Mountain
Mountain is one of the most infamous examples of what are occasionally (usually pejoratively) dubbed “non-games.” Aside from looking, the only interaction you as a player get is to draw a few MS Paint-style squiggles on a blank screen in response to prompts like “Loss” or “Love”. What exactly that drawing does is unclear, but from there, an idyllic but uprooted mountain floats and spins through outer space, a geographic bonsai-miniature. Various junk objects crash into your mountain seemingly randomly. These objects often disrupt your ability to make sense of the scale, since coupled with the size of the screen (serving as a virtual window, or perhaps a display case?) make it unclear just how large or small the mountain might be. On occasion, surreal phrases and questions pop up, resembling writing prompts or concrete poems, but with no clear way for the player to respond in the mountain’s self-contained existence. While opinions place it somewhere as virtual sculpture and a conceptual art troll, there is a certain miniature beauty and sublime in Mountain. But it also has a subtle undercurrent of critique about our preconceptions about how we view landscape in relation to the speed of digital interactions.
Creator: David O’Reilly
Website: http://mountain-game.com
Connections:
Ed Ruscha - Lion in Oil
Wanuri Kahn - Pumzi
Rene Magritte - The Castle of the Pyrenees