Blog post: Uzu for iPad: a game or not?
It was yesterday, after wakening after a few hours from that feeverish dream which is Uzu for iPad, that I wondered: Is uzu a game?
Uzu is a particle manipulator. A few thousand particles fly at random around the screen, and with touch is controlled in many different way. Each added finger has it' effect. Two fingerst attract the nearest dots, three sends them flying in a triangular loop.
http://uzumotion.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/uzuAppOfTheWeek.jpg
I have written earlier about what a game really is: The art, the interactivity, they taylored experience; but Uzu exists on the fringe.
Similar applicatoins are called toys. Some have borish descriptive names. I think "Uzu" comes closest to being a good name. Uzu means whirlpool in japanese. The app has a name that adds to the experience. And as such I am more inclided to take this "experiment" seriously.
So Uzu is fun, and interactive, has a taylored experience and so on. But does it have gameplay? I think it has to do with they way you treat it. It seems that for a game to work it has to have some kind of goal- specificity. It needs to go somewhere. And Uzu does not have that clear goal. But then again, it doesn't have to.
Everybody "gets it". Everybody that sits down with this app, understands the true goal of this experience - to have fun! And they yearn to deepen that experience. The players wish to deepen their understanding of this mystery which is Uzu, and so they are drawn towards an undefined goal.
So is it an exploration game? Perhaps. But why wouldn't I say, that this is not just an art experience. For that I like to refer to my post about art, in which I define art as that which defined by the artist and the viewer to be art. Not nessesarily to a high degree, or good art, but still. And none of the two in this case defines Uzu as art. I think it would be wrong to press such a label on the thing. It is simply a fun game.
