The sun bleaches the sandy landscape of my prison; the walls that confine me are craggy and crumbling but infused with an esoteric magic. I grab the hand of the Princess and pull her towards the monumental monoliths. The gates electrify; like a lightning leader between the Princess' soul and the gates themselves, banishing the shadowy demons that stalk her and me. We’re in this together. She’s Yorda, and I’m Ico.This is an interactive poem, not a movie. All that is frivolous without beauty is abandoned, and you are left with the core heart of what videogames could be. Ico manages to shed the menus that eject the player from the digital reality; you have your weapon and your key. Your key walks.This game couldn’t have been created anywhere but Japan. Eastern videogame designers don’t distinguish between style and content, the joy of doing is as an important part of what makes up a game as the visuals. Western game producers maybe able to make beautiful lightshows with a detached and intangible ‘story’, but they rarely tend to fuse the two together; doing, creating and interacting go hand-in-hand with observing.This is the medium evolving; Ico displays the beauty of control leading the beauty of design. What we need is not more MIP mapped sweat beads rolling down the photo mapped NFL player’s face, but consideration in what we want to represent, how we represent it and how that representation really works. As our toy’s become increasingly more sophisticated so do we.Ico is far from ugly, yet it’s as far from anal about its polygon count. It’s the Zenith moment in design, where play is considered in the role of this constructed world. It’s stylised and detached, playing within its restraints rather than trying to attain a flawed representation of something ‘real world’. That is clear in its near abandonment of dialogue.I’m in Ico’s world and I’m more than sympathetic to my toil against blocks, leavers, shadow demons and, rather unfortunately, Yorda’s AI.