Last weekend I had one of the most incredible collective experiences with a video game. It's called asses.masses and it's a video game that a crowd plays together. You can play or you can backseat drive and voice act for the characters. I was absolutely blown away by the entire thing.
The game itself is about donkeys staging a revolution to get humans to appreciate them, and I figured it would be fairly straightforward, but it's got a lot going on. There's donkey afterlife and reincarnation and donkey gods, and how the gods aren't going to save you. The play style for the afterlife is completely different in that it's in 3 dimensions and the rest of the game is in 2. Plus there's questions at the beginning that I don't think change much, but they foreshadow some jokes.
I was also really fascinated by how this is a one person game, sometimes it's 2 people or more, but really there's only one controller. And yet a whole crowd is participating. It does feel like a huge experiment to see if it's possible to have a collective experience that way, but honestly I was so engaged and I never touched the controller.
I suspect I'll be thinking about that for a while longer, it was a great way to show how engaging video games are and how to get a group focused on a single goal. I hope that there's more projects like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment