all 15 levels. what is a game and who cares.

one. ice level

two. burger level

three. house level

four. jungle level

five. carpark level

six. astronaut level

seven. ancient castle level

eight. fire level

nine. sewer level

ten. facility level

eleven. port level

twelve. hospital level

thirteen. garden level

fourteen. temple ruins level

fifteen. city level

this game was called 15 levels. and you imagine what goes in them. probably stuff you know and guess. but maybe something else.

you can go round them and collect gems or evil bones, and maybe there’s a world ending threat or maybe just a smaller scale threat. or perhaps no threat at all. there is no reason to say yes or no.

lay down and let sunlight cover your body. some argument is happening outside. some grand movement is occurring on some level somewhere.

is the game about the escalation of climate breakdown due to fossil fuel usage and extractive land practices. is the game about the massive divide between the rich and the poor. is it about a small alien mouse in a car that is distinctly apolitical to the point of commenting that hey why is there so much division… can’t a billionaire and a person with nothing just get along. this mouse then dies at the end crushed by the boot of time, and depending on who you are it’s either great or scarred your childhood memories.

the smell of cleaning fluid and the cigarettes your granddad smoked. the smell of a wet dog you love. a dog wet that you know. the voices outside grow in volume and they’re doing some kind of either argument or discussion. an adult talking down to a child. where does each of them come in on the scale of recognising the game. both alive for the era in which these things have become tropes. both able to encounter them as people learning about the world for the first time.

a world made out of trees and facilities and lava and ice and labyrinths and temples to gods of this planet and of small renderings of tables and chairs. and each one the child and the adult know it to be a true rendering of their feeling about the world, that it contains these things. that skeletons might talk and that birds might talk too. that we create our reality in conjunction with other people’s imagination of what a reality can contain.

at the end of the day this is not any different from the building you might live in. this was made in the same way and renovated in the same way, and the bits taken out and new bits put in in the same way. as an imagining of what it is to exist within the structures that came before us because it is what has been made available.

a game is a loose structure put over play and other activities. play is what is most associated with them, and is what happens when you’re having fun. a game is a world and its interface, a world is all the things in a game, an interface is how you interact with that world to create meaning/variation.

the different games called football have their worlds as the pitch, the surroundings, the players, the referee if you have one, the interface is the ways you are permitted to move the ball to create meaning (points), which might also be recognised as ‘the rules’ (which usually intervenes more outside of the screen). the game of catch, throwing a ball between two people or more, has its world as those people and their location and the ball, and all the things brought into the world by these elements, including the relationship between the people, the quality of the ball, the friction. a game cannot keep out these things, it’s world is porous and permissive, in opposition to the concept of the ‘magic circle’ or ‘immersion’ where the game becomes dominant over reality by virtue of being played. a game is rather a collection of things, gathered as its world, interfacing.

the simplest worlds a body and an object, or even just a body, can have the simplest games, but not necessarily, the ways of iterating an interface (the modes of engagement) are infinite. the amount of times you can do it in a row, or the height of something thrown representing the level of difficulty for a catch, or the distance, makes a game out of the play act of throwing a ball.

a game is a thing that can happen accidentally out of play as a way of creating meaning.

a video game if understood this way has its key difference in its interface being based on any monitor for transmitting input that can be manipulated. this is an arbitrary definition, but useful considering how many video games exist. its world is then the contents as defined within a type of data packaging, and the ways that it this information is interacted with is its interface. this is as multivarious as games not played on screen. it’s just a way of doing things that is popular, and it’s worth recognising that video games are often tools used outside of their base funtionality, and integrated into other forms of activity with their own interface rules as defined by a collective of people (e-sports, custom matches, community organising, etc).

a level is a way of designing a world in separate chunks that can be interfaced with distinctly, a separation that represents a distinct challenge or area to be interfaced with, like how a certain type of building has floors.

and the way of interfacing with a lava block and an ice block remains the same perhaps, its effect on the body of the player character with slight variation, and imbued both with the sense of what… exploration in dangerous places. and that’s because their design didn’t come from nowhere. these tropes were not selected at random. they emerge from the wider history of play, and the colonial historical imagination of play specifically. i ask you to think of Tin Tin comics, as an exemplary colonial era document for matching to ideas of “level design”.

but… i digress. 15 levels, 15 chunks of a game world made into digestible bites. for you to run around in.

one. ice level. edmund hillary mount everest.

two. burger level. mcdonalds america.

three. house level. whose house? whose designs do we internalise?

four. jungle level. tarzan et al.

five. carpark level. motorcar focussed urbanisation.

six. astronaut level. ideologies of space exploration.

seven. ancient castle level. british.

eight. fire level. tin tin on volcanic islands.

nine. sewer level. teenage mutant ninja turtles pizza eating.

ten. facility level. the facility as an enemy exemplified by ww2.

eleven. port level. the historical site of colonial trade.

twelve. hospital level. hospitals as colonial architecture.

thirteen. garden level. gardens as colonial architecture.

fourteen. temple ruins level. indiana jones et al.

fifteen. city level. we build cities on the bones of the dead and displaced.

consider how the embodiment of colonial imagination today is working to take the land of indigenous peoples and destroy hope between us of something that isn’t this. the origin of our ideas in the legacies of colonialism is very very much what we can then design into the world, and introducing an awareness of and resistance to that impulse within a discipline like game design is to me a way of showing we haven’t lost yet. because outside of my tossed off ideas people are still building their worlds of play with limiting building blocks.

destroy capital and destroy racists.