I discovered 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness. And promptly began pondering the limitations and boundaries of games, much as I imagine the creator was doing. Specifically, what makes a game? How far can you push a game before it stops being a game?
In this particular game, what is perhaps the most extreme experiment in game minimalism I’ve ever seen, the flow of ‘play’ proceeds thusly:
1) Start the game.
2) Pray that no one else in the world does the same for at least 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
3) Win.
And that constitutes the entirety of the game. Gameplay is visualized by a large status bar slowly changing from black to white, followed by, upon successful completion, an equally simple final screen. (I won’t tell you what it is in case you want to preserve the suspense. Alternately, the final screen is a bitmap included with the .zip, so if you really can’t wait, you can always make with the clicky-clicky.)
The fundamental conflict in the game is that as soon as another person, anywhere in the world, starts playing, you lose. The game vanishes from the screen and you must start over. Ultimately, in order to win the game, you must be the only person in the world playing this game for a minimum of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Your own personal slice of time in which you are doing something unique, something that no one else in the world is doing.
As a commenter suggested, this is perhaps the world’s simplest MMO. It is also unique in that it is the only multiplayer game wherein one can only win if no one else is playing with you.
Does this actually constitute a game? All you have to do is click on the executable; in fact, there is no other way for the player to interact with the game. It is also the only way to interact with other players of the game, id est, killing their game by starting your own. However, in its standard-issue form, even that aspect is hidden from you; all you see is the status bar, and nothing else. Winning is pure luck: at no point is strategy or skill involved. Is it still a game?
Minimal representation, minimal interaction, and minimal victory requirements. Is it still a game?
Later, one might discover a better visualization of the game: a map of the current leader. After this, the game is more clearly a game, branching away from minimalist art and into an exploration of representational pseudo-solipsism and wanton griefing behavior. One is busy contemplating one’s uniqueness not via status bar but on an actual picture of the world, when lo! some asshole comes along and ruins your game. The battle is on! Start new games as quick as you can to kill your opponents’ games, or lull him into complacence and wait to snatch victory from his slimy, Turkish grasp at the last second! (Surprisingly, I saw a lot of players from Turkey while I watched. Don’t they have anything better to do in that country?)
Several commenters on the game’s orginal post indicated a desire to build a batch file for no reason other than to start games every couple minutes, just to fuck with other players and prevent them from ever winning.
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(Segue: I have decided that there are only three possible victory conditions given the map visualization mechanic, and they are as follows:
1a) By pure luck, no one else in the world is bothering to play at the same time as you.
1b) Other players are watching the map, and have kindly consented to allow you to win, without interruption.
Note that 1a and 1b are indistinguishable to the player.
2) You forcibly create a Type 1 situation by griefing all other players into submission.
For the record, I won a Type 2 victory. Bastards will learn not to screw with me when I’m on the perch. I return you to the rest of my post now.)
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Still, we come back to the question: is it a game? You don’t control anything, at best you have a status bar on top of a map picture, and victory conditions are entirely dependent on luck and whimsy. I say, yes, it is still a game. More than anything, after I started playing, I developed a strong desire to win. Frustration crept in occasionally, and boredom certainly, but throughout I was motivated to conquer for no other reason than that I could say I had done so. I have no doubts that what I was doing was playing a game, albeit one less traditional than anything else I’ve ever done to which was attached the moniker.
Ultimately, I feel that something deserves to be called a game if someone wants to play it. If no one wants to play it, it ceases to be (or never starts being) a game, and is instead a waste of time. This is the sufficient criterion for gamehood. Anything else - fancy graphics, captivating plot, complicated control-schemes, well-designed multiplayer environments, the works - is nothing more than window dressing. It all comes down to whether a person wants to play or not. To me, this is the only possible way to classify a game as a game.
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Right now, I am most likely not the only person unemployed and blogging from a laptop on a couch at home, daydreaming of Dew and the stress zone between the Infocalypse and the Singularity, and whether a mesh-style network comprises a non-singular, possibly-plural ontological entity. I am most likely not the only person barefoot, with a headache and an empty stomach, who is also warm and dry and attended by a mildly paranoid and rampantly disinterested cat. But for four minutes and thirty three seconds, I knew I was the only person playing a game.
For three and a half hours, I tried for four and a half minutes to myself, and eventually I got it. In the end, there was no great personal catharsis, no momentous feeling of individual identity, no lifechanging instant of satori. I was, however, mildly amused at my accomplishment. I have played the game, and I have won.
That is all for now.
