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1 ALL SQUARES RESIDE IN THE HUMAN BREAST In 2007 game designer and Second Life CEO Rod Humble wrote a video game called The Marriage[1] The player’s goal in The Marriage is to prevent two squares from shrinking or fading out while circles drift around them Moving the mouse over the shapes has curious but consistent effects on the size and transparency of the squares Its abstruseness immediately brands it an ‘art’ game I don’t have a problem with calling it art, unlike Roger Ebert, who raised the hackles of many a techie by claiming that video games could not be art   There are two related issues that technology raises for art: nonlinearity and interactivity Interactivity creates more possibilities for nonlinearity Nonlinearity demands increased interactivity Yet it is the formal implications of these two factors that cause the problems   Humble’s game wouldn’t have necessarily exposed these problems, except that Humble rather guilelessly posted his interpretation of the game, which I excerpt here:   The game is my expression of how a marriage feels 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 The circles represent outside elements entering the marriage This can be anything Work, family, ideas, each marriage is unique and the players’ response should be individual The size of each square represents the amount of space that person is taking up within the marriage So for example we often say that one person’s ego is dominating a marriage or perhaps a large personality […] The transparency of the squares represents how engaged that person is in the marriage When one person fades out of the marriage and becomes emotionally distant then the marriage is over Your controls reveal the agency of the game You are only capable of making the squares move towards each other at the same time or removing a circle by sacrificing the size of the pink square You are playing the agency of Love trying to make the system