Rationalization was covered on the Indie Games blog and reviewed on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was great to see that people were interested in checking out the game.
Though, on Rock, Paper, Shotgun people did far more than just check it out. There were over 50 comments and many of these were very thoughtful interpretations of the game. It excites and surprises me that the audience of this primarily mainstream game industry focused blog would be interested in dissecting this admittedly strange “proceduralist” game.
Almost surprisingly, most interpretations were in line with what I was intending to communicate. A big inspiration for Rationalization was Rod Humble’s The Marriage. As part of my quest to harness the alleged and only slightly understood power of “Rules as Art“, Rationalization was first purely abstract (no words, instructions or key), but because of the difficulty most people have playing and interpreting The Marriage, I decided to slightly ramp up the amount of representation and give the player some context. I worry that I perhaps went too far, but I believe there is a sweet spot that someone will stumble upon soon enough.