now playing: "Obey the Game"

Obey the Game
Genre(s): Action
Credits: Armor Games, 2009

Warning: the following game is so stereotypically casual, stereotypically Flash, stereotypically pointless, that you'll wonder why it's ever getting reviewed here. Until you click on the link and realize you can't stop playing it.

Obey the Game plays like a chapter of a Camus novel: an utterly meaningless routine. Furthering the irony, your player-character is an elephant cutout. Perhaps Armor hoped to justify the mediocrity of the gameplay by assigning what they believe to be an equally mediocre animal as the PC. Personally, I believe elephants are smarter than people. They obey what nature intended them to do. But I digress, partly. So you role-play the elephant's personality by completing a series of simple arrow-key movement tasks: walking, collecting coins, collecting balloons, committing suicide, hiding in a box, pushing a button, climbing stairs, running from a giant fan, on loop, under the pressure of a psychedelic countdown. The only catch is that if you're told to DISOBEY, then that's what you do.

I had enough trouble as it was snapping screenshots and playing simultaneously during the initial levels where the countdown clock lasts four seconds.

When the screen is red, "the only way to win is not to play."

Obey's inherently repetitive nature emphasizes its addictive themes. When I started out, I was playing for laughs—as Geico says, so easy a caveman could do it, right? By the time I started to realize I was losing more lives than I could regenerate, my brain cells had absolutely fried and my nerves were toasted. My eyes darted to the monitor clock, but the fact that I had wasted twenty, thirty minutes on this game barely registered in my head. The miserable little elephant had mutated into a Dalek slave. YOU WILL COM-LETE! COM-PLETE! COM-PLETE!

The transitional zoom-in-and-out between levels.

Taking a meta approach to the most fundamental game logic—if this, then that—Obey the Game exists solely to mock the casual gamer's quest for the next "entertaining thing." The ridiculously simple mechanics initially made me wonder if it was even worth my time; I always look for this factor first when I'm researching casual games to review, because if there's no redeeming value then why would I play it? But I realized that when it comes to the gamers and game-lovers, we're already elephants. We do whatever the computer tells us to do—and the moment we think we can outthink the AI with our superior human intellect (in the split-second just before the DISOBEY screen appears), we're proven dead wrong. Even in an open world experience like Minecraft, there are still rules to follow. Elephants don't ask questions. Elephants don't fight the system. They know their limits. They play without thought or reason. Not like us humans, who have so much potential to not only fight the system, but innovate and imagine a replacement. Not like us humans, who can host meaningful dialogue about the medium's evolution and future. Not like us humans, who often forget that there are no limits to our limits.

Obey's wonderfully obsessive-compulsive personality and ironic lessons in meaningful game design make it a perfect game to wrap up transcending pixels's first month of life.

Next time: Whether you're 12 or 21, school's just about to start (again). Let's kick off September with a game that's sure to depress the life out of you.

Watch for a very cool announcement tomorrow at 9:00am CST!