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Molleindustria has created another great game in the genre of games that is so hard to categorise. They describe it as an art game, but it is close to the newsgames and other political games they have made in the past – except this time, it doesn’t evolve around a scandal like Operation: Pedopriest, or about the wrong-doings of a corporation like The McDonald’s videogame. It is a game about our every day, gray life called Every day the same dream. This game might make you feel bad in one second, because isn’t this actually what your boring, miserable life is about? Then the next second it might feel like an inspiration because you know life is about so much more than what this game is portraying. This simple “game” makes you reflect. It’s clever.

Desperately trying to get out of the vicious gray circle of life, I let my character go in his boxer shorts to work one day. The lady in the elevator doesn’t even notice. The boss does, however, but what happens then? The character gets fired, and wake up to a new day where I can choose between putting on his clothes or not when he’s leaving home to work in a new office – which, of course, is an office in the exact same shade of gray as the previous one.

So. Is there a way out of the gray hell? Well, yes. Sort of. It is even marked with a green exit sign and is visible from the office cubicle. But the solution is not an uplifting one. And I am still wondering what my character’s dream is – and might his dream be in any way connected to my dream? What is my dream?

I am fascinated by the serious/radical/political/ideological/news game genre, and wrote a paper about these kind of games in 2008 called Games Combatting the Dictatorship of Entertainment. A Study of the Newsgaming Phenomenon. Read my short blog post about the paper when I had just finished it, read the whole paper thingy, or just play some good, radical games from Molleindustria!

I am no graphic designer. However, as I work with web and interaction design, I know graphic design makes a huge difference when creating user experiences. Functionality is often viewed as one thing that we can separate from the form. When the functionality is in place, then one might consider to add a layer of visual eye candy – if the time and budget allows it. But without the “pretty design” properly integrated with the functionality, how will we even know that there’s a button to push or a link to click?

Let us say that the button feels somewhat clickable even without the “pretty design” applied. Still, will the user even feel like pushing the button if the button is in an visual appalling environment? I know I rather click a button if the user interface as a whole gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

How I “think” can not be separated from how I “feel”. From “In Defense of Eye Candy”

Humans are not acting as rational as we might like to think. Stephen P. Anderson wrote a great article on this and the importance of “pretty design” called “In Defense of Eye Candy”. The article is inspiring – and gives me several reasons why I should get to know the art of graphic design. Wireframes and flow-charts alone won’t give me the warm fuzzy feeling inside, I’m afraid.