Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

What if, back in the day before televisions were in every waiting room and bedroom and bar, before the perpetual buzz of blue background noise changed the way we think and speak, before our leaders began to speak to us like third-rate voice-over actors...what if some influential genius had recognized the threat and stood up and yelled Stop?

The next dominant communitactions medium in America is undeniably even more potent than the television. It presents our brains with beguiling tasks. It commandeers our circuitry. And we can actually issue commands back.

That's the promise and the terror of this new form. We can interact with its entertainments. We can summon new layers of noise and color. The American video game is enabling us to live out deeper escapist fantasies than television ever has. Right now, we're mainly using this new medium to imagine that we are space aliens and NFL quarterbacks and mercianries with hearts of steel. But it doesn't have to be this way.

In late 2008, a man by the name of Gregory Weir uploaded a game onto Newgrounds.com. The game was a simple, one-framed creation. In The Majesty of Colors, you are an underwater leviathin, resting in solitary isolation beneath the waves of the ocean, unbeknownst to the world above. The ocean floor on which you rest is your only world. In your sheltered existence, you have never seen color; to you, there is nothing but dull shades of grey, a representation of the bleak and mundane reality you are a part of. In probing through the murky depth with your tentacle, you break the surface, snatching a curious floating object that lackadaisically hovers overhead. Bringing it up to your enourmous eyes in curiosity, you discover, for the first time, the wonder, the phenomenon, the unbridald majesty of color.

As pixels slowly bloom as radiant dyes seep into the greays and blacks and whites, illuminating the world into a luminous spectrum. You finally see the world in all of its glory. But now, as you have discovered this strange new world, you need to investigate it more. Suddenly, a man on a jet ski appears on screen, whizzing by without a care in the world. A fat-pizeled mystery. You reach up and grab the man out of his vehicle, dragging him down to the depths to your horrifying face. Well, some company after all. At least he won't be alone. Hahahaha. If you are like most people, you will watch him slowly die, gasping for air under the titanic waves of an unforgiving sea and its residents. But perhaps you will pity the squirming creature, and set him back on his platform, to return to his world.

Whatever actions you take, you had better stick to them. The tiny creatures are not without protection, and will take drastic measures to ensure that you do not cause harm to their kind. Oh, well, it was only one man. How will they know I killed him? Then thwack! Bombs hit you, dropped from flying creatures above the white crests of the sea. Sleek, cylindrical beasts race through the water at breakneck speed towards you. Are they good or are they bad? Thwack! Another explosion. Will you fight back, defend yourself and show the insubordanate organisms that they are nothing, or will you accept your fate, bowing down to the creatures as they destroy the onimous threat that lies in waiting, ready to strike at any time?

Some players didn't know what to make of The Majesty of Colors. One comment reads, "It's a weird little game, but sweet, and worth spending a couple of minutes with. But weird."For others, though, it was a revelation. Games don't have to be bloated and huge and violent. They can be small and quiet and deep. Writers struggled for metaphors; to one person, The Majesty of Colors was "a pregnant, forlorn sentence" of a game, while another reviewer opted for "a superb and tightly crafted sonnet," gushing, "more than any game I've ever played, it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition."

The Majesty of Colors was sad, it was sincere, it was personal, it was mysterious, it was existential, and for all of these reasons, it was new. The big boys of gaming were probably in front of an audience full of the industries most influential game designers, growling, "Why can't we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? I think it sucks ass that a guy tinkering away in his spare time has done as much or more to advance the industry this year than the one hundred thousand of us working fifty hour weeks."

We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here's a game that made me stop and think about life and death, good and evil, reality and actuality. It made me feel emotions that a video game has never made me feel before. Here's a game that almost made me cry. It did. It really did. Here is a cute video game that made jaded men weep by commanding a sophisticated and rare power that lay...where?

Where in those little pixels does it lie?