now playing: "MelVille"

MelVille
Genre(s): Weird/unknown (with "action," "art," "puzzle," "simulation," and even a bit "social")
Credits: David Fox, 2011

What the byte!? or some not-so-kid-friendly derivative of the expression might have ran through your mind as you saw the Zynga trademark in today's review title. He said he reviews quality games!! I don't call FarmVille dirt "quality"!!

Or, if you weren't thinking that, it's probably because you remembered that Melville was the name of a pretty important dead author, more or less (in)famous for the hundreds of pages that make up his saga Moby Dick. Those of you who read said tome in its entirety and loved it, my apologies—no, MelVille's not a faithfully-rendered isometric 2D roleplay interpretion of the storyline.

It is the storyline.

Yes. Really. No, I'm not joking. Here, I'm on Chapter 2. Every page I turn increases my awesome star power, but also decreases my reading energy (which refills every minute).

Created with the best of critic-loving intentions by one guy who coincidentally works at Digital Chocolate, MelVille doesn't exactly qualify as a "game" as most of us would define the interactive medium. Furthermore, its placement on the Facebook app platform calls it out for intensely graphic irony. You probably figured out by now that the genres I've classified it under are true when applied to the book's content, but hardly adequate for its status as a "game." Its point-and-click psuedo interactive capacity, limited to the turn of the page and inviting "crewmates" to read along with you, promises to bore the average visually-addicted procrastinator to death. Even as someone who grew up reading old-timey-wimey classic lit for enjoyment's sake, I found the initial few chapters as dryly dull as the emo prosaic rants I wrote every so often in middle school.

Additionally, bugs and quirks rampage happily. I (and apparently other players as well) had several issues with coming to the end of a chapter and not seeing the beginning of the next; I had to reload the browser tab to gain full text visibility, and there's currently no method of turning back any pages I inevitably missed. 

So why does this apparently inefficient, barely-interactive title end up in a "transcending pixels" review? MelVille marches up to the dumpster slew of overbaked, underdone, and mindless social games and jabs them in the stomach with broad, pointy elbows. Although Fox explains that he feels personally partial to Moby Dick and thus selected it as the narrative in the first place, I believe that this particular work is regardless of preference the most appropriate choice for the game's message: technologically-addicted consumers, as a general unit, have forgotten how to use all of their senses to experience life, including their imaginations. For that matter, they've forgotten what life is—or rather, what the history of life has taught us about how we should live. As I've tried to emphasize throughout this blog, I don't have anything particularly against some harmless, brainless twaddle every now and then. But when twaddle becomes the norm rather than the exception, not only in our games but in our music, movies and books, how does that reflect on our culture? What does it reveal about our intellectual and spiritual priorities? MelVille reminds us of the simple pleasures that reading brings to the open-minded, inquisitive player willing to take a few lessons in the history of interactive entertainment. That, and it's a pretty darn good whale of a tale.

Next time: We're going wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey! Well, in the spatial sense, anyway. (But let me know if you ever do find a game about time travel. That would be fantastic.)