Passage's Jason Rohrer and emotional game experiences

Esquire profiles Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage. That little game, playable in just five minutes, provides one of the most emotionally affecting experiences of any game yet. Rohrer is apparently consulting at EA now to help developed "LMNO", another Spielberg-backed game project:

And if this new breed of emotional game can also rake in the cash, well, all the better. Under way right now is a high-stakes race to create the Citizen Kane of video games: an "AAA" title (the industry's equivalent of a big-budget summer movie) that also pushes the needle forward artistically. The best current contender is a project code-named LMNO, part of Stephen Spielberg's development deal with Electronic Arts, which has been described as North by Northwest meets E.T. Your character in the game will be a spy who encounters a mysterious, sexy woman. How much help she offers will be dependent upon how well you cultivate her as your partner and guide. Essentially, LMNO aims to be the first major video game whose action will not pivot on jumping puzzles or twitch-reflex fusillades but on a nuanced relationship.

Brandon adds: Little is still known about LMNO (apart from the above information and this small preview shot [higher def version coming when I can remember where I've squirreled it away]), but it promises to be one of EA's most interesting projects, having again brought together designers Randy Smith and Doug Church. Smith and Church are veterans of developer Looking Glass, a studio still talked about primarily in hushed reverent tones, and had their hands in some of PC gaming's finest, most notably Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex. The fact that they've brought Rohrer on board as consultant gives it even further potential as a thought provoking title that'll light the art/intellectual-gamer set ablaze.

At Gamasutra, Persuasive Games' Ian Bogost has just written his own breakdown of Between, the game Rohrer created for Esquire to accompany the writeup, and has coined a new term -- 'disjunctive multiplayer' -- in the process.

The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls [Esquire.com via Waxy]