FLASHBACK: 'Loved' by Alexander Ocias (2010)

FLASHBACK is a series of articles that look at notable Flash games and their legacy in an often overlooked and forgotten era of independent games.

Loved dons no disguises in its intent to confront the player. The game immediately subverts the typical gender and tutorial selection questions one expects from such games by taunting the player and providing no guidance. Throughout Loved, these elements recur and punctuate what would ordinarily be a simple platformer with a core question: does the game control the player or not?

The game is the work of Australian developer Alexander Ocias, a computer animation and digital media graduate who has worked across a wide range of mediums and projects. Ocias created the game over six months in 2010 using Flash, Pixelmator, and Audacity. The game received notable coverage for a short Flash title, garnering attention from outlets such as G4, NPR and Wired.

Loved takes the conventions of the platformer genre and inverts them into a narrative interplay between the player and the game. As a platformer, it's fairly standard: the player jumps and ducks through a linear course, avoiding hazards including static and moving spikes. However, the design offers enough of a challenge to support the central conceit of the game around obedience.

Throughout the game, text narration commands the player to perform certain actions. It's clear that compliance with the narrator makes for more difficult gameplay, imposing a value judgment on the player's actions. There are essentially two paths in the game: one of masochistic compliance with the narrator's instructions, and another of defiance. Completing the narrator's instructions transforms the game's assets into more detailed, if barbed, monochrome designs. Conversely, defying them distorts the world into a brilliant cacophony of color, symbolizing the breakdown of the ordered rules that bind the game.

At the end of the game, after enduring no small measure of humiliation from the narrator, the player's choices ultimately prompt a reaction from the narrator based on the level of the player's obedience. Either way, it ends with the same refrain: I loved you.

What effect did Ocias intend the game's narration to have on players? He discussed with Gamasutra that the game was intended as a "confrontational" title that deals with "dominance and power". However, Ocias frames his intent in terms of engaging the player to "think about the games they are playing". I think the deliberate avoidance of discussing subtext is a good indication that Loved is a provocation to the player to react in their own way to the game, in whatever way prompts a genuine engagement.

It's interesting to look at how players interpreted the game upon release. Of course, there's players that found the game's narration 'insulting' or little more than 'philosophical gushing'. The more interesting responses are those who played Loved and projected in its ambiguity many things: 'what a relationship can turn into', about the 'choice whether to let someone impose their worldview on you...or choose your own path', or even religious themes around faith and forgiveness. I think this is precisely what Ocias hoped to achieve with his game.

There's a broader conversation to be had some time about the merits of the 'art game' and the role of the Flash era in making that genre more accessible. It's uplifting that even in the heyday of Flash games a general audience were pretty open to understanding and responding to Loved and what about it provoked them.

Loved can be played on Ocsias' website.