At the moment I feel pretty positive about a lot of talk and other things being made around videogames. This isn't to discount the immeasurable awful stuff, the mediocre stuff, etc., but I have some warm feelings RE the future. There are some good, new (to me, at least) podcasts (EG Spawn on Me, and Woodland Secrets), and I've particularly been enjoying some videogame-centric essay film type things (which inspired some Minecraft videos I made, and will probably lead to a better, more careful video essay in the future) like On Walking Sims, by Dylan Schneider, and various things by Zolani Stewart, Liz Ryerson's Doom and Wolfenstein 3D related videos, and Clyde Bink's Battlefield 3 videos. I like the film essay as a form. It's a really rich seam to tap into (Chris Marker's a good place to start for anyone interested, and Godard has some great ones (and there's plenty from people who aren't guys and who aren't French;), and I'm looking forward to lots more. Also looking forward to Youtube being less full of videogame videos made by obnoxious people.
It's cool to be in a painting and have a jet fly by
and then get to shoot some bullets at it
and know that there's a person driving that jet
and they can tell there are bullets flying at them
So! I'm writing this post to talk specifically about Clyde's Battlefield 3 videos, here are links to all of them:
I really like the enthusiasm you can hear in Clyde's voice when he's playing with the game: trying to set up situations, interacting with other players, and explain where his satisfaction is coming from, and what he's trying to do.
The interacting with other players part is probably what I find most stimulating RE my own thoughts about making things. The fun he has is much less disruptive than the behaviour expects. It's generous, communal. He invites other players to take part, though the game doesn't really facilitate that kind of communication, let alone create expectations of it. It's a kind of détournement, to use the buzz-word. And it gets me thinking about ownership and virtual space, and ownership and play, and control of space, and squatting. In these videos it seems like there are parallel universes, with Clyde in one, and the other people in another. Though that's not always true. (perhaps unlike myself) Clyde says that getting shot at helps him appreciate the space. Going against the game makes those experiences more rare, was my first thought RE that.
The videos are also funny! Especially getting stabbed while lying on the ground trying to set up a little game. Perhaps playing in another way that would be frustrating? Perhaps, like I was saying about the parallel universes (maybe it's better to talk about them as contexts. Maybe they're also like different languages), it's when these contexts bump again each other that's most interesting?
Oneiric Gardens, by Lilith.
There's some pro climbing in those videos above, I reckon. Do not invite me to your house, I will get on your roof.
Oneiric Gardens is a very pretty collection of play spaces, organised as one connected world. I'm struggling to say things about it, for some reason. But anyway!, I highly recommended it. Though you should play with it before watching my videos.
Dancing Girls, by clyde.
Dancing Girls is lovely. You play a chap with concertina, and each button press changes the note played, as well as the dance move performed by your friends in yellow skirts. The arrow keys determine if you are pushing or pulling the bellows, which also effects the note played and dance performed.
That embedded video is me playing. Like any other time I touch an accordion-related instrument things turn out melancholy. I must've watched it at least fifteen times.
Emotica, by Anna Anthropy.
Emotica is like a ZZT game, with a contemporary glyph set (emoticons from either IOS or Android; player's choice), instead of DOS. As a person who is not familiar with either operating system I gain nothing from familiarity with the glyphs, but that didn't seem super important.
You control a smiley face, and wander round a flick-screen world, bumping into other things, trigger sounds (sound samples all taken from Klik & Play, I think, which act as their own little set of sound-glyphs), text, glyph changes, and some other things. I think my favourite is just stomping in the leaves, which triggers (random seeming) piano notes. Part of the charm is how well and inventively the limited glyph set is used to communicate/represent, and how surprised we are by the result of our attempted interactions. There are plenty of nice surprises here! Plenty of smiles generated! Smile Generator is a nice name for a genre.
As Anthropy says:
what made the ascii characters so versatile as atoms of a world was a low-res vagueness that allowed a single shape to serve as many different objects. hi-res emoji are much more specific, which i think just makes them more absurd. characters are way more loaded.
And I think the explicitness of the glyphs helps that surprise factor, which, in my limited experience, is not as strong in ZZT games. Some sort of surprise/inventiveness scale.
The small size of the world and set of potential interactions, and how easy it is to gauge their quantities, suggests a goal of 'see everything and touch everything', but I'm not sure that's too much of a negative here.
Hmmm. This all reads a bit dry, so far. I like this thing a lot. I would like to make a 3-D smile generator. You should play it! She's also working on a game about cute gay cats in a forest with a similar structure. All the games of Anthropy's I've played have been very strong mechanically, very well designed, quite restrictive in their required play-style. This is an interesting and playful departure!
A good essay proposing a Formalist approach to thinking about videogames, and not treating games as puzzles, as things to be gotten or solved.
It's refreshing reading videogame writing by another artist (one who went through the same University course as me, no less), and reminds me of how frustrating it can be reading writing about videogames because of how old-fashioned it often is.
This basic distrust of the opaque pervades game culture [see footnote 1]. In broad pop-cultural terms, games are expected ideally to be fun/digestible/gratifying, but if that's not possible then they should at least be meaningful (i.e. if I can't play it like a game, I should at least be able to read it like a book). The problem with this attitude is that it doesn't leave game critics particularly well-equipped to engage with works that don't hold up to analytical scrutiny. This isn't to say that Mountain should not be regarded analytically — this just probably isn't the best way to read it.
Unfinished things. Fragments. Impossible room escape games. Some notes:
Sunken Factory is polished plastic architecture bones. The Laputa games contain credible PSX-era grey and walljumping in an enclosed outdoor environment. Walled Crossroads takes place somewhere similar. Abandoned Sepulchre has lovely grey texturing and floaty jumping. It's my favourite.
vidconrelated
Destroy Your Home, by Juliette Porée.
This blog was started when I was thinking about games as performance spaces, and about performing them / in them as art works. That's become less interesting to me now (that must have been in ), but the types of games that facilitate this are still just as interesting.
What got all this ticking over in my mind was playing Juliette Porée's game Destroy Your Home. I keep returning to this game when thinking about performance and games, and openness and games so I wanted to start the blog with it. I recorded a bunch of Let's Plays of it (and lost many trying to figure out how recording works), and have since recorded LPs of a lot more of Porée's 3-D games (all the ones I could find, in fact).
I still can't grasp what it is about this game that works so well, so I'll just list things and see if anything comes of it:
The game has lovely music, which is attached to radios (and a dog)—so, diagetic—and is able to be pushed around and arranged just like everything else.
So, yeah, everything is made from simple Unity objects, some welded together to make things slightly more complex (tables, plants), and is able to be pushed around. The walls are made of blocks, somewhat like the blocks in the Super Mario games.
There is a dog. Attached to the dog is a lovely piece of organ music I need to ask the name of. The dog is an image on a polygon. When you are on its reverse face the image is flipped.
The house is only a small part of the world.
The textures give enough of a description (along with the title), without being particularly, um, explicit, I think. How representative the objects in my games should be is something I am always wrestling with. I am also bad at applying textures, somehow.
Apart from the blocks that make up the walls, the other parts of the house, the floors/ceilings, are large rectangles. These two shapes collapse well together!
The destructibility, the first time it is encountered, is a surprise. You make go to walk down the stairs, try to jump out a window, and then the house starts to wobble, maybe crumble. It's a big surprise, in the sense that it reveals the games main mechanic.
I am easily amused in games. Mostly I just like jumping on things, especially if I am jumping awkwardly into places I feel like I should be in. Destroy Your Home is kind of a tool for randomly generating things I like to jump on, and also a tool for constructing things I would like to jump on.
On first encountering the ending I was disappointed, I wanted the length of my play to be my own decision. Now I think it's kind of sweet. It's a game that leaves you alone. to play as you wish, with a nice set of toys; so having the developer pop-in to say thanks for playing—I don't know—it just feels really sincere.
There was something about Brecht and social gest I wanted to work in here.
