the two players, while the gray and brown worlds are private. Each player seems to have a different but complimentary set of three of the six colors in the target so that the target can only be built by the players sharing resources.

Of course, the players begin the game knowing only that it's a cooperative game and that at some point they will encounter another player. When you first begin playing, though, it feels very much like a single player game and it's only as you explore that you begin to notice that you are definitely interacting with another person. There's never a moment where you see the other player, so it's a subtle process of discovery. You place a block somewhere in the green world, muck about in the brown and gray world, and come back to find that your block in the green world has been moved or that another block has been stacked on top of it.

The process of experimentation and confirmation as you first try to suss out the presence of another player is a fascinating, exciting experience unlike anything else I've ever encountered in video gaming. Most games want you to know when you're dealing with another player and who that player is. You'll see the other players' avatars running around the screen, you'll see them on "player radars," you'll see their names floating over their heads, and you'll see what they have to say in chat. You're never in any doubt that you're alone, and you're never uncertain about where the other players are and what they might be doing. Between, meanwhile, makes you infer the presence of another player by the actions that player takes and, presumably, asks you to accomplish a task with that other player by building the target.

I say "presumably" there because the game doesn't make it clear that you're supposed to do anything with the other player once you've confirmed their existence. Perhaps you're supposed to work together to build the target, but when I played the game I built the target in each of my three worlds and nothing happened. The game seems to have been built entirely for the purpose of making you discover another player by inference---an awesome experience---but then gives you nothing to do with that knowledge except to accomplish a task of no consequence.

The ability to reach out and connect with other people, to define where the self ends and the other begins, is one of the most important things that people can do in their lives. Having that experience recreated in a game is very exciting, and I applaud Jason Rohrer for having found a way to do that. However, the game's mechanics seem to imply that whatever connection you make is essentially meaningless. The game, as near as I was able to tell, has no ending and no goals. There's no way to "beat" or even to "finish" the game, so what I'm left with is that I played a game where I had discovered another person, a stranger whose name I don't even know, and then nothing happened. I have no sense of having accomplished something with another person, no sense of having made but the most fleeting of connections. Rohrer has made the video game equivalent of passing someone on the street without so much as a nod, and I can't help but find that if not disappointing then at least mundane.

Of course, all of this is subject to change if there is some sort of goal that can be accomplished in the game, but if there is I, and whoever I played with, wasn't able to find it.

You only had three yellow blocks in what way? You could only produce yellow blocks, or there were only three yellow blocks in one of the worlds?

I don't think so. I figured there was some way that blocks of different colours in you and your partner's green world combine to give you (and them) the secondary coloured ones, but I haven't figured out precisely how that works.

The only way to get secondary coloured blocks in the other two worlds seems to be to propagate them forwards yourself from the green world using 'w'.

I noticed that this game is now available on Steam.

It's listed as a free demo, but so far as I know, it's the full game.