Spring
It’s spring in Proteus, and the whole world sounds like it’s in bloom. Made by two men—Ed Key, a programmer and designer from Cambridgeshire in the UK, and composer David Kanaga, who lives in Oakland, California—Proteus is a very unusual video game. The player is presented with the most remarkable island, randomly generated by the game’s rules and imagined in strokes of hard, ungradiented colour. The world is a blanket of greens, browns, pinks, blues, whites, oranges. It looks like Kandinsky with a copy of MS Paint. For the player, there are two possible things to do: you may walk or sit. That’s not entirely true—players can also look and listen. These mundane acts of the senses, so routinely overlooked in favour of the more complicated interactions that video games can offer, become paramount in Proteus. It is a video game for contemplation, not reflexes; the world of Proteus is for rumination, not ruination.

Screenshot from the game Proteus, released 2012