Inside Jason Rohrer's Philosophy — playing life and death through constraint

Introduction

Jason Rohrer is an American independent developer who has made games entirely on his own. With the five-minute Passage (2007) he pulled off something new: telling a whole life and death through game rules alone, and he became a spark for what came to be called the "art game" movement. A maze, treasure chests, a spouse, a time limit — from utterly ordinary parts he built a work onto which players lay their own lifetimes.

This piece is not a review of his games but a study of the person who made them. Reading across three interviews he gave over more than a decade, I (Kizuki) want to draw out what runs through all of them, the habits that recur, and the failures and doubts he has admitted himself. Reheating my hojicha, I keep asking my usual question: does this remark line up with what he said years earlier?

Background — a one-person shop who makes and sells it all

Rohrer describes himself as "an independent video game designer and programmer." For him, being a one-person shop is not merely a format but the condition that makes the work "a very personal person-to-person thing." He makes not only the game but the website, the PR plan, the music, even the tech support. "When the end user interfaces with this product, they are getting a very personal person-to-person thing," he says (Handmade Pixels interview, 2017).

His work is almost always 2D, often in pixel art or plain hand-drawn graphics. He releases his source code into the public domain and has sold many titles directly from his own site. Owning no mobile phone and deliberately developing on old hardware are inseparable from how he makes things. Key works run from Passage, Gravitation, Between, Sleep Is Death and Inside a Star-Filled Sky through The Castle Doctrine to the massively multiplayer One Hour One Life.

Philosophy — speak through interaction, not narrative

At the core of his position is the conviction that interaction is the very substance of games. He cuts the tie to narrative cleanly: "I think of the idea of 'narrative' as being directly opposed to the idea of 'interactive,' so I feel that narratives have no place in games." That is why he would never make a game about "the death of a loved one" — because that is (hopefully) not a very interactive experience. Passage instead became a work about "the various choices that one makes in one's life" (Critical Inquiry, 2011).

In Passage he used what later got called "mechanical metaphors." A maze with limited visibility stands for the risks and rewards of exploring the unknown; the patterns on the treasure chests, for learning which goals are worth pursuing; a gap wide enough for one but not two, for the trade-offs of taking a life partner; a strict time limit, for the finitude of life. He credits the idea explicitly to his friend Rod Humble (Critical Inquiry, 2011). To my reading, his design bets not on picturing meaning but on making meaning playable.

His motive always returns to himself. "When I decided to make games, part of my motivation was to fill this void — to make games for people like me. I was sick to death of cutscenes," he says. The same reason lies behind his refusal to make games for kids: "I make games for people like me, and people like me are interested in social, political, and ethical issues" (Critical Inquiry, 2011). For him a game is both a toy for idle minds and a medium better suited than film to weighty subjects.

Obsessions — turning constraint into an expressive tool

A habit that runs through his work is choosing constraints. He turned to pixel art because a Gamma event imposed a "less than 256 by 256" limit, and once he tried it he found it "so heavily constrained that it led to a lot of creative productivity" (Handmade Pixels, 2017). With only five pixels for a face, there are only so many expressions to try, and you settle fast. Citing Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he holds that abstracted, iconic images invite a "could be anyone" identification. The little guy in Passage could be you.

His commitment to 2D, too, is less aesthetics than a matter of design space. "The design space is way more open in 2D," he says. In Passage, joining hands with a spouse makes you twice as wide so you can no longer fit through the maze — a symbol of the compromises of a relationship that, in 3D, would collapse into "why don't they just go single file?" (Handmade Pixels, 2017). Constraint is what lets the metaphor stand.

Another constant is making the music itself interactive. In Transcend, Between and Sleep Is Death the player builds the music; in Gravitation it tracks the protagonist's mood; in Cultivation and Inside a Star-Filled Sky it is procedurally generated in real time from the game state. "I'm working in an interactive medium, so I want all aspects of my games to be interactive" (Critical Inquiry, 2011). And the drive to connect personally with buyers — direct sales, the "no middleman" icon — is a habit he has never dropped.

Failures and how he got past them — tedium, and a change of heart about punishment

The failure he speaks of most frankly is tuning Inside a Star-Filled Sky. At first he tried hard to eliminate the player's tedium: fail, and you are sent right back to the spot. But that bred "robotic grinding" — players would die, clear the sub-challenge, then inch a little further, sinking into repetition (Gamasutra, 2011).

That failure changed his mind. "Developing this game gave me this whole newfound appreciation for what I had always passed off as pointless — player punishment and repetition for the sake of making the player do stuff over and over" (Gamasutra, 2011). What he had tried to purge became a design element that generates tension. To my reading, this is the moment he let go of his own ideal (kindness) in the face of the reality he observed in players.

The other is the distance he keeps from his own signature, Passage. "There's something about Passage's approach that was very limited. I felt, for myself, that I couldn't keep making games like that forever," he admits, adding that "that peak in the 'art game thing' has maybe run its course and we're all trying to figure out what to do next" (Gamasutra, 2011). And selling is not the same as reaching: of Sleep Is Death he says "my sales figures are not indicative of how successful the game was in terms of reaching people and touching people" (Gamasutra, 2011).

Dilemmas — the highbrow vs. the accessible

The biggest tension he names in his own words lies between the highbrow and the accessible. On one hand he acknowledges the democratization of games — tools anyone can use — while on the other he admits, "I am sort of somewhat interested in the highbrow" (Handmade Pixels, 2017). Games had high budgets and famous voice actors, yet the people around him outside games cared nothing for it. What was missing, he felt, was the highbrow.

His conclusion is bitter. Reaching the mainstream "may not ever be attainable for very fundamental formal reasons." So he redefines the goal: "For me, the goal is having 20,000 fans that really get what I'm doing" (Handmade Pixels, 2017). The Castle Doctrine is impenetrable to a non-gamer yet deeply interesting to a connoisseur — a split he chooses to bear.

Another dilemma pits immersion against the sublime. Citing Brian Moriarty, he concedes that a mind wrestling with mechanics in a flow state is "not still enough to be able to even receive the sublime." Makers like Tale of Tales fear exactly this. But Rohrer pushes back: "what we're doing when we're playing a really good game is the meat, the meat and the heart of what games are," and we must make aesthetic experiences out of that meat (Handmade Pixels, 2017). To my reading, he is a designer who refuses to dissolve this tension and stays planted in the hard place of holding both.

Influences — names he acknowledges himself

For influences I list only those he acknowledges publicly. First, Rod Humble: he explicitly credits him with the idea of the "mechanical metaphors" in Passage (Critical Inquiry, 2011). Then Raph Koster: he says his starting point was Koster's notion that games could be artistically expressive by giving players more than one right way to play, and that Koster's A Theory of Fun — its argument about "delight," the intense but fleeting feeling that beautiful graphics give — hit him hard (Critical Inquiry, 2011).

For the logic of visuals he cites Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: a sign at the "sweet spot" between abstraction and realism invites a "could be anyone" identification rather than a specific person — Homer Simpson could even look like your dad (Handmade Pixels, 2017). Brian Moriarty's talk "An Apology for Roger Ebert," touched on in the dilemmas section, is another framework he returns to repeatedly.

Behind Between lies philosopher Quine's thought experiment of radical translation; he turned the impossibility of truly understanding another person into the game's barrier. Ian Bogost, one of the game's few admirers, coined "disjunctive play" for that isolation (Critical Inquiry, 2011). To my reading, his influences lean less toward master craftsmen inside games than toward thinkers about meaning, signs and translation — which pulls him closer to a thinker than a craftsman.

Kizuki's reading

From here on is my (Kizuki's) interpretation. I read Jason Rohrer not as an "art game" person but as an engineer of constraint. His consistent move — in mazes, in music, in how he distributes — is to first impose a limit on himself and then dig out the meaning that can only arise inside that limit. Pixels, 2D, five minutes, old hardware: these are not poverty but scaffolding for the metaphor. He can bet on making meaning playable rather than depicting it, I read, precisely because constraint pares away the extraneous and lets each remaining move carry meaning.

And I see this designer's honesty in the time-lag between his statements. He once treated tedium as the enemy and dismissed punishment as pointless. Yet after observing players in Inside a Star-Filled Sky, he admitted to a "whole newfound appreciation" for punishment and repetition. To start by raising an ideal and then let it go in the light of observed reality — his refusal to hide that turn is where I see one of the few truly honest designers. What he really keeps building, I read, is neither mazes nor universes but small devices for facing his own finitude.

Closing — where to start

If Rohrer is new to you, start with Passage. It ends in five minutes and its source is public; actually playing it lets you feel in your body how the "mechanical metaphors" cited here work. Then move to Gravitation and compare a kindred technique on a different theme — and you begin to see why he fears repeating the same form.

As designers connected by philosophy, Rod Humble, who also speaks of "interpretable mechanics," and Jonathan Blow, who made time the theme of Braid, sit close by. This site also has a study of Jonathan Blow, and reading them together as makers who tried to speak meaning through machines should give Rohrer's position more depth.

Sources

Primary sources referenced in this article:

・Critical Inquiry, "Between: An Interview with Jason Rohrer" (interview by Patrick Jagoda, May 2011)

・Handmade Pixels interview (Jesper Juul, conducted October 23, 2017)

・Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), "Interview: Rohrer's Star-Filled Sky And The Journey To Meaning" (Leigh Alexander, March 11, 2011)