Game Jam Winner Spotlight: I Could Do That!

We’re nearing the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, and Best Remix winners, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: I Could Do That! by Geouug.

It’s the first time in these game jams that we’ve had a double winner: Geouug also won the prize for Best Visuals with As I Lay Flying. But where that was a physics-based game rich in graphical details, I Could Do That! is simple and streamlined, using a single mechanic to deliver a bit of commentary about attitudes towards abstract art. The game is based around Piet Mondrian’s 1930 painting Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, and you’ve probably heard more than one person deliver the game’s title as a reaction to that painting or another piece of superficially simple abstract art: it’s just some lines and colors! I could do that!

Although there are many robust and serious rebuttals to that reaction, the game delivers a playful and somewhat cheeky one. It says: so do it.

After being given a moment to look at the painting, the player is delivered to a blank canvas with some simple drawing tools, where they must try to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. Keeping the correct composition in your memory is harder than it might sound!

Once you’re done, the game performs a rigorous pixel-by-pixel comparison, giving you both a numerical score and a visualization of what you got right.

Of course, in essence, it’s a memory game. But the subject matter makes it feel like something more than that: it centers your mind on composition and balance, which are precisely the things that the painting invites the viewer to contemplate, and becomes a deceptively impactful exercise in thinking about abstract art. It’s novel, funny, and well-executed, and for that it’s this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Geouug for the win! You can play I Could Do That! in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the final winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!