I wrote here before about how I found it gorgeous that someone had hacked Super Mario Brothers to necessitate a refutation of the game’s ostensible logic — the logic that humans were expected to obey — in order to manipulate the game’s actual logic — that upon which the code’s collision-detection logic was predicated. (I won’t go into the mechanics of how this works again, but I will again direct you to the “Collisions” section of this site for a brief primer.)

What made it the most interesting in –AIR–’s case is that stage 3-2 negates the possibility of button input; the stage itself is laid out in a fashion in which Mario sleepwalks through an entire level, his course essentially predetermined via level design, such that completion of the level can be nothing but certain. I made the case then that it was beautiful, and I stand by that; Robert Rauschenberg often made the claim that he wanted his work to exist “in the gap between art and life,” and I would consider this sort of marriage between level design and game mechanic something that exists in the gap between art and code.

This is why I was excited to see that this is starting to happen to other games — or at least that it has. N (website) is something like Lode Runner with a physics engine, and is easily one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played, much less any game I’ve played for free. It’s more action-based than Lode Runner, so you’ll only spend upwards of a minute in any given level, assuming you can stay alive that long, but the physics of the thing are tweaked to make moving around really enjoyable; eventually, assuming your hands don’t break off from the frantic key-tapping, you hit a state of realizing that what you’re doing looks really awesome. And then you get shot by a Gauss gun, and you restart the level.

The fan community surrounding it is also robust; the release of a level-editor led to an in-game fan-made map database, which comes preloaded with maps, and which you can add to yourself. One of the map types they support is called “DDA,” which piqued my interest; as it turns out, DDA stands for Don’t Do Anything. The theory is the same as in 3-2 of –AIR–; you start the level, surrender control, and watch the level unfold.

What’s great about N’s DDA levels is that the game itself is incredibly chaotic, sometimes incomprehensibly so. In later levels of the regular game, you have to enter a fugue state to survive, or risk dying as a result of information overload. As a result, whereas –AIR–’s level emulates a sonambulistic walk through an unfolding landscape, wherein the loss of control makes the resultant action seem voyeuristic and eerie, N’s DDA levels are, in sharp contrast, like watching a highlight reel of highway accidents, or an incredibly expensive fight scene in a Bruckhiemer film. The game’s physics simulation is flaunted to squeeze N around the corners of blocks at high velocity, or to propel him through a series of springboards and up a curved ramp, and since you have no offensive capabilities in the game proper anyhow, the effect is of watching some unimaginably laconic player choosing their steps eleven seconds in advance, realizing no action needs be taken, and biding their time. The preparation required to choreograph not only the player-avatar’s motion around the screen, but to ensure that none of the offensive weaponry hits them, must be astronomical.

The finest of them all, though, is Tattletale — which is what all this lead-in was for, honestly — in which not only is the player strung along a series of jump-pads and switch-triggers, flaunting the game’s collision engine all the way, but so is a homing missle, which, despite having much simpler collision rules (”explode on contact,” basically), also has error-checking algorithms which are also flaunted. Both the player and the missle are led through a series of tunnels, and the dance is gorgeous; neither must touch (but, of course, threaten to at any second), and while one must be moved along by platforms and levers, the other must not touch anything, or explode. It’s like Dadaist ballet, full of motion and warheads and signifying nothing, and it’s absolutely entrancing.

And I’ll say this, before I get lambasted for comparing any of this to dance or sculpture: Until someone finally manages to make a game which can be objectively viewed as a work of art (and good luck with that, considering how long it’s taken the graphic novel), we can at least recognize the successes in gaming which are artistic. Some elements of games lend themselves far easier to this task, of course, as they contain elements of, or are redolent of, actual art — a game’s music and visual deisgn, I mean. But things like –AIR– and like Tattletale seem to me equally gorgeous, and exist on their own as standalone pieces. They are to dance what, roughly, Electroplankton is to music. And since new-media culture is agog over the juxstaposing of two seemingly unconnected sources to make new material, why not this? At the very least, it’ll give people something to blog about.