Of many things, I am rather unsure. But here, dearest, is a certainty: Process is something. It probably is not really a game. It takes the medium’s most sacred component – play – and stabs it in the back. It is a heretic in the holy church of interactivity. The games developers would have you think of it as a short story or art installation but that, I’m afraid, is giving it too much credit.

Histrionics aside: Process is a descendant of the venerable Myst. It consists of no more than 10 screens that you can click around to take you to other screens or primitively interact with. All you need is the mouse and your brain – no keyboard. There is no play here, just the banal manipulation of mostly static images. The player’s volition is stripped away from him or her – you may only click on, interact with and go to where the developers want you to. It’s set on a series of three train cars, primarily, and each “game” is limited to 20 minutes. As the player, you’re tasked with moving about these cars and attempting to solve the mystery of what the hell is going on and why disaster will strike in 20 minutes. I played three of these 20 minute segments before seeing what I believe to be the ultimate ending.

Over the span of my hour’s worth of play, I did indeed carry out a process – each time repeating the same (wait for it) process of events over and over to dig further in using less time, and thus see the story to its optimal conclusion.It is my belief, though, that the developers of this game don’t want me to call it the ‘ultimate’ or ‘optimal’ ending. To them, it’s simply one “play experience” or narrative. I am, of course, only guessing. But they are asking the player to appreciate this sparse, mechanically minimal thing on an artistic level – not in a primal- or accomplishment-oriented mindset.

But here’s the problem: Process is not art. It is sound and fury and annoyingly player-adverse – all signifying nothing. It is less Joyce and more “this sounds and looks and presents itself as deep, so it must be deep.” The game fails to say anything that resonates, never daring to be evocative on anything more than a superficial level. The only affects come from its creepy visuals and overwrought soundtrack, but even those are only skin deep.

It could be that I didn’t play it enough – but even the three play-throughs I did make left me only wanting to stop. They offered me no tantalizing glimpses or hints at an epiphany; I chased the story down further only for journalistic purposes. It’s a dry and soulless game that tries to pass its blandness off for style and/or meaning – and fails.

I have to give the developers credit for trying. They aimed high – they wanted to make a game that matters. And in truth, that’s more than we can says for the miscreants pumping out Farmville clones by the minute. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on them, you might be saying – but we have to be. If games are to begin to truly matter – to be held up against masterpieces – we can’t let sophomoric attempts at art pass by unflogged. This game fails to be a true work of video game art because of it’s “style over substance” approach and the way it relegates the medium’s most important character – the player- to a minimal and restricted role. So, I suppose, we’ll need to take a few of these somethings in stride. These odd mutant things like Process might be failures – and we can’t afford to not call them such – but regardless, they can be steps – sometimes minuscule – towards where we would all like to see our beloved videogames go. It is a process, after all.