About We Become What We Behold

We Become What We Behold is a five-minute game about news cameras and what they do to the people watching. Made by Nicky Case in 2016 and released into the public domain, it hands you a camera pointed at a tiny world of circle-people and square-people going about their day. You choose what to photograph; whatever you capture becomes the broadcast everyone sees; and the world changes to match what it watches. That loop — behold, become — is the whole game and the whole argument.

Nicky Case is one of the most distinctive voices in browser games, known for 'explorable explanations' — interactive pieces like Parable of the Polygons (made with Vy Hart, about how small individual biases produce segregation) and The Evolution of Trust (about game theory and cooperation). We Become What We Behold is the angriest of the set: less a lesson with sliders, more a satire with a trigger button.

The mechanics are engineered to implicate you. Photographing a quiet, kind moment produces a shrug — the broadcast ignores it, nothing spreads. Photograph the one weirdo, the first flash of conflict, and the screen lights up: the image spreads, the crowd changes, and suddenly there is more conflict to photograph. The game never forces you to escalate. It just makes escalation the only thing that works, which is precisely the media critique, played on you rather than explained to you.

The escalation curve is brutal in miniature. Petty oddity becomes suspicion, suspicion becomes fear between circles and squares, fear becomes rage, and the last minutes tip into violence the early minutes could never have predicted — all fed by your framing choices. The title, borrowed from a line often attributed to media theorist Marshall McLuhan's circle, stops being clever and starts being literal.

Because Case released it under a public-domain dedication, the game has been ported, mirrored and studied everywhere — it is a staple of media-literacy classrooms and one of the most-streamed short games ever, with playthroughs in the tens of millions. It fits browser play perfectly: one sitting, no mechanics to learn beyond point and click, and an ending that recontextualizes everything you did.

On LemonArcade it runs free, no download or account, on desktop, mobile or tablet. Give it the five focused minutes it asks for — ideally with sound — and let it finish. It is short precisely so that you replay it, and the second run, where you try to photograph only kindness, is where the game's real lesson lands.

Tips for We Become What We Behold

• Play it in one sitting. It is five minutes long and paced like an essay — interrupting it halfway breaks the escalation the ending depends on.
• Photograph what interests you, honestly. The game reads your instincts; following them without overthinking is what makes the ending land personally.
• Watch what the crowd does after each broadcast. The reaction to your photo — who imitates it, who hardens — is the actual mechanic, and it repays close attention.
• Try to break it on the second run. Photographing only kindness and calm is possible, instructive, and quietly devastating — the game has an answer ready for pacifists.
• Keep the sound on. The audio shift across the five minutes carries the tonal turn from comedy to something else, and it is easy to miss on mute.
• Notice the one character pair the camera keeps finding. There is a small love story threading through the crowd, and tracking it changes how the ending hits.
• Show it to someone afterward and watch them play. What each person chooses to photograph first says more than any post-game discussion.

Did you know?

• Nicky Case released We Become What We Behold in 2016 and dedicated it to the public domain, which is why it appears on platforms everywhere.
• The game's only verb is taking photographs — every escalation in its world is driven by what the player chooses to frame.
• Case's other explorable works, including The Evolution of Trust and Parable of the Polygons, are used in classrooms worldwide.
• Photographing peaceful moments deliberately produces no reaction, making escalation a design trap rather than a requirement.
• Streamed playthroughs of the game total in the tens of millions, and it is a recurring text in media-literacy teaching.