Have you discovered Sword and Sworcery? It’s a game for iPad, wrapped in an immersive audio-visual art experience. Although it evokes games of pixel-past, it feels new. There are rich, untamed landscapes and careful color choices made throughout. Such care is given to the lighting, and subtle rustling sounds have an emotional impact as you move around. And the music? Just incredible. There are a number of good reviews written for the game, so I won’t go into great detail, but beyond a certain nostalgia it evoked I did want to highlight a specific memory.  If you are of a certain era and ever had the chance to play Pitfall II from Atari, you might have found there was a hidden level built into it. At the time it was a thrilling discovery--a doorway into a new world within the game. I may have reached it once or twice, but as sometimes happens, our controllers broke. There was no eBay or Amazon to easily replace the controllers so the game console languished, moved to the attic and eventually disappeared. This lost place was never to be visited again. But as with all art that has an impact, it stays with you. Entering sword & sworcery was like teleportation. I felt as if I was back inside the additional Pitfall level, except it had evolved while I was gone and now there was wind, and music and humor.

I played for a few minutes longer with my 5 year old. As I was figuring out the game I asked her to help me decide what to do and where to go next. Within moments she would only speak in whispers as we tried to find the tome and tame the dark wolf in our path. The careful combination of story, sound and image, I think, allowed her to be so fully engaged. 

This kind of gaming experience reminds me that the meta-realities we create though our art are real. They are places that we go, leave and come back to. They act not merely as brief escapes, but as appurtenances to our real lives.