It’s easy to pass the eyes over the pages of a book, or to bathe in the waves of image and sound at the cinema or in your living room. Game-play-the work of working a game-is fundamentally irritating, at least in comparison with other media forms. Let the memers honk their geese so you don’t have to. And like all labor, the best way to get it done is to farm it out to others. Untitled Goose Game is a game about work’s ubiquity in the guise of a game about leisure’s frivolity. It might even be more fun not to play the game than to play it. It did so, in part, by offering a counterintuitive way out of the quandary of game-play’s fundamental aggravation: Someone has to play the game, but that someone needn’t be you. Untitled Goose Game became a massive, surprise hit-and a meme-in the month since its release. The player’s job is to make them work again. Games are machines, and broken ones at that. And playing them requires exerting the effort to operate them. That’s the big problem with video games: To enjoy them, you have to play them. The only problem is that you have to play the game to do so. You gain a new perspective, having had the opportunity to be something grander than-or just different from-yourself. Games turn the world on its head, allowing you to become all the things you are not: a criminal, in Grand Theft Auto an explorer of alien worlds, in No Man’s Sky the universe itself, in Everything. It’s fun! Being a goose for a while is diverting and surprising, and embodying one in a simulated, pastoral environment speaks to the flexible power of games as a medium. For some reason, it turns out to be familiar to everyone, even city slickers who have never seen a goose in person.

A recent, hugely popular video game, Untitled Goose Game, stages this conflict. If you are a person and one appears on your country estate, the advice recommends avoiding engagement and then standing your ground if it charges. They’re brusque, clumsy, and territorial. Like games, geese are notoriously annoying.

Download untitled goose