The Graveyard, a game that isn’t a game?

March 24th, 2009 16:28 by ogrim

The Graveyard is one of the shortest, yet most beautiful games I have played in a long time. The beauty lies in the refined graphics and sublime sound, and the extreme unnatural limitations on the gameplay. I think the sound is sublime, because it indirectly tells you about the environment and the mood. The only difference between the demo and the full version, is that the possibility that the old lady can suddenly die.

Picture from Tale of Tales: The Graveyard, post-mortem

Beside the obvious beauty, the game has serious flaws any gamer could point out: the lack of gameplay. The unnatural limitations of the gameplay is the fixed position of the camera, pacing and extremely limited number of options you have. There are hardly any interaction at all. You controll the old lady with the cursor keys, and the gameplay is based on walking up and down a relatively short path and sitting on a bench. Your own skills don’t affect the course of the game, and as mentioned it is very slow paced. You are never rewarded or measured.

The Graveyard definetly talks the same language as other interactive computer applications intended for play, also known as games. But because of the limitations, you might not consider The Graveyard a proper game if you don’t find it fun. Games have to be fun, right?

What if play is more than fun? I saw an interesting talk about this yesterday, and discovered that my definition of play probably is flawed. Dr. Stuart Brown talks about this at the TED conference. Click the link or the picture to see the talk.

A short summary of the talk is that play is essential, and that play is not necessarily just fun. I think games are a form of play, and after the talk I realized that games don’t have to be fun in order to be a form of play.

Play for me is some sense of exploration and wonder, much like you might get from pieces of artwork. I consider games to be an interactive way of playing, often with goals or some way of measuring my skills. This means that I probably can call The Graveyard a game of sorts, because after all it does offer some level of interaction, and it gives me a sense of exploration and wonder. If you don’t like looking at art, listening to music and such, The Graveyard propably isn’t something worth your time. However, if you are like me, you should at least try the demo.

Download The Graveyard demo here. It’s for Windows and Mac OS. The full version is only 5$, and is worth it to give the developers respect and support, if you want to.