Exit spring, enter summer

Finaly, summer is come. Its moist air wraps about my bare legs as I scream down the country highway. Even though I am but 3 feet off the ground, I'm flying. Around me, bright greenery is tinted by the haze the warm sun develops.

Such experiences are hard to duplicate. They require a background and a context (many months in a cold, dark basement, in my case). If I did this every day, it wouldn't be so special. Yet I defied my normal physical boundaries, if only for a moment. That's all I could as for.

Flying is one of those dream which has always haunted mankind. The New Age movement says that this is because we once did in a previous life. Yet their system of endless works-based reincarnation and grasps as godhood are as saddening as they are laughable. It's amazing where a little false premise here and there will lead you.

In reality, the dream of flying is but a fantasy, an imagination-powered boost out of the ordinary. Just as I hold fantasical dreams where I am no longer a mild-mannered student but a monster-hunter extraordinaire, or a master of infiltration, the common dream of flight is the wish to break the common hold of gravity. Just as my wish to overcome relative physical weakness and inability to correct injustice is reflecting in my choice of imaginary careers, most gravity-bound people wish to escape their flat existence.



Enter Cloud.

Video games are a unique art-form which allows for direct interaction. They are dynamic, not static. They allow for exploration, not passive observation. Every game is composed of a mixure of two elements: story and gameplay. Some have more of one then another, some are almost entirly one or the other.

Cloud is a game with simple gameplay; flyaround and group the clouds together, while chasing off the smoke. But the main element is the joy of flying about though the sky with no limitations. You make your own story, it doesn't matter what. Cloud givse the player the equivilent of a sandbox, only with sky, the ability to explore an impossible setting. It the imagining of a limitless world, only instead of a flat, static canvase, the artist makes the world alive and dymanic. It's depiction of a utopia that exists only in ones mind is an exellent example the just how games can be artistic. I hope to later expand upon this premise, even showing the art inherent in games like Pac-Man and Tempest.

Try Cloud. It's a free game, and a modest download. Fly about its skies, if only for a moment, to experence what I'm talking about.