You Chose to Photograph the Argument. Now the Whole Square Is Angry.
A town square. Circles and squares milling around, mostly peaceful, occasionally tense. You hold a news camera. You decide what to zoom in on, what to photograph, what to broadcast. At first the choices seem neutral — capture what’s interesting, that’s your job. Then you photograph an angry face. Then another. The broadcast shows conflict. The crowd sees the broadcast. The crowd becomes what the broadcast showed them. We Become What We Behold by Nicky Case plays in about five minutes and explains the last ten years of media better than most long essays have managed.
The Camera Doesn’t Distort Reality — It Selects It
That’s the thesis, demonstrated through play. The town square contains everything: kindness, curiosity, tension, hostility. Your camera doesn’t create any of it. It just amplifies whatever you point at. A peaceful exchange, repeatedly broadcast, produces a peaceful crowd. An extreme gesture, repeatedly broadcast, produces a crowd full of extreme gestures. The simulation is blunt by design — Nicky Case, who also made "Parable of the Polygons" and "Coming Out Simulator," builds games that make abstract arguments visceral. The bluntness is the point. You feel the mechanism. You can’t unfeel it.
Five Minutes. Resonates for Days.
We Become What We Behold won multiple indie game awards after releasing in 2016 and has been quietly circulating ever since — linked in media studies courses, passed around in political science threads, shared by people who finish it and immediately want someone else to experience it. It’s free on itch.io. It requires no download, no account, no setup. You finish it, and then you notice something about the way news is framed that you hadn’t noticed before. A good game changes how you see. A great game changes how you see things you weren’t even looking at. This one is the second kind.
Comments 0
