Meme Tag 1927

Meme Tag 1927 is a game about spreading the influence of your "meme," understood according to Dawkins' notion of a "unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" (p. 249, emphasis in original). Two players compete with each other to win over the hearts of others in three increasingly complex levels. 'Swimmy' controls are intended to represent resistance to change posed by prior habits of mind.

The gameplay was inspired by a consideration of Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion and Blaise Pascal's Pensées. Freud was a 20th-century atheist, and Pascal a Christian philosopher from hundreds of years earlier. However, they both appreciated the limitations of the intellect, and consequently recognized the importance of habit in the formation and persistence of beliefs. 

Our minds and our hearts are not always aligned, especially when it comes to beliefs about the supernatural. Likewise, the agents in this game may be tagged with a certain meme, but they will not necessarily move immediately in the corresponding direction. It takes time for them to build new habits of thinking under the intellectual influence of a new meme; in the meantime, their hearts may be tagged again and won back by another influencer.

The game's narrative is an interquel to The Way of All Flesh, a silent film directed by Viktor Fleming and ultimately lost to history (with the exception of a few surviving clips). It takes place between the main character's fall from grace and his musically inclined son's rise to fame, at a time when the son is only beginning to rise to some prominence through gigs at casual venues like the one portrayed here. 

This game was built by Benny Mattis with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. In keeping with the theme of the game jam, it has been released to the public domain.

To the extent possible under law, Benny Mattis has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Meme Tag 1927. This work is published from: United States.

Reference: Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. ISBN: 978-0-19-878860-7.