美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Wattam' Is Keita Takahashi's Latest Video Game Of Radical Joy（在线收听）

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The point of most video games is to defeat your competition. But a new game out today called Wattam has a different intention, aiming to bring people together. It's the creation of a renowned video game designer, Keita Takahashi. And we have a report this morning from NPR's Vincent Acovino.

VINCENT ACOVINO, BYLINE: The year 2004 was not unusual for video games. The bestselling games of that year were full of familiar titles like Grand Theft Auto, Madden and Pokemon. But one game that year was unlike any other.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KATAMARI ON THE ROCKS")

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Vocalizing).

ACOVINO: That game was Katamari Damacy. It's about a god named the King of All Cosmos who, while drunk, accidentally destroys the stars in the sky. His son, The Prince, is left to clean up the mess by rolling up objects on Earth into big, sticky balls that grow so large they become stars.

Robin Hunicke is the co-founder of Funomena, the studio that developed Wattam. But she's long been a fan of Takahashi's work. Back in 2004, she helped exhibit Katamari at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for a workshop on experimental games. Keita Takahashi gave a presentation that blew her away.

ROBIN HUNICKE: He showed the gameplay. But then he went all the way to the credit screen where you can roll up all the countries on Earth. And so you're making a katamari of all of us. And Keita said, in a very heartfelt way, that he had been really destroyed by the idea that we were going to just keep fighting and killing each other.

ACOVINO: Katamari Damacy was a surprise commercial hit in North America. It was also a critical success and is one of 14 video games that helped establish a new category of art in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. Keita Takahashi's games are funny and absurd at the surface but kind and earnest at their core. Although Takahashi originally studied to be a sculptor, he became upset when his classmates were throwing out their work after getting grades on their projects.

KEITA TAKAHASHI: I was very shocked about that. We have environment crisis. I don't want make more garbage.

ACOVINO: Takahashi aimed to make work that was useful and made people laugh. It's an ethos that has carried over to all of his projects, including his latest game, Wattam.

HARRY DELORME: It's full of very strange things - a character that's a mouth that eats other characters and excretes them as poop.

ACOVINO: That's Harry DeLorme, who helped curate a mid-career survey of Takahashi's work at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Ga. He says that Wattam is funny, but it's also a game about joy and kindness.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DELORME: It starts off with a character who is utterly alone.

ACOVINO: A green cube with a mouth, a mustache and a top hat sits on top of a rock. It's crying but then starts to walk around.

DELORME: Gradually, he starts discovering that there are indeed other beings around.

ACOVINO: More and more characters join Wattam's world. They interact together in simple and joyful ways - climbing on top of one another, spinning in circles, holding hands.

(LAUGHTER)

ACOVINO: Takahashi said he came up with the idea for Wattam when he moved to Vancouver and was living in a place with a diverse population.

TAKAHASHI: We still have some issue or problem or conflict in this world because of the - like, a different perspective or different religion or different skin color. I believe differences make a good, deep culture.

ACOVINO: A good, deep culture, one where people are brought together by playing games.

TAKAHASHI: Somehow people get over the differences by having fun.

ACOVINO: Vincent Acovino, NPR News.