First Impressions: Everything

amaidinh
Apr 11, 2016
3 min read

If you know me, you know that I'm all over experimental, unconventional games. Unorthodox games excite me, because they push the possibilities of the interactive media experience. Everything does just this; it offers an experience that I don't usually see in mainstream gaming -- in which you do nothing else, but be.

Everything is a video game project developed by experimental artist and designer David O'Reilly, best known for creating the video game sequences in Her (1). In Everything, everything is a playable character; all you do is possess objects or groups of objects. You can literally be anything you want, from a speck of pollen to entire galaxies, and if you desire you can move around as well (in a super hilarious spinning animation that I am half-hoping remains in the game).

That's really it.

To fully understand what I mean, you will need to watch the Hands-On Gameplay video I linked above.

It's a simple concept for a game. To some it may be too simple, but I find it's minimalist nature to be beautiful. The trailer (linked above) puts me in this calm, trance-like state. Everything seems to offer an experience that is very philosophical, meditative, and spiritual. After all Everything touches upon existential themes. It's a game with no point, instead, as O'Reilly explains, "Everything is a game about the things we see, their relationships, and their points of view" and about how we come to understand those things (2). By playing this game, you can become one with the universe.

Because this is what Everything is all about, it might not be considered a game at all, and that's what I think is the most interesting part of it. Everything is a very raw game to me, not containing much in terms of gameplay and not containing anything at all in terms of narrative. This can be its greatest strength and weakness, since many people may be intrigued, but not necessarily hooked. I can't really imagine myself playing this game for hours at a time everyday, because, after a while, being things in a game could get boring. However, I imagine that O'Reilly's purpose wasn't to create an entertaining, action-packed experience. O'Reilly said himself that he is "concerned with the medium of 3D and it’s effect on our brains" (2). Thus, O'Reilly's purpose is to provide us a thought-provoking experience, as a form of exploration of the interactive medium. He has done this before with Mountain, a game that gives you a mountain you can barely interact with; you just watch events unfold on your mountain (1).

Not only is Everything is pushing the boundaries of gaming in a philosophical way, but it could also be pushing the technical capabilities of the medium itself. Jake Muncy shares this sentiment in his Wired article:

"It’s an ambitious idea to tackle in a videogame, and not only from a philosophical point of view. The engines that power most videogames rely on carefully circumscribed constraints and specific conditions for allowing actions. Highly interactive game worlds are incredibly complex to code. A game world where you can not only interact with but also inhabit any object you see sounds nearly impossible."

Therefore, I'm excited to see how O'Reilly and Damien DiFede (the sole programmer) take advantage of the video game medium to serve their message. O'Reilly explains that "there’s more familiar mechanics [in Everything]...but there are also totally new ones no other game has done" (1). I'm kind of hoping one of those mechanics is the chance to interact with your environment in highly specific ways, depending on what object you are possessing, and to see how your interactions affect said environment. For example, could I get to play a group of lions that hunt antelopes to near extinction, and watch my ecosystem collapse as a result?

However, I wonder if O'Reilly plans to preserve Everything's minimalism. With a bunch of extra features in the game, it could get complex very quickly and I'm curious if that is his intention. Like I said before, I appreciate how bare the game is. It's kind of like how I appreciate minimalist and abstract art, as baffling as they could be. I can imagine Everything being used as a therapeutic outlet, almost like meditation. Despite this, I'm also anticipating what this game is going to grow into and I'm really excited to see how Everything is going to challenge the game medium.