Katamari, Noby Noby Boy and pushing boundaries

Recently a friend of mine who is a big fan of Katamari Damacy (Released 2004) and its sequels, bought a game designed by the same man - Keita Takahashi - called Noby Noby Boy, and I was intrigued by it. Both of these games feature unique concepts and mechanics that are fascinating,confusing and absurd. Those familiar with the Katamari games will know that the gameplay and design of the games designed by Takahashi are far from conventional, the objective of the first game being to recreate all of the celestial bodies destroyed by your father (the giant King of All Cosmos) by using a ball called a Katamari (which has the special ability to pick up anything smaller than itself) to collect materials to refashion into the objects that the King has obliterated. The gameplay involves being set in an environment filled with different people places and objects of varying sizes and being let loose with your Katamari. At first you begin rolling up small objects like paperclips or pieces of fruit. As the size of your Katamari grows, you gain the ability to pick up larger objects including people, animals, buildings, vehicles, parts of the earth, countries and eventually the celestial bodies you yourself have created over the course of the game. Moving through different scales happens in small steps, and these progressions that see you cowering from humans one minute and rolling them up in your colourful snowball of destruction the next are addictive.

Dad

A Katamari large enough to pick up countries

It is certainly an unconventional game by western standards and often polarises people with its unconventional concept and controls. Its little brother, Noby Noby Boy was released in 2009 for iOS and PS3.

This is Boy

It is a very strange game.

I don't know how to explain this

The player takes control of the character Boy, a colourful tube with a face and legs. By using the Dualshock 3’s left analogue stick you control the front of Boy, by using the left you control his rear end. What seems to be the aim of the game is to stretch Boy as far as you can. Noby Noby Boy features no real goals, however the player can submit online the distance they have stretched Boy to another character called Sun.Through sun, the distance stretched is transferred to the character Girl, a celestial being who manifests the collective stretching of Boy by every player who has submitted a “score”. By doing this, girl stretches away from the earth towards the moon, then Mars Jupiter and so on, unlocking new settings and objects to interact with during gameplay. Boy also features the ability to jump both the front end and back end of his body independently, and by repeatedly pressing the jump button Boy will continuously jump higher and higher in the air, allowing for further possibilities in stretching and creating bizarre, bizarre images. Additionally Boy posses the ability to eat objects in the game,and by eating two different items there is a possibility that they will combine in his bowel and be expelled as something new i.e consuming a man and a strawberry will produce a bowel movement consisting of a smiling strawberry with the body of a man. It lacks any semblance of traditional narrative, but relies solely on the agency of the player to propel gameplay forward.

Girl, the Moon, and a bipedal lion

I have no idea how to analyse this game or what it could possibly mean. Is Boy’s growth a kind of sexual metaphor for his existence? Is there any inherent meaning?
Regardless of this, and its strange conventions, Noby Noby Boy is a very fun, surreal and odd game, and its lack of meaningful structure creates a true feeling of discovery and exploration and brings forth feelings of actual play. Though released 4 years ago, Noby Noby Boy is the most novel game I have played in a long time and both it and Katamari are examples of a positive explorative movement in game design, towards new ideas and mechanics completely alien in comparison to the status quo. No one is injured (transmogrified perhaps, but since when is becoming part strawberry an injury?), and though you are able to mess with buildings, people and other objects there is no imperative to do so. 

Party (?)

This tangential approach to game concepts intrigues me and I’m interested in other games that approach gaming from a fresh point of view. What I suppose I’m trying to say is that there is so much ground to discover in terms of what games can do while still being fun and it’s great that there are examples of people pushing the boundaries of what a game is, or is meant to be.