Electroplankton

Playing Electroplankton is everything you want out of a piece of media really; it makes you smile and you don't notice how wide until you stop to blink.

Toshio Iwai, an interactive media artist whose work is known for blending both visual and audio elements, was approached by Nintendo in 2004 and asked to design a piece of software that made use of every feature on their DS system; both screens, touch screen control, and a microphone. What Iwai made is a music creation game that allows players to manipulate vibrantly colored plankton creatures on the screen by touching them. They make sound, change shape, and form melody over a provided rhythm (and sometime silence) that makes up the background. You touch the plankton, the plankton sound off, and while you might expect this to end up sounding like a caucophonitastic mess, it works. Spectacularly. You know that scene in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where Beethoven walks into the keyboard store and the salesman's all like, here listen to this? He starts playing one of the demos and Beethoven just grins like a baby. It’s a lot like that, but with a stylus in your hand.

There are ten different tracks and plankton to play with and some are more effective at letting you feel like you’re creating songs than others. Tracy is a great introduction, really letting you get a feel for what you're supposed to do with the game. The following plankton Hanenbow is ambient and soothing and really guides you into experimenting with all the different functions on the DS. Luminaria and Beatnes really bring the art and the audience together. There's a real sense of give and take between the player and the game, when you start to feel like you might not be controlling it anymore, that you're just listening to some bit of preprogrammed music some fancy artist made before you touch the screen again everything about it is different.

Electroplankton's important for a few different reasons, not the least of which is that it's one more piece of software released in the past six months the really proves the legitimacy of Nintendo's push for new ideas of play. Touching most certainly is good. It's also important because it's a new idea and at this point, videogames need new ideas more than ever. In Iwai's liner notes that come with the game, he writes about how the things that fascinated him as a child inspired Electroplankton, the things that made him want to discover, create, learn, and play. Go get it. You should be playing too.