Not Quite A Game (Games that go beyond the need to be understood) – The Candybox Blog
These last few weeks people have been sharing their games with me, saying how much they appreciate my work, and showing the beautiful thing they ended up making too. I’m speechless. It got me thinking again about how much more a game can be… So I was inspired to write this!
There’s this really interesting theme that I’ve noticed in things played, or just haphazardly discovered on itch.io, while browsing the endless sea of games out there. I have to wonder…
Do games really need a purpose?
What’s the point of having a point anymore?
You can find games that challenge that, very pointedly.
They show that there’s a beauty in not understanding something. It’s complex, experiences beyond words, just distilling things into feelings, questions, a journey through something, a journey through nothing… They inspire a type of wonder that I sometimes forgets exists so well in a digital context.
– I stole this from google images because I needed something here
Computers are strange devices, at first beyond our comprehension, until we get to know them.
We learn how to program, how hardware works, how to interface with them… But before all that, they are strange alien things.
Glowing lights, and weird sounds.
Before you understand what a UI is, or what the desktop is, it’s all unknown glyphs.
It’s a type of wonder that I miss. It’s something that I knew when I was young, as I played around with DOS commands… Not knowing what I was doing, but there was a simple rewarding joy whenever the computer responded with SOMETHING. It could have been anything. “Abort, Retry, Fail?” A high pitched bleep? How fun it was that it responded!
Eventually I learned it’s language, and that relationship with computers grew deeper. To a point where I take them for granted because I understand them too well. We now have a mutual language.
But what if that language was taken away and I had to learn it all over again?
Over the years there have been games that inspired this type of “alien puzzle” feeling.
I think maybe language is deeper than words. When you take words away there’s this sense of awe you can find when having to learn how to understand something. You need to meet it on its own terms.
That’s what’s special about digital art.
There are no rules. There is no language. We invent that.
The games featured here remind me of that.
It’s the type of experience that brings me back to playing through weird artistic Flash experiences.
For context, I’ll mention Fly Guy (2002, Flash), and work by Abnormal Behavior Child (completely lost, and not preserved)…
I wish that I could share something from Abnormal Behavior Child because there’s barely a trace of it online, when it was so influential at the time. I’ll leave a list of links from when I occasionally try to search for any remnant of it: http://tekka.net/news/Mar2005/Flashvideo.html https://uxdesign.cc/my-love-letter-to-adobe-flash-8166ec03f10b https://fitc.ca/speaker/nikostumpo/?event=18394/ https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7xohf
I think it’s fascinating how a piece of digital art can be so known, so celebrated, so influential, and then completely vanish. Nothing left.
It lives on in whoever’s collective memory might hold it. It’s reduced to nothing more than a dream you woke up from. Maybe you remember it all. Maybe just bits and pieces. Did it ever happen?
The work was so unusual to begin with. It was UI and interfaces, with flashing colors, animation, and art. All of which you didn’t really understand. You just moved through it.
– Volumeone.com from “My love letter to Adobe Flash”
Work from that early Flash era captured the wild imagination of existing in a digital space. You didn’t understand it. You just experienced it.
These experiences used to be normal in the “Flash website” era.
We moved on from it, and computers started to make sense.
– Kevin (1997-2077) by KevinDu
Which brings me to Kevin (1997-2077) … It’s the perfect example!
I don’t really know how to describe Kevin (1997-2077). It’s like diving into someone’s headspace. All conventionality when it comes to UI, interfacing with a computer, even words, mean nothing here. It exists entirely using its own language. The initial experience is confusing, and I’d like to reflect on how that confusion is actual a good thing.
Digital art: I want to be confused. I don’t want to understand. I want to see something for the first time again. Rarely a game does that, and when it does it’s a precious thing.
Eventually, through looking at strange hand scribbled glyphs, Kevin (1997-2077) teaches you that you can scroll through it. Eventually you learn that you can draw. Eventually you learn how to move through it’s various pages. Eventually you learn how to interact with it deeper. It eventually makes some sense, but it always holds comprehension at arms length.
Over the years of making “weird digital art” (like BlueSuburbia or “Everything is going to be OK” would be my main examples when discussing this in my own work), it would often get criticized for being “confusing”.
Remarks like “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do” are very common.
I never understood why “confusing” is such a bad feeling to give to someone. Isn’t it wonderful not to understand something? It challenges your perception to learn how to look at something in a totally new light.
The ideals surrounding a good “game” often go hand in hand with “power fantasy”. It’s an old tired way to describe video games. Players have control. The WIN state is the point. That’s the rule.
I’d like to reflect on how, maybe, it’s a type of “power” we exercise over art when art has to be completely comprehensible.
Maybe we’re asked to surrender our power, ideals, ego, sense of control, when art provokes us to not understand it. Maybe a game doesn’t have to make sense, and that’s why the journey through it is so wonderful.
When arguing the legitimacy of why my work is the way it is, I’m often told that art is bad if it doesn’t please the viewer… which is a very commercial and consumerist lens to look at art.
I believe that art is special when it expands our sense of reality.
Something like Kevin (1997-2077) exists in that type of space. Instead of having art that cares about how it is perceived, or a game that cares about the experience it gives during play, or a UI that cares about how obvious it is… This is an experience that you appreciate for what it is. You must develop your own relationship to it.
The idea of a “simple contemplative visual experiment” is a beautiful thing to reflect on. It doesn’t exist to send you away on a grand quest, or give you tasks to complete before you can feel that sense of accomplishment. It’s something that exists entirely on its own terms. I find that iconic about digital art.
Our digital world is a fantasy. Everything about it is a construct that we all participated in creating. Nothing about it is real. Not in the sense that grass exists, and if you touch that grass, it will universally feel a certain way. You know that it follows these rules. If you jump, gravity will pull you down. All that is established and unchangeable.
The digital world is something we made up. It changes constantly. Software is fantasy. Its rules only exist because we convinced ourselves that they mater. We all agreed on a certain language for interfacing with it, and that’s called “standards”… but when you go beyond that. When you really question the way that we agreed on all these things, special things happen.
The art here can be anything.
So I have to wonder…
Does there need to be a point?
Do you need a purpose assigned to you to enjoy a game?
Can’t it just be?
À l’Angle describes itself as a “simple contemplative visual experiment”. It’s simply stunning. When it ended I felt like I woke from a dream.
The experience creates this beautiful headspace for you to exist in. It offers these tiny, context-less moments that you move through. Nothing is rushed. You move forward whenever you are ready.
Each space in À l’Angle has this incredible amount of detail that gives you a sense of just being suspended in time. I think the visual fidelity is novel because I’m used to seeing this quality in something like an AAA game, or premium indie title, where the point of the game is the goal.
Games that look like this usually give you a clear thing to accomplish, and the experience is one of being urged to do something to win. Usually you’re not really given a chance to take in the carefully crafted environments, or beautiful world that you are in, because that’s very much not the point. For example, I’ll remind everyone that “walking simulator” started out as an insult.
À l’Angle is the opposite of this. The point is the pointlessness. It’s the beauty of just existing in a vague moment. Some relatable memory we can all share of looking at beer bottles on a restaurant table, cigarette smoke that rises up, looking past that into the distant blur of a city. Then the graffiti on a bathroom wall… No context, just the space between words. You fill it in yourself.
À l’Angle is a beautiful poem without ever even saying a word.
I can’t recommend it enough.
– A TIME TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO PAST DELICACIES by Gabriel Helfenstein
After playing Kevin (1997-2077) and À l’Angle I ended up wondering why we can’t just appreciate digital art for what it is, rather than what it does for us?
Software, games, anything on a computer, is viewed through the lens of being a service to us. It all does something for us. It’s all maximized for output, or to keep your attention, to streamline interest… So we are kind of used to expecting certain things from anything that lives on our screens.
When a piece of digital art exists on its own terms, by definition, I believe it becomes controversial. It’s more than a service. It’s value is not defined by its usefulness as a digital object (game or software). Now you, the almighty user, glorious player, consumer, must come down and meet it on its own terms.
Will you react aggressively like a reviewer on Steam, expecting to have your money back?
Will you appreciate that it’s different?
– THE OLISINPA SPLIT by Samuli Pietikäinen
I had an interesting short conversation with the developer of THE OLISINPA SPLIT about the difficulties of creating work like this, where there’s no real understanding of it’s importance, or there’s just not a space for it yet.
It’s hard to make something that exists outside of the norm. Not only will your work be misunderstood, you will have to be the constant advocate for it, teaching people why it matters.
If that sounds like a waste of time to you then I’d like to take a moment to point out that even Twitter had to convince people that it was worth using. Originally people laughed (or where confused) at the idea of a micro blogging platform that had a character limit, and really only enabled short-form thoughts. Twitter had to convince people to use it, eventually gaining foothold into the whatever good or bad thing it became… But, before that, it was useless.
Even when considering the general concept of computers, you could argue that computers are generally useless. I think back to when I had to explain what the world wide web was to friends, who didn’t get why anyone would want to be online. What’s the point? All this is fake. We convinced ourselves that we need it, and then we built our society around it, so now we are dependent on it, and have to use it… So… Digital art that rejects all this established “mode of reality” I think is tremendously important.
It’s kind of an act of defiance.
It’s the closest thing you could get to your teenage quest of rejecting the status quo.
This art serves no other purpose but to be what it is.
THE OLISINPA SPLIT is novel to me because it packages two very short-form experiences together that you can play pretty much at the same time. Both happen simultaneously, in separate open windows, running next to each other.
You’re not sure if it ended when it does. I think the way the developer compares it to music is interesting. It’s similar to two experimental songs that you find on a vague CD someone gifted you. You make whatever sense of it you will.
I appreciate that it exists. It’s given me something to think about… musing on why digital art even needs to make sense.
– individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r?a?n?t? manifesto
When À l’Angle finished I scribbled down part of the ending message “weird little thing made with love”, so I could contemplate that later. I wish we had more room for digital art like that.
For example, a while back when I was chatting with a friend about “ Individualism in the dead internet age ” not being allowed on Steam (unless I change everything about it, which basically means that it’s banned… Ok, semantics, you get the point). They mentioned that a game from one of their friends was rejected from Steam because it wasn’t “Game” enough…
Developers making experimental games that fall under the constantly changing definition of “argtame” “altgame” or now “arthousegame” understand what that means.
Sometimes games just don’t have a point. I mean, something like Brave Mouse Cartographer Trilogy is literally just about watching. It’s a beautiful unconventional journey where purpose is obscure…
So I really question why, in the year 2025, we are still struggling with rigid understandings of what a game is?
I do blame storefronts for standardizing such values. Even a platform will enforce ideals that inevitably alienate certain art.
The AppStore would constantly give me grief for my “simulated error” because my aesthetic is “computers breaking”. If the AppStore or Steam was my only option, then my work would not exist.
Mind you, I don’t even make anything all that controversial when you actually look at what other stuff gets past the approval process and is allowed. (In this last inline text link, I’d like to point out that this made it through Valves approval process).
When work is really, truly, radically different, it’s not going to be understood. That inability to be comprehended, almost to a point of being offensive (especially from a strictly consumerist viewpoint) is why it’s all so intriguing to me. I’m looking at an entirely different reality in the digital world. One where it’s not about profit margins, entertainment, Steam reviews, and pleasing a player base, but about experiencing something on its own terms.
I’ll leave these musings with one final gem…
– ocean::ephemera by INFINITE TEARS
“The ethos of INFINITE TEARS is to promote a space for alternative art to break through the limited constraints of expression imposed by the pervasiveness of rigid and oppressive profit-driven structures.”
ocean::ephemera (by INFINITE TEARS, who’s work you really should check out) is a surrealist sea of sound that you occupy for 7 minutes and 43 seconds.
It captures that feeling of awe when you look at something you can’t quite make out, but it’s all so grand. The movement of waves, coupled with sound that fills up a vast unknowable space, enveloping you as you journey through… something. It’s electric water. An impression of something that you fill in the blanks of yourself.
Trying to describe it almost feels like an injustice, because you should experience it for yourself and understand it for yourself.
I love it because it captures that necessity to “see it yourself” when it comes to digital art.
It’s like when people get emotional about “no spoilers!” when they watch a popular show, and spoiling it is something friendships end over. It’s the same with this type of art. Instead of me telling you about it (which almost feels wrong), you see it for yourself and figure out what it means to you.
When I see experiences like FarFama’s work, or things like À l’Angle I wonder about how I will remember them five or ten years from now (also see Tripgate by dustmyte, which I still think about sometimes). Similar to how I miss the “abnormal behavior child” Flash site, and have these meaningful bits and pieces of it in my imagination, will I look back at ocean::ephemera’s bubbling film grain or À l’Angle’s moody cigarette smoke the same?
I often say that the time we spend in games is real to us in the same way that dreams are real. It’s a type of lived experience we had, even if it wasn’t in the physical world. It becomes a memory nonetheless.
The way we travel through our collective electric dream that is this digital world is not different. I know I will look back in horror at harassment that I received, or think warmly back on the way I laughed at memes with friends as we browsed the internet… I will remember things in these virtual spaces with the same weight as things that happened in the real world.
This art is the same. It’s a type of experience it leaves us with.
The fact that a “game” can be appreciated for what it is, without being literal in how it should be interacted with, perceived, or played, is what’s so beautiful about digital art.
Our digital world is a collective dream. The journey is the point.