The Marriage is an experimental art game created by Rod Humble and released for Microsoft Windows in March 2007.

The player's actions cause pink and blue squares to increase or decrease in both size and opacity, representing the balance of personal needs in a relationship.

The game received praise for its innovative concept and design, as well as criticism for its heavy reliance on Humble's accompanying written explanations, and for its depiction of simplistic gender roles.

By combining heavily constrained mechanisms for interaction and control with abstract visuals, The Marriage encourages experimentation and meaning-making based on kinds of engagement and interpretation.

The player's actions or inaction enlarge or shrink pink and blue squares, increase or decrease their opacity, and move them towards or away from each other.

The Marriage is his second attempt at a game which derives personal meaning primarily through mechanics rather than audio, video, or other traditional storytelling, following A Walk With Max and preceding Stars Over Half Moon Bay.

[2][9] The core ideas behind The Marriage began while Humble was on a trip to Carmel, California, with his wife, and was developed over the weeks that followed through a process he described as "like carving with the grain of the wood or painting with the brushstrokes rather than against them.

[14] Bogost compared it to Braid and Passage, games which share several properties: "procedural rhetoric, introspection, abstraction, subjective representation, and strong authorship.

"[3][19] Starting with Humble's statement that the game is intended to be an expression of "how marriage feels," Game Development professor Doris Rusch wrote that she found the gameplay too far abstracted from a relationship such that it "does not actually model the experience of being in a relationship, but depicts from an outsider's view the reflection process about its mechanisms.

"[3] In an interview, Humble commented that the most common criticism he received was that the documentation he provided to explain the game was too detailed, though he did not regret including it because he felt it was important to communicate his intention.

"[12] Writing for MTV, Stephen Totilo expressed that the difficulty he encountered in playing the game and his inability to beat it actually generated anxiety about his own relationship.

[9] Humble told IGN he wanted to avoid player failure but explained that while he tries to subvert traditional elements of video games, in practice doing so is challenging: "you discover quickly why they are used too much, they are very useful tools which get you out of tricky design situations all the time.

[26] Others criticized the premise, arguing against reducing the complexities and ambiguities of human experience in order to correspond to simplified representation and a fixed model of interaction.

"[20] Treanor, et al. credit Humble's approach with helping "to inspire a proceduralist movement of game designers".

Purho, who called it "the most interesting game presented" at the 2007 Experimental Gameplay Workshop, created The Divorce as an April Fools' Day clone of Pong with a similar artistic explanation.