A Peaceful Forest, Some Deer, and a Whole Lot of Playfulness.

The Endless Forest wasn’t built as a mind-tweak; it just is one.

Designed as an interactive-screen saver, The Forest is a social game in which you play a deer, and interacting with other people playing deer. It sounds odd, and it is… but it is coolness beyond words, a reset button for the brain, and meditation, but ever so much more fun.

It’s damnably pretty, too. Check out the screen shots scattered through this post.

But it’s more than just the beauty of the system that makes The Endless Forest work as a MindTweak. The Forest is a game, but not in the sense of checkers, Monopoly, or Doom. Somehow, it takes you back to innocence, to childhood, to the simplicity of playing for the sheer joy of *playing* in the spirit of games you made up as children.

Running around in The Forest is like playing cops and robbers, hosting teddy bear tea parties, or back yard circuses. There are no built in goals, no points, rankings or badges to earn, nothing to win, and no way to lose. Play is plain, straightforward, and natural.

The real genius of the game springs from the limits placed by the Creator-Gods of the Forest. The lack of human language and individual identity (beyond a hieroglyphic “name”) dissolves class and cultural boundaries. There is no means to compete or become better than others in the game to re-establish those boundaries. More importantly, while there are many ways to be friendly and playful, there is no way to effectively disrupt another player’s experience. It’s almost impossible to be rude in the forest, and aside from the occasional obsessive moo-er (which I choose to interpret as over-exuberance) it’s tough to even be annoying. Players can’t plant spam in the forest, make inappropriate sexual comeons, or bully newcomers. And there’s no room for social anxiety; because if another deer doesn’t like me, I’ll never really know!

Even with the strict limitations on interaction, the game requires cooperation and interaction between players in order to unlock many of the actions and magic spells. The learning-curve reminds me of being a very small child - watching other children and adults do things, trying to figure out what they are doing, what, and how, all without words.

Personality and mood come through the gestures remarkably well. Surprisingly clear “conversations” take place using only deer-like actions. Mini-games are invented spontaneously, between players, using nothing but combinations of the allowed actions.

There’s no icon for the mini-games, no signposts, no users guide. Most are simple: Tag, Chase, Hide-And-Seek, of course.. then there’s “Keep Everyone Worshipful-White” and “Magic Mask Moo Morph” (which admittedly disturbs the peace of the forest) ” Run-Around-Til-We-Should-Fall-Over-Dizzy” and “Turn-Me-Into-Your-Twin!” just to mention a few. All of the games have one thing in common… they’re the sorts of things that children create on their own, in those precious few moments they spend without computers, sports-schedules, batteries and playstations.

The Creator-Gods (aka, the game developers) maintain a tangible presence in the Forest. They sometimes interact as deer themselves, but more importantly, they personally decide when it is dark or light, whether it is sunny, raining, or snowing. As a player, you never know when they are watching, and magical happenings have a way of appearing out of nowhere, clearly directed at you, personally, giving you the sense that They-Are-There, involved, watching, amusing and protecting, the literal parents of the Forest.

Participating provides moments of childlike discovery and wonder (watching giant dandelions sprout in the rain) moments of plain hilarity (giving a fawn huge oversized antlers that by all rights should make him topple over) and moments of aHA! (deciphering the intent of another deer who has been desperately trying to communicate “I’d like the bat wing antlers, please!” ).

The Endless Forest is a poetic play-scape, and interactive art. It’s cooperative rather than competitive. It teaches patience, rewards social behaviors and cooperation, shifts your brain into a child’s learning mode, takes you out of judgements and anxiety and competitiveness. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful, subtly changing environment. But most of all, it is play for play’s own sake — plain, pure, pointless *play* … the sort adults rarely experience and even children seem to be missing out on these days.

So check it out: download the screen saver files and an optional launcher at the Tale-of-Tales website: http://www.tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/index.html

Be sure and register (free) to “name” your deer, and get all the options unlocked.

Two cautions: The Forest requires a pretty good graphics card, and you MUST install the screensaver itself *before* the launcher.

See you in the Forest!