Coil
Developer: From The Depths
Nomination: Innovation Award
Platform: Web Browser (Flash)
Website
Description: Coil is an experimentation in what games can be. It intentionally puts the player into situations where he doesn’t know what to do, but tries not to make that a bad thing.

Adam’s Thoughts:
When I’m writing reviews, I like to talk primarily about the mechanics and design principles of a game because they interest me the most. Agency really defines the gameplay experience for me, and although music, art, story, and everything else play important roles in the experience, the gameplay is what sticks out. Coil takes this idea and tries to stretch it into art.

Does it work? That depends on what you think of as art. It’s certainly opaque–most of the gameplay in Coil consists of trying to figure out what the gameplay is in Coil. It’s recursive for sure, but it forces you to stop and think about what you’re doing and your relationship with the game (one of those things that art is supposed to do). It’s usually a sin to break immersion in game design, but that seems to be Coil’s goal. The net effect is that once you’re finished asking yourself what you’re doing, you find yourself asking what you’ve done. This kind of inferential gameplay won’t be for everyone; it’s as frustrating as it is interesting. However, if you’re a games-as-art evangelist, this game will be right up your alley.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Like a lot of games that are constructed as art, what you get out of this game depends greatly on what you bring into it. Being trained as a biologist, this game evokes themes of bringing order out of chaos, and the evolution of the complex out of a population of random elements. I could write about how the moody music keys into the theme of evolution, because evolution is all about what dies when. In an attempt to figure out how the game works, the unsuccessful interactions die out, an the successful ones populate your endeavors, even when you move on to a new environment. But that’s the tricky thing about art: just because the metaphor feels real and ingrained to me, it doesn’t mean that it’s meaningful to anyone else. It’s worth the half hour of confusion and frustration to have your own conversation with the game

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