Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole discovers the hidden zen in the world of mobile games
Somehow I’ve never got into playing videogames on my phone. I’ve owned a long succession of handhelds with actual physical buttons and, latterly, sticks, and have very fond memories of portable gaming on the GBA SP, the Neo Geo Pocket Colour, the PSP, the 3DS, the Vita, and so on. Indeed they are some of my fondest videogame memories altogether – a Christmas spent playing Advance Wars, a Greek holiday immersed in Metal Gear Ac!d. But playing games on a phone? It always seemed to be something that, you know, civilians do – people who don’t really know anything about videogames. Everyone was just mindlessly swiping on stupid fruitbased puzzle games on public transport while I did something more productive and important with my journey, like listening to Queens Of The Stone Age.
In other words I was labouring under an unacknowledged snobbery. Sure, I had a brief blast on Pokémon Go last summer like everybody else, but I was sure that most phone games were basically worse than other kinds of game. Until very recently. For a couple of days, my girlfriend had been taking suspiciously long phone breaks while she was supposed to be working, and then she somewhat shamefacedly showed me the culprit: a thing called Wooden Block Puzzle. I was intrigued enough to look it up, and it turned out that it was one of hundreds of cynical clones of an original game called
1010!, so that was the one I installed and began to play. And play. And play some more. In case you aren’t aware of the genre, 1010! is essentially a kind of gravity-free Tetris, in which you place blocks of varying shapes and sizes into the playing area. Completed vertical and horizontal lines vanish, and the aim is simply to keep going. Play ends when the board is too full with pieces to place the next one.
It sounds very boring when I put it like that, but the exquisite design and feel makes it mesmerisingly pleasant. The particular stroke of genius here, I think, is that there is no rush. Tetris has an inbuilt time limit because the blocks fall at a minimum speed. But in 1010! you can take as long as you want over any move. You can think properly. And, simple as its universe is, it is a persistent gameworld: blissfully, 1010! lets you pause and return to your game after hours or days. Whenever you have time. You’re in charge.
A decade ago I wrote a manifesto for ‘slow gaming’, expressing the hope that more videogames would not be structured like tedious real-world jobs, involving timecritical makework tasks rewarded with virtual currency. Since then slow gaming has of course flourished in many fields, such as the walking simulator or the anti-game. But perhaps 1010! and its host of viral clones is the perfection of this Zen ideal. That’s not to say that twitch gaming doesn’t still have its place, as in the brain-melting kinetics of Housemarque’s stunning recent collaboration with Eugene Jarvis, Nex Machina. But in an age where everything else is screaming at us and battering our attention with ostensible urgency, a game that stretches and relaxes time itself is wonderfully calming.
The story behind its creation is also inspiring. Turkish indie studio Gram Games, then a five-person outfit, had already released three unsuccessful games and was down to its last $15,000 of funding when the idea was first mooted. The game was released within a month and now has more than 40 million installs, driving healthy revenue through display ads. And the stress-free, slow-gaming quality of the experience was an explicitly thought-through decision, as CEO Mehmet Ecevit explained to Pocket Gamer: “As part of our focus on user experience, we decided not to impose any limits on time or lives.” The result is a really beautiful modern classic. It’s not surprising, if awesomely perverse, that some dedicated fans of the game have managed to score in excess of one million points, which represents literally weeks or months of full-time play.
Of course, most smartphone games are still at best meretricious trash and at worst price-gouging microtransaction rent-seekers, but that’s only because the majority of cultural production in any medium is rubbish. The touchscreen smartphone may seem like a rebarbatively simplistic control interface to those of us who grew up on dedicated hardware, but it’s an authentic platform for videogames. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have just bought Mario Run and am going to dive in. I may be some time.
Everyone was just mindlessly swiping on stupid fruit-based puzzle games on public transport