Thought For The Day

Rami Ismail on Meditations – a year’s worth of contemplative daily games.

Ten dark grey bars lie in the middle of the screen, arranged like rudimentary dominos. Click on the first and it turns a creamy white. Click on the second, and it too lights up. Ditto, the third. But on the fourth click, they all reset to their original colours. It takes a while to realise what you’re supposed to do: curb your natural instinct for instant gratification, leave a longer gap between each click than the previous one and you’ll eventually light up all ten. And that’s the game.

This is Tempres by Melbourne-based developer Tak, the inspiration for a yearlong interactive art project set up and curated by Vlambeer’s co-founder and staunch indie advocate Rami Ismail. Meditations is the work of Ismail, a small team of helpers, and more than 350 game developers. Download the launcher and you’ll receive one game each day for a year. The games are small – no more than five minutes long. You can use them as inspiration, or simply a diversion: Ismail doesn’t mind either way.

It was late 2017 when he first encountered Tempres, via Itch.io’s Randomizer, which lets you set up a filter to discover something new from its vast library. “I played it early in the morning and just having this moment of insight, something little to toy with, had this weirdly profound effect on my day. I ended up thinking, ‘Why don’t we do this every day?'” Why, indeed. The first week of January 2018, he emailed Tak with his pitch for Meditations. “I explained and asked if I could use his game for January 1 [2019], and that’s where it started.”