Everything, a Must-Play Game Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before – WIRED

Slide: 1 / of 3. Caption: David O'Reilly/Sony

Slide: 2 / of 3. Caption: David O'Reilly/Sony

Slide: 3 / of 3. Caption: David O'Reilly/Sony

I am a polar bear, careening over snowy hills in continuous cartwheels. Then, I am a pack of Douglas firs, our branches undulating like snakes. Then an elk. A galaxy. A desert. A streak of light imported from deep space. In Everything, out now on PlayStation 4 (and slated for PC next month), I am the essenceof creation moving through all these things. That title isnt a feint or an oversell: In this game, you can be everything.

Everything is the brainchild of David OReilly, an artist and digital creatorwhos probably best knownfor designing the videogame interfaces used in Spike Jonzes Her. In the videogame world, though, hes celebratedas the creator of Mountain, a beguiling and confounding titleabout the life of a single mountain, suspended in space. It lived on your computer. Life grew on it. It talked to you. Eventually, it would leave. Mountain was a polarizing work, the sort of thingthat provokescritical debate about what a videogame actually is. At its heart, though,Mountain was an eccentric, playful meditation on existence from a narrow field of viewa sort of ontological toybox.

Everything takes that same sensibility and projects it to the heavens.

You begin the gameat a determined, procedurally generated pointa specific object in a specific place, at a specific time of day. In my case, I was a moose on an ice continent. How you proceed, though,is entirely up to you. You can spend the entire game as that single object, settling in to your surroundings, listening to the thoughts of fellow creatures and objects, and considering the weight of your solitary life. Or you can write your own cosmic encyclopedia, jumping from object to object using the games simple set of verbs: Press one button to look for objects larger than you; another for objects smaller. Ascend and descend by way of comparison, from galaxies to atoms to one-dimensional plasma beings.

OReillys playground is a superb adventure of intuition. I allowed myself to soar through the universe as whatever caught my fancy. Its an experience that lends itself to lists: I spent half an hour as a flower blooming at the bottom of the ocean. I spread my consciousness over so many cars that I couldnteven move them all. I wasa snowman; I gathered my family together and danced.

[Mountain and Everything] are what I think is interesting about games, OReilly told me at last months Game Developer Conference, which is the ability to describe worlds through systems. Those systems, though, are all beholden to something larger.Everything depicts a world where all objects are both combined and separated, paradoxically of the same substance yetwith unfathomable gaps between them. Scattered throughout the environment are prompts that bring up audio narration fromBritish philosopher and theologian Alan Watts, whose blend of Western rationalism with Buddhist thought made him a popular (and divisive) figure in the 50s and 60s. As you occupy the life of a family of algae or read the thoughts of a television with relationship problems, Wattstells you about the basic interconnectivity of all things, the way in which we are all a part of one grand, luminescent thing. Its symbiosis on a mass scale, writ across the innumerable bodies that populate the universe.

OReilly, sees that broad, integrative thinking as having its roots inMountain. Whats interesting about a mountain is that its not a sectioned-off thing, he said. Its earth pushed through the ground over millions of years. Theyre moving things, but we dont see that. And they have tons of life on them. Its hard to say exactly what a mountain is. Its more of a blurred thing.

Everything, then, is an exercise in blurring. Jumping fromanothervessel to anotherisnt the only thing you can do; you can also dance, via abutton that makes the objects in your control move in strange, rhythmic patterns. Its an effective metaphor for what the game itself accomplishes. Everything is a dance through objects and space, a playfuland mindfulwaltz through a simulated space. In trying to approximate something unfathomable and infinite, it conjuressomething deeply emotional, a play experience that evokes the naturalistic optimism of Waldo Ralph Emerson as much as it does the system-based entertainment of Will Wright. Its a wonderful accomplishment; the kind of videogame you want to bringhome to meet your parents.

OReilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an organism that keeps going. Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrateto your own whims. Strangely, this might be the most remarkable showcase of Everythings power:watching the perspective tumble through OReillys pocket dimension like a sort of high-tech nature documentary, moving from thing to thing until you discover something youve never seen, an object whose life you need to learn more about, and youre movedto pick up the controller all over again and take it for a spin.

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Everything, a Must-Play Game Like Nothing You've Seen Before - WIRED