HUMANITY

You got some Lemmings in my 20th century minimalism

- Wes Fenlon

Before I declare Humanity a new member of the videogames-as-art canon, I should confess that I know embarrassingly little about art. My mum is an artist, yet I somehow developed no vocabulary for the subject—I spent the time I should’ve been writing about this brilliant videogame trying to decide if it was futurist, or constructivist, or minimalist.

Did you know there’s a post-minimalism? I should try my hand at being a post-postminimalist writer and turn in an empty page next time I’m on a deadline. But that wouldn’t be fair to Humanity, which I’ve been playing nightly for the last couple of weeks. Perhaps this is a more useful aesthetic reference point: Humanity is an early 2000s physics tech demo turned into a proper game. It unabashedly pairs philosophical musings on life and war with block-pushing puzzles, like a more aloof Katamari Damacy.