From 2004 to 2011, they practiced voluntary simplicity, living on a budget of less than fifteen thousand dollars a year in towns such as Potsdam, New York, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Rohrer, his wife, and their three children live in Davis because it has what they value: good food co-op, good farmer’s market, bicycle friendliness. “It had a pool on the roof, and everyone was in their bikinis up there,” he said. He said that long ago, back when he “tried working in the ad industry,” he had a meeting at a place like NeueHouse. He talks quickly, with the calm presence of a guru. He was wearing camouflage pants and a punk-band T-shirt that said “ DEAD BARS” above an illustration of a skeleton in a spacesuit. “Well, it is a club, right?” Rohrer is six feet eight. “When I first walked in, I thought it was a club,” Rohrer told me. We had found a quiet conference room in the building’s core. Before the event, Rohrer showed me his games on his laptop. NeueHouse has the atmosphere of a tech incubator crossed with a popular restaurant-five stories of elegant young professionals drinking wine and espresso, sitting in front of laptops instead of plates, patrons and servers alike zipping around in a mood of anxious exhilaration. That night, he was the star of an event at NeueHouse, the vast private-membership work space “for the ambitious and the curious” on Twenty-fifth Street, in which he discussed video games and art in front of an eager crowd. His work is the subject of “The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer,” the first full-scale museum show devoted to the video games of a single artist, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College his game Passage, from 2007, is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. On a recent Tuesday evening, the video-game creator Jason Rohrer was visiting Manhattan from Davis, California.

Photograph Courtesy Jason Rohrer / Davis Museum at Wellesley College The video-game creator Jason Rohrer’s work is the subject of a show at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

State of survival game artwork