Satire, the stuff that lowers the surface tension of a liquid. Oh, wait, that’s a surfactant. Satire is a cute little tool often employed by authors to poke fun at serious issues without sounding like grumpy old codgers. So, if you call your auntie a bloated old bovine, you can just say it was satire, and everyone will laugh and think you’re clever. Or something like that. Anyway, satire can be used to make people think about serious issues, apparently, and that’s something :The Game: may or may not do. Whether it’s just a bunch of mildly interactive scenes or a piece of thoughtful commentary is entirely up to you!

How much of a “game” is :The Game:? Not as much as you might think for something with the word “game” in the title. This little curiosity plays out in a series of short vignettes centered around a theme introduced just before the action begins. You can usually control a little character with the arrow keys, jumping and crouching like any old platformer, but that’s almost incidental to everything else that’s going on. And besides, not all levels feature that sort of control scheme, so the statement “no rules” shoved in your face at the beginning is pretty much accurate!

Level after level, you’ll take part in an exercise extolling the pros and cons of societal concepts. Sometimes your choices matter, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you’ll play a tiny mini-game, sometimes you’ll just dive off a cliff. No matter what happens, the game goes on, tossing new ideas in front of your face and summarizing things up a few moments later with big red letters.

With something as minimally interactive as :The Game:, you can almost look at it like an interactive Flash video. There are some sections where actual gameplay occur, but the outcome doesn’t hinge on your skills at the keyboard, which could be another layer of this “satire” we’ve heard about. Do Flash games care what you do? Does any game really care that you’re playing? Do you care about your choices changing the game you’re interacting with, or is it just another way to pretend you’re in control of something in front of your eyes? There’s something to get your noggin’ churning!

Note that :The Game: frequently employs violent scenes and some adult-type concepts to make commentary on various social structures. It’s nothing you wouldn’t see on a PG-13 movie, but since it’s a browser game, we thought we’d let you know!

If you’re ready to think about things like communism, the environment, the five stages of grief, and 37 other concepts presented in a defined order, give :The Game: a try. And if you’re not in a cerebral mood, give it a whirl anyway and just watch the pretty colors move in front of you. At least the animations are pretty, right?

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