9.03m and the not-game

9.03m is a strange game. By which I mean, it's not a game - and good for it. I'll be looking over a few more not-games in the near future and tagging them for easy reference. But first, what is a not-game? Well... It's lacking something inherently game-ish. For me, this definition has mostly to do with mechanics. These not-games all have in common a lack of mechanics. They will never be fun in the same way that, say, Peggle or Mini Metro might be. They'll never have that "just another round" feel of Civ or Stone Soup. In short, the mechanics are sparse and not engaging by themselves. A not-game uses its sparse mechanics to bolster the experience of the game.

9.03m is inherently a game about tragedy, being inspired by Japan's 2011 tsunami. Like most not-games, the mechanics are incredibly simple. In 9.03m, you start at the top of a small, wooden staircase, leading down to a beach. Text at the bottom, (wonderfully) bi-lingual, informs you "Find the butterflies." And so you walk, slowly, through a dream-like, blue beach, to the sound of crunching sand and gentle waves. (You can find a decent let's play here).

Eventually, you find a silhouette. Walk up to touch it and it disappears, leaving behind an object - a soccer ball. "Move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen to rotate the item. Find the clue and click it." The clue - a small butterfly stamp (not entirely unlike the little wooden-and-rubber butterfly stamps my grandmother owned) prints a message across the bottom of the screen - a name - and then erupts into a sparkling butterfly and sails off towards the sea, backed by a faint twinkling and a piano. The sea recedes and you repeat the process.

... Which sounds about right for a not-game. But somehow, I felt like the experience was lacking, and this feeling only intensified after I finished it. Upon finding the last clue, the camera pans up to show you the beach, suddenly filled with people, as they turn to butterflies and fly off, backed by strings.

Let's deal with the good first: the sound and feel of moving are great. This is really important in a not-game where walking takes up a lot of time, and most not-games want walking to take up time. The more you walk between the game's few set pieces, the more you think, anticipate, are primed for the next piece. The walking segments let you take in the symbolism, the graphics, the soundtrack - the parts that the mechanics are supposed to be buttressing. As such, walking needs to feel natural. The crunch of gravel under your feet reinforces the feeling of motion and exploration; it reminds you of how like an aquarium the beach is.

On the other hand, the more I listen to the music, the more I dislike it. Maybe not dislike it, but the more I think it should have been removed or drastically quieted. The moments where the piano came in, yelling "feel, damn you!" only served to distract me from the pleasant-but-ominous waves or the gritty crunch of sand.

The graphics, too, were a slight distraction. I quit the game 30 seconds in to fix the display resolution, then quit again to set up anti-aliasing. 9.03m felt so heavily invested in its style that I was surprised the developers didn't put in effort to make the style come off without a hitch.

But the core of why I was left wanting had to do with the interactions that were in the game. Each interaction was with one individual - one butterfly - and was something trite, something typical, something somehow expected, and then we moved on to the next individual. I didn't grow any particular attachment to any of the butterflies besides the couple. There was never a moment where I wondered. The game failed to let me explore this loss - it merely presented it.

"Here is a 3-wheeled toy train. It represents a youth cut short." This approach seems the most obvious, and by being obvious, is somehow less interesting. It's hard to simplify a life down to an object, but I can imagine few objects less interesting than a soccer ball, a teddy bear, a toy train, and a ring. The objects' descriptions also seem to present something ("this is the child's name") instead of inviting exploration.

This refusal to let the player (can it be a player if it's not a game?) explore continues with the linear manner of finding the butterflies. Only one butterfly is above the water level at any moment. And, speaking of the water level, I was also disappointed when I read that the beach in the game is Baker Beach, in San Francisco, which destroys my internal attempt to understand what 9.03 meters of water height looked like on a beach of typical slope. That part of the visualization, that question of what would it look like if this much beach flooded in 3 seconds, is a key part to my understanding, and the change in setting yanks that away from me.

The developer says he chose the beach because "lots of the debris from the tsunami has been appearing on the west coast of America the past couple of years," but if that's the case, and he wants artifacts, why not have the player pick through a beach of debris for these - or more interesting - personal artifacts?

9.03 awkwardly skirts between the figurative and the metaphorical, without committing to either, or making the most of its dream-like logic and graphical palette (perhaps a better expression of a similar sentiment is found in Motohiko Odani's Phantom Limb and A Dead Man Sleeping installations). In short, 9.03m is neither dream, nightmare, nor playground; it fails to be unpredictable, it fails to threaten, and it fails to let me explore.