Games
I first played Minecraft when I was 9 years old after seeing my older brother playing it. Even though it is just a game about destroying and placing blocks, it is probably the most influential piece of media in my life. It is a game that showed me how to accept failure by letting me simply mine my mistakes back up. It is a game that allowed me to express myself by placing blocks. I learned how to program by reading the game’s code to make mods which I shared on YouTube.
It taught me to be creative, fearless, and curious. It made me aware of my own agency in the world. I realized my own potential to change things in my life and in others. For me, Minecraft is much more than a game. It was my childhood.
The Witness is a game where you explore an abandoned island and solve line puzzles on panels you find throughout the island. These puzzles eventually intertwine with the world and the environment itself until you have yourself questioning whether the leaves on the ground are part of a larger puzzle or if they are just leaves on the ground. The Witness, through its puzzles, forces players to break their assumptions about how the world works. The moment of realization where you finally understand a puzzle is one of the most enlightening experiences. As a game designer, I played The Witness in a time of artistic confusion, where I struggled to conceptualize what I wanted to do with the medium of games. The Witness helped me to understand how games are much more than just entertainment, and when designed correctly they can be used to change a player’s entire perception of reality.
In Manifold Garden, you explore an Escher-like world of impossible fractal geometry that is all dictated by simple rules that compound to beauty. The world wraps around itself so that you can ascend by falling down. Manifold Garden helped me to appreciate how simplicity is beautiful when done correctly. Seeing how I could simplify my own life, I became vegetarian, a decision I had been debating for months. I began to live much more habitually, without the worrying about what to do at any given time. I realized how complex I was making my own life, and that by living a much more simple existence, where I wasn’t in conflict with myself, I could live a much more fulfilling life.
