Jason Rohrer's "Between"

As featured on Esquire

Anybody played this besides E Hunnie and me? We tried it a little tonight, and couldn't entirely figure it out. It's mandatory co-op, but I'd really like to talk to people about it.

Between is a game for two players linked by a network server. You can play with a friend or find a stranger on the server. There is no single-player mode. (If you must play in the same room as your partner, do not look at your partner's screen -- it will spoil the effect of the game.

No way for me to play with another person. Fail.

We played via the internet yesterday. Don't tell me you lack an internet connection.

Who am i to play with? You?

You're not the only nerd in the UK, you know!

I could try and introduce you to one or two others, if you'd like. Do you know this guy? http://noblecarrots.com/

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*

So?

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

My girlfriend and I tried the game out a couple weeks back. She's pretty much a purely casual gamer. We "cheated" and kept an IM window open during the experience. I was able to get the first four or five rows of the tower built once we (unintentionally) generated some secondary colour blocks. She didn't make quite as much progress her first time out - it took her a while to get used to the mechanics.

I still don't fully understand how blocks transfer between the two players - though we both ended up with tons of junk blocks in our green world that we didn't make (in addition to the secondary colour blocks). It also seems like it would be very difficult, even once those mechanics are learned, for the players to be able to communicate usefully with each other within the game without a pre-arranged message encoding scheme of some sort. On the other hand, it seems like once four of each of the secondary colour blocks have been created, no more interaction between the players is actually necessary.

We both enjoyed the experience, and I think it was actually enhanced by being able to IM with each other during the game. There's this fun little meta-game that emerges of trying to describe what's going on, and generating a common set of terminology for the game objects.

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

Jason Rohrer wrote:

One night, in a dream, they appear: things that you clearly could not have conjured on your own. Not snowflakes. Not the self-similar forms of leaves. Not distant planets' erosion networks as viewed through telescopes. Not those things that are beautifully external but lack the signatures of consciousness. These things that appear are ugly and non-procedural: indecipherable transmissions bubbling up through static, faded messages floating in bottles, and charcoal handprints on cave walls. Evidence has reached you through time of unknown duration and distance of unknown magnitude, but stale evidence is still evidence.

Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other.

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.

Hm. Maybe something went wrong for me, but I only had 3 yellow blocks to work from, among the other colors. Also, I'm not sure I paid enough attention to know that the mess was not my own.

Interesting that the green (presumably "awake") world is the shared one, albeit tangentially, while the players remain fundamentally alone in all worlds.

wordsmythe wrote:

Hm. Maybe something went wrong for me, but I only had 3 yellow blocks to work from, among the other colors. Also, I'm not sure I paid enough attention to know that the mess was not my own.

Interesting that the green (presumably "awake") world is the shared one, albeit tangentially, while the players remain fundamentally alone in all worlds.

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 only had three yellow blocks in one of the worlds (none in the other two worlds). Does that mean my partner had some that she wasn't sharing?

wordsmythe wrote:

I only had three yellow blocks in one of the worlds (none in the other two worlds). Does that mean my partner had some that she wasn't sharing?

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'.

wordsmythe wrote:

I only had three yellow blocks in one of the worlds (none in the other two worlds). Does that mean my partner had some that she wasn't sharing?

Having done a bit of playing around with two computers (which has been difficult because Between, for reasons unknown, runs incredibly slowly on my two-year-old PC), I have some changes to make to my mechanics summary above.

  • The shared world isn't always the green world, but it looks like there is always only one shared world.
  • The shared world seems to be reversed on the X axis for each player except for the target. That is, if one player leaves a block on the right side of the doorway in the shared world it will appear on the left side of the other player's doorway.
  • Each player begins the game being able to create red, green, and blue blocks. However, when you leave blocks of one of those colors in the shared world they appear in the other player's version of the shared world as secondary colors. Blue becomes mauve, red becomes yellow, and green becomes teal.

If I can find a second machine that runs between smoothly, I'll see what happens if you build the target in both worlds (creating two inverse columns on either side of the doorway). [Edit: running two instances of the program causes an error when attempting to join them in a game. The code given does not find a compatible game even when entered correctly.]

adam.greenbrier wrote:

[Edit: running two instances of the program causes an error when attempting to join them in a game. The code given does not find a compatible game even when entered correctly.]

Noticed that myself. Sorry I didn't mention it.

From a coughed thread:

Yoyoson wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
Duoae wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
Duoae wrote:

Haha... Wordsmythe's going to be spitting feathers!

Honestly, I can't find the thread I started about this last year.

What, this one? It was the second result on google search for 'Between' when searching GWJ. I never use the site search - it just doesn't work.

Yes, that one. Spent half an hour looking for it on Google this morning. Humph.

Well, that all being said: *cough.*

Gaaar! *rolls over, dies*

That doesn't mean stop talking about it. It's still a fascinating game, after all. Just keep the discussion cohesive.

I noticed that this game is now available on Steam.

adam.greenbrier wrote:

I noticed that this game is now available on Steam.

Is it still free? I saw a couple games that I remember being free that were put up for cheap on Steam, as part of the recent indie fest.

wordsmythe wrote:
adam.greenbrier wrote:

I noticed that this game is now available on Steam.

Is it still free? I saw a couple games that I remember being free that were put up for cheap on Steam, as part of the recent indie fest.

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

What i found was that, the map is a time line
The area all the way to the left with a bed is the time you fell asleep
The area all the way to the right is when you wake up
The shared green area is your dream

This makes sense because two people cannot have the same life, but can have the same dream

In your dream, you are constructing a tower, however, you do not have all the parts to complete it by yourself
Before you realize you don't have all the same parts, they appear on your map, sent by the other player
You must work together with them to complete your dream

But alas, it is a dream, and all dreams must end
When you complete your "tower" (dream), you wake up, with nothing but memories of your dream

And you have no way to find this other person (player)

Says you. Here in America, we all have the same ill-defined consumerist dream.

Or so I'm told.

I debated with myself for a while about whether to go that route or something sappy about sharing my dreams with my wife.

I actually played with someone last night. At first it was confusing, about 2 hours in I realized what was going on. I like it, but it can be frustrating. I'm reluctant to call it a game and more an experiment.