I heart Katamari Damacy!

Someone out there in Flickr-land has done the world the invaluable service of collecting and posting dozens of delightful Katamari wallpapers. If you like Japanese animation and graphic design, you need to see these things.

The box copy really says it best:

Play is controlled with the analog sticks only. No buttons to press. No combos to cause distress. Featuring ball-rolling and object-collecting gameplay mechanics of mesmerizing fluidity, reduced to Pac-Man simplicity, through pure absurdity.

Dimensions change drastically as your clump grows from a fraction of an inch to a monstrous freak of nature. Go from rolling along a tabletop to ravaging through city streets, picking up momentum and skyscrapers along the way.

Enjoy quirky, infectious humor throughout—from the insanely cosmic animations, to the wacky and wonderful musical stylings, to the royally contagious storyline that's undoubtedly like no other.

Undoubtedly!

'Katamari' means 'rolled-up wad of stuff'. 'Damacy' is an idiosyncratic transliteration of a Japanese word meaning 'spirit', not in the supernatural sense, more like the team spirit or school spirit sense. There's a backstory which, if I elucidated it, wouldn't help you much. The basic idea is that you're a tiny antlike being rolling a sticky ball through various environments, trying to gather stuff up. The more stuff you gather, the bigger the sticky ball gets, and the larger the objects you're able to pick up. For the most part, the game aspect is in 'beat the clock' form - you have a certain amount of time to make a ball of stuff of a certain diameter. That's it, that's the whole game. Does it sound like fun from this description? Maybe not, but as an experience, it's utterly compelling.

The cool thing is that the game is all taking place in ordinary human environments, populated by ordinary human artifacts. In a house, you're trying to roll up erasers, bottles, socks, chairs, remote controls. In the supermarket you're rolling up shopping carts, melons, cans, rolls of toilet paper. Every last object you encounter can be interacted with or picked up; there's no functionless "wallpaper" the way there is in most supposedly 3D games. The highway guardrails, clouds in the sky, trees and bushes, islands in the ocean - if you're big enough, you can glom any object into your katamari. It turns out to be great and uncanny fun to see quotidian settings and objects in a video game. Katamari would be much less surreal if it took place in outer space or wherever. The various Wil Wright and Sid Meier simulation classics have that same uncanny quality, for me one of the big attractions of video games generally.

Designers of mainstream computer game graphics are currently locked in an escalating race to produce ever more highly detailed and "realistic" game environments. The best designers, like Shigeru Miyamoto, long ago recognized that a cartoony look plays better to computer animation's strengths as a medium. In a game like KD or anything in the Mario series, every object you encounter is made of a few simple flat-colored polygons. That leaves plenty of computer horsepower to render a lot of such objects on the screen moving around in full fluid 3D. Even in "realistic" games, designers have to do a lot of stylizing and streamlining to make their jobs manageable. The cartoony guys wisely recognize that limitation up front and turn it into an advantage. Part of the fun of KD is discovering the vast array of objects populating the game, and seeing how the designers have translated each one into their vocabulary of basic 3D solids: people, dogs, cats, bicycles, spatulas, batteries, baseball stadiums, shrubs, juice boxes, pencils, gas stations, carrots, balloons, endless varieties of seafood (remember, it's Japan), video games (!), traffic cones, pillows, oil tankers, giant squid, giant robots.

Katamari is instantly intuitive to everyone I've seen play it, down to a friend's two-year-old daughter. Its taxonomy of objects in the everyday world is vastly simpler than the one in your head, but the process is much the same. What makes the game interesting is how it combines the familiar routine of classifying and distinguishing objects in the world with distinctly unfamiliar radical changes in scale. In the game's eighth level, you start out at the size of a thumbtack, and if you're successful, by the end you're picking up cars and shipping containers. In one swoop, you pass from rodent size through familiar human scale and out past whale or brontosaurus (both of which you pick up in the final level.) One reason I'm so eager to get my hands on Spore is that it carries the scale thing all the way out to its extremes in both directions. What makes Katamari D unique in my gaming experience is that the scale change is gradual and continuous. At first a bike or table is a major feature of the landscape; later it's an obstacle; still later it's an object you can pick up. Your own size changes affect not just which objects you can pick up, but which areas of the terrain you can access - for example, when you get big enough to roll over and absorb fences.

Computer simulation is an extremely helpful way of expanding your imagination out of what Richard Dawkins calls Middle World. For example, try this out. Take a look at this too. Your senses and attendant brain areas evolved to make sense out of objects and events in a very narrow range of scale between extremely huge and extremely tiny. We now know that, say, rock is comprised almost entirely of empty space pervaded by invisible force fields. Our experience of a "solid object" is really neural shorthand for big wads of particles that hang tightly together in predictable ways. To a neutrino, a rock looks like a thinly populated asteroid belt. I'm not talking here about the Empire Strikes Back asteroid belt, I mean the real one, where each asteroid has an average million trillion cubic miles of empty space to itself. You, too, are nearly entirely made of empty space, and trillions of neutrinos pass right right through you every second.

Even slight changes in scale would make a very big difference in our experience of the world. Shortly after getting KD, we also got a new kitten. I would turn off the game and then sit and watch Bird explore our apartment from his tiny vantage point. What is it like to be that small? KD put me in the perfect frame of mind to imagine it. I'd love it if somebody did a detailed simulator of the ordinary life of an NYC pigeon, or rat, or cockroach. Even better, I'd love a game set in a human immune system. Think Fantastic Voyage meets Osmosis Jones.

Katamari's soundtrack deserves particular mention, because it's a full-length album of fully-produced songs in a variety of genres, all of which are about the game. The record was a hit in Japan and won their equivalent of a Grammy. A couple of songs in the game are extremely weird love songs, like so:

I know you love me, I want to wad you up into my life
Let's roll up to be a single star in the sky

This is sung by a Japanese guy, in English, in a clear effort at emulating Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, missing both targets by a country mile, but succeeding at creating a crooner style of his own. Equally indescribable is the beatboxing by Björk collaborator Dokaka.

KD has spawned two highly recommended sequels. We Love Katamari is also for the PS2. It's the same basic idea, but with new wrinkles. There's a racetrack environment with a race going on, and you're hurtling around at many times your usual speed. But you're not participating in the race itself, you're just rolling stuff up as usual, so you're free to roll along against traffic, off-road among the spectators, whatever you want. Another level has you seeking out objects based not on their size but their monetary value. Finally, there's a breathtaking underwater level. The soundtrack continues to be mostly delightful J-pop.

There's also a sequel for the PSP called Me And My Katamari, combining features of its predecessors with more widely varied topography. The cartoony graphics translate very well to the tiny screen. Suddenly, a long line at the post office or supermarket takes on a whole different flavor when it becomes an opportunity for uninterrupted Katamari. Those guys at Namco deserve some kind of prize.

By the way, check out ths TV ad for Travelers Insurance that delightfully recreates Katamari. Blogger Florian Eckhardt makes an intriguing suggestion:

I've only played a bit of the first Katamari. Do any of the levels allow you to build a Katamari so big that you eventually manage to roll-up the planet you're on, then continue to build your katamari until you make a star of all creation, sucking up black holes and galaxies? Eventually, you get so big that you realize that the entire universe is but one small molecule in an infinitely recursive cosmos, and you can actually continue to expand your universe throughout infinity? That really does seem like the natural conclusion of the concept.

I totally agree. A fourth Katamari is supposedly in the works. Namco, want to take this idea and run with it?

Update: see my many Katamari-related links on del.icio.us, especially the interview with the game designers.

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