Jason Rohrer's Passage

I needed a break and ended up digging through my archive of games (the temptation to start an RPG like Zelda or FFVII, or CivIV was strong).








Passage by Jason Rohrer is an art game, in his typical style - you'll notice some graphical elements and music from Gravatation.
It is embeded with meaning which he explains on his page What I was trying to do with Passage. 
You take the agency of a charcter in a maze. To the far right is a compression of the future - it's compressed and fuzzy. As time goes by, you shift to the right and the left becomes compressed and fuzzy. There are tresure boxes which can be spotted in the distance, but only certian ones give you points. It is possible to learn to distingush between them. Early in the game, you have the opportunity to meet a female character and become attached to her for the rest of the game. While attached you earn twice the ammount of points walking to the right as you would by yourself. The downfall is that you can now not walk down narrow corridors. 

The intention of this was the express aging. When you are young there is no past - only an impression of the future. When you get old, there is only past.

While playing I noticed that was that it is possible to walk backwards. But I felt that walking to the right expressed aging, so am I walking back in time? I think the expression of age is related only to the window frame - even though you can walk backward you cannot reverse your direction in the frame, and the ammount of compressed maze you see does not change. Perhaps in the wisdom of you old age you can see parts of the maze you didn't see before and can now expore them.

Something  I noticed in Gravatation, and is back again here - is the presence of the scoring system as points. And I've been wondering, recently, what's the point? (no pun intended). They have no real meaning, they seem like some shallow way of showing your progress, or success in the game. Rohrer writes something similar:

Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible, but in the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone.

 Scoring points for the sake of points, is meaningless. Like earning money just for the sake of money. In competitive games, scoring of points is a way of measuring one person's/team's success in the game. But the presence of point scoring in single player, non-competitive games is totally unnessecary.
Not that I'm taking a stab at Rohrer, it does feel like a concious intention.

Perhaps for my 'Strangers' game, the selfish player could rack up the points but gathering stuff, and the friendly player may miss out on the points, but have a different (argurably more better) reward at the end.

Final thoughts.. Did the game mean anything to me? Possibly, it is hard to say. It provided me a different way of viewing relationships for sure. The moral of the story is: while you may not be able to search the whole maze and gather all the stars, you will instead be able earn more points :)