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Jason Rohrer's Passage has a quality to it that one feels the need to call it Jason Rohrer's Passage instead of just Passage. This game certainly has an emotional design blueprint unlike any other. Passage's release for the iPhone in gives a good opportunity to stargaze at Passage's emotional design.

In my efforts to create models that would allow us to understand game designs as emotional designs, one approach I'm still working is directly related to the metaphor of stargazing. In the same way as astrologers have drawn vectors from one star to another, thus enabling us to understand a set of stars as a constellation, it is my effort to draw out similar 'skeletons' of game designs. First, out of existing games and the ways they have aligned their elements into dynamic wholes, and from there, into tools that could be used to sketch such emotional scenarios for future game designs.

In the dynamics of computer media, such constellations often have vectors that have consequences for the emotional play experience. They are either direct vectors, such as the gravity of blocks in Tetris, or the shape of the tube in Zuma, or indirect, implying a direction or force that the player should gravitate towards.

In Passage, there is a vector that is both direct and indirect. Nevertheless, it is powerful. It has to do with curiosity, and it has the metaphoric pull of life, and love. Both, coupled with passage of time, have a strong sense of inevitability to them, supported by our curiosity and will to move forward, even if only a part of the future is shown to us. When this inevitability is met with another one in human life, the vector comes to an end, breeding indecision and inability to act. It is a very powerful, emotion-eliciting design. Play the game and you know what I am talking about.

Technorati Tags: design metaphor emotional design Jason Rohrer Passage