10 Mississippi

Computer games often make use of the first-person perspective, but things rarely get really personal. In 10 Mississippi, game designer Karina Popp takes a different and on occasions awkwardly intimate approach. She wanted to create a stop-motion game consisting only of photographs, drawing inspiration from filmmaker Chris Marker’s masterpiece La jetée—not for its subject matter, but for how it dispensed with the medium’s central characteristic. La jetée is a film without movement, while 10 Mississippi is a game in which players much accept that they have no agency.

That said, players do exert some influence on progress through this series of interstitial moments in someone’s life—by pressing one of the humorous icons and letters on the keyboard, you move on to the next step, but that's the limit of your control. You follow a route that was set out long ago and is repeated again and again, as you move from the disappointingly empty fridge to cutting and pasting in an Excel document. Morning exercises, office job, chow down, repeat, repeat, repeat.