Bird Alone restricts you to playing this way, as the bird informs you it will have new content only once or twice per day. The game is fairly brief, clocking in at around three hours, but it is designed to be savored in bite-sized chunks over days rather than binged. The first and most crucial hurdle that Bird Alone must clear is getting you to care about a simulated bird friend. All the game elements work together to foreground this truth and keep it active in your mind. (Stop right here if you don’t want spoilers.) Your bird friend starts to die, and you are forced to grapple with the truth of impermanence.Īs taught by the Buddha, impermanence refers to the truth that everything-physical, mental, and yes, even virtual-is in flux, unreliable, and subject to decay. But the thing that sets the game apart is its second half. There’s enough here to keep you surprised each time you return to say hello, something I found myself often looking forward to. You’ll also write poetry together, make music, cherish memories, and exchange contemplations of some of life’s biggest questions. You’ll name your bird friend (I chose Lotus), feed it oranges, even rub its belly. Bird Alone is one such video game that encourages you to explore not as much what’s on the screen as what’s inside you.īird Alone can be best thought of as a simulation-think Tamagotchi pet, but with a more philosophical bent. Some bend the rules, even break them, on their quest to surprise us, make us feel something, or free us from a fixed mindset. It’s available on iOS and Android for $2.99.Not all video games fit our expectations of what video games are or what they are supposed to be. This is often exciting, exuberant, silly and beautiful, but also is sometimes this is heartbreaking and painful.īird Alone is one case where it is really worth reading the comments. These and other examples not only offer a unique way to understand difficult topics, but serve to broaden our perspective of what video games can be. There are games like Before I Forget that explore dementia. There are games like A Mortician’s Tale where you work at a funeral home and ensure deal with dead bodies with dignity. There are games like The Longing, that offer a deep look at loneliness (and take 400 real days to finish). What’s exciting, as someone who helps guide parents and carers through the world of video games, is that there are more and more experiences that offer just this kind of substantial encounter with the things that move us most deeply. But games are still associated more with entertainment than making sense of the world. Particularly if that’s what it said on the back. It would not be a surprise for a book or film to enter this territory of loss. We don’t yet expect them to do the things that other media does. However, the fascinating reviews offer an insight into where games sit in our culture. Particularly at the moment, many of us will want to pass over this particular experience. It’s important to signpost, as the develop does before you purchase the game, that you might not want to enter this territory if you are sensitive to loss. This group is perhaps the most emotive of them all. Then there are another set of players who haven’t yet discovered that the bird will die. Others feel that a mean trick has been played on them. Some players can see the sense in the unexpected demise.
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