If there was any doubt that indie games have arrived, point your mouse to pOnd, an online game that sets the player up with a bunch of indie tropes (low-fi graphics, no apparent goal) and even goes so far as to abandon big-gaming’s construct that games must be fun (that’s so indie). I beg you to play the game – it takes a few minutes at most – before clicking through.
Even the name of the game, pOnd, embraces the alt.capitalization of art games such as flOw and flOwer which is where this game gets its inspiration. That is until the surprise ending which explodes (literally) the entire blissed-out experience.
When the smoke clears at the end of the game, the developer, Peanut Gallery, leaves us with this quote from Roger Ebert: “I may be wrong …”. This is Ebert’s admission that his intelligently stated but massively uninformed blog about video games’ incapability to be art were possibly … uh … uninformed. But after a game that pokes fun at games as art, it seems that the parodic barbs might be pointed at the video-game industry for giving a shit what Ebert thought in the first place.
Hopefully you played the game before reading this, but if you’re still interested, click here to play.
This article appears in July 16 • 2010.
