Play The Marriage, The Provocative Art Game of Newly Appointed Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble

Back in 2007 when Second Life was enjoying the peak of media hype, an Electronic Arts executive made a small indie game called The Marriage (free download required), an abstract metaphor for marriage explained in terms of colored shapes that you can manipulate by gently moving your mouse. "The game is my expression of how a marriage feels," he explains in his extensive notes. "The blue and pink squares represent the masculine and feminine of a marriage. They have differing rules which must be balanced to keep the marriage going." When I played it, the gameplay seemed to suggest a man is diminished by the demands of marriage, while the union makes a woman grow -- an apparently retro understanding of the institution that was part of the conversation the game inspired. I admire the ambition that went into his game, though I think the execution is burdened by a mismatch between the weight of the concepts Humble is trying to convey, and the abstract geometry he chooses to convey them with. (Compare for example with The Passage, another indie game that covers similar themes.) In any case, it's an interesting insight into the mind of the man now leading the effort to make Second Life fast, easy, and fun.

Humble, by the way, is a seriously hardcore gamer of the old school, by which I mean tabletop wargaming with Napoleanic era battle figurines -- he even wrote these open source rules for resolving skirmishes of game.

Photo from Arthouse Games, Marriage frame grab from Rod Humble's site.

Comments

[smiles large]

sounds like the right guy to terminate the Lab

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Sounds like a man who has something between his ears besides an accounting spreadsheet.

This could get interesting (in a good sense, for a change).

[Adeon Writer]

Cute game.

[brinda allen]

Since I came during those heady days of 2007 when it was "your world...your imagination" we of perhaps necessity have been ruled by a paramount desire for a return on investment.
Spending a few moments playing the above game, and reading what Mr Humble had to say...I would tend to believe what @Arcadia Codesmith had to say. Let's hope that the 'money' allows him the time to repair "our" world.

[Opensource Obscure]

(( too bad this blog is always infested by trolls ))

It's encouraging to have such a person as CEO at LL.

With The Sims he demonstrated to be skilled with creation and management of products used by millions of people.
It also seems he knows that creativity and art are very valuable things for people, even when they have no commercial value (see video interview in the previous Hamlet's post about him).