Who are we, when we're together?
Oddly we're more comfortable facing the question of who we are as individuals -- we're more afraid to reckon with how the collective defines most of who we are or how we act.
But the short hand-drawn game Kids -- recently released by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach, the award-winning German duo known for Plug & Play -- immerses you in the nature of group dynamics. That doesn't even begin to cover the scope of what Kids captures, though. With a minimalist yet celestial aesthetic, the 15-30 minutes it takes to play feel like a free fall through universal human experiences.
In the iOS version (though it's also available on Android, PC, Mac, and Linux), a simple touch control lets you initiate reactions with ripple effects, whether in crowds or individuals or even an umbilical cord-like tunnel. Kids works purely in symbols and tableaus, giving off a lot of Plato's Allegory of the Cave vibes.
Fascinatingly the puzzles are not solved through complex mechanics, but rather psychological reasoning. The solutions rely on a series of "aha" moments of recognition about how certain social dynamics play out in the real world.
An ode, a celebration of humanity as part of the larger, natural, cosmic pattern that defines all life -- big or small.
In one instance, you touch different members of a small group, causing each to pick a new person to point at and demand, "You do it!" You only progress after figuring out that the answer isn't touching different members of the crowd (like in many previous puzzles), since they will just pass the buck of "doing it" (whatever "it" is) onto the next person. Instead, you must continuously click on the same person over and over again, until everyone in the group is pointing at them, goading them to "do it."
Inevitably, that individual does "it," their own sense of agency dissolving under the pointed weight of a peer-pressuring majority.
In less nuanced hands, Kids could have been a boring, pessimistic game wallowing in the totality of societal ills. But the social forces explored here are not all bad. The game's overall tone is much closer to a celebration of humanity as part of the larger, natural, cosmic pattern that defines all life -- big or small.
"The characters in a crowd behave much like matter: They attract and repel, lead and follow, grow and shrink, align and separate," reads the game's official description. And that's exactly it.
So many video games (and books, films, and TV shows for that matter) reinforce the narrative that being special and individual is what matters. Meanwhile Kids insists on the beauty of being one indistinguishable part of the masses, part of something cosmically bigger than any one ego.
It's like if Planet Earth turned the camera back on us, only to show how a macro time-lapse of a city looks indistinguishable from the way a school of fish moves.
What is lost in the collective, and what is gained?
As we've seen throughout history, there is something equally beautiful (a synchronized dance performance) and disturbing (a Nazi rally) about the power of what happens when human beings act as one. That tension defines what makes Kids such an impactful feat of interactive art.
Its central question of who we are when we're together is answered with two contradictory follow up questions: What is lost in the collective, and what is gained?
What is lost is that exceptionalism, your own sense of agency, the ethos of an individual's will or spirit as the defining characteristic of our humanity. But what is gained when we forget about the egocentrism of humanity is something far more true and everlasting: our universality.
Despite the name, Kids isn't about childhood or a childlike experience. The few voices heard are kids, and there's plenty of birth imagery. But from what I can tell, the title is more a reference to the phase in our psychological development when we start to learn and test out the boundaries of socializing -- a reckoning with the realization that the world doesn't revolve around you.
Or, from a more pessimistic perspective, it's when our indoctrination into the larger social order of human civilization really begins.
Out of context, Kids might look horrifying, with piles of countless silhouetted human bodies falling forward into a black hole of nothingness -- nudged over the edge by the slightest touch of your finger. Yet as you progress, a more holistic picture begins to take shape.
We fear the collective because we cannot control it, because it is a reminder of our own smallness and insignificance. But after watching enough symbolic births in Kids, you start to see the comfort in how the collective can never die.
As an individual, your power is weak, fleeting, brittle. As one, our power lies in the infinite.
You can buy KIDS for $2.99 for iOS, Android, Mac, PC, and Linux.
Topics Gaming
