Gray is a game that was designed to generate discussion, and it's been pretty successful at that. The game appears to be a commentary on polarized arguments, though the creators, Intuition Games, are being somewhat coy about any particular intended meaning beyond generating discussion. If you want to experience the game without any spoilers, you should try it out before reading any further.

Gray takes place amid a crowd of rioting people. Your character is black with a white outline, and all of the rioters are white. Some of the rioters have a black outline, these rioters you can talk to by walking up to them and pressing the space bar. The "conversation" is a little one-button minigame. Your word balloon is meshed with your opponent. Their side of the balloon is white, and yours is black. In the middle there is a gray gradient. Your opponent sends sound-waves (presumably representing arguments) toward you. You can send your own arguments at them by pressing the space bar. If your arguments meet in the gray area in the middle, your opponent's side of the balloon will darken, otherwise it will lighten, or remain white. When the "conversation" is over, your opponent will turn black if you've succesfully darkened their side of the balloon enough.

As you change more and more black-outlined-white-people to white-outlined-black-people, you will notice that some of the white people without an outline have also turned black. Presumably, the people you have convinced to switch sides have convinced others. After a while, all the people on the screen are black instead of white.

Then comes the twist. The people are still rioting! Making them change sides has not calmed anything down. Perhaps realizing this, your character turns from black to white! Now you must repeat the process, this time convincing everyone to switch back to their original sides.

This process repeats itself several times, similar to the Dr. Seuss story "The Star-Bellied Sneetches". Each time you change sides, the conversations with opposing people contain more and more sound-waves/arguments. This actually makes the game somewhat easier, because careful timing of arguments is replaced with frantic button-mashing. The people without outlines also change faster, making each "level" of the game shorter and easier. This is obviously totallty the opposite of how most games work, but I get the impression that the game is trying to get you to the final stage of the game before you get bored and think the game is just about pointlessly switching sides back and forth forever.

After several switches, your character turns gray instead of black or white. The riot is still raging around you, but it now consists of both black and white people. This means we'll finally be able to convince everyone to stop rioting, right? Not quite. Now that you are gray, your arguments go right through your opponents' arguments. There is no way to convince either side of anything anymore! After you try and fail to convince one person of each side, the game fades out and asks if you want to play again. This game does not have the same happy ending as the Star-Bellied Sneetches.

Of course, the real final stage of the game is the discussion thread afterwards. In our workshops, we've talked about "Learn", "Do", and "Connect" activities. Gray is a perfect example of an activities designed to create a need to discuss the topic of argument. It does this succesfully by ending the game with nothing resolved, and my remaining ambiguous.

If you'd like to discuss your feelings and interpretation of Gray, there are already some pretty good discussions going on over at Jay is Games, and on the Intuition Games Forum.

And of course, you can leave a comment below. How did you interpret Gray?

Play Gray