VIDEO
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's dungeon design | Boss Keys
§
Are Bullshots Illegal?
§
A Love Letter to Grim Fandango
§
Errant Signal - Oxenfree
§
The PS4 Pro - Changing the Console Market - Extra Credit
§
Why We Remember Bioshock's Fort Frolic | Game Maker's Toolkit
§
Review: Japanese Gaming Restaurant
§
Errant Signal - Firewatch (Spoilers!)
§
Errant Signal - Devil Daggers
§
Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? (The Death of the Adventure Game)
§
Errant Signal - Anatomy (Spoilers)
WRITTEN
No Wrong Way To Play — Transistor - Romeo and Juliet
§
Reverse Design: Final Fantasy 7
§
Can love fix Life is Strange?
§
Indie Horror Month 2016: The Quiet Apocalypse of 'The Final Station'
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Halloween 12/11
§HALLOWEEN
Spooky Halloween Spectertacular
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/2rlzn2/the-final-bosman-spooky-halloween-spectertacular
§
Extra Credits - Horror That Lingers - How the Uncanny Instills Fear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSKtTBjSBg0
§
Extra Credits - Shiver with Antici-pation - How Horror Games Create a Tension Cycle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyiAR2BXtKU
§
The Evolution of Horror in Videogames | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrZYUN8EoNk
§
Errant Signal - Alien Isolation (Spoilers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh-FjR4lWOY
§
Horror, in general, and escapism, in particular, is often more popular in times of economic downturn, when you want to be somewhere else.”
/.../
There’s a disillusionment from the classic era of cyberpunk that makes a revival now seem fairly natural, I think.” Natural or not, the revival is in full force, and it’s becoming a strong and subversive undercurrent in the indie games space.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/187163-cynicism-recession-and-the-resurgence-of-cyberpunk/
§§§§§
So, what horror games do I look forward to? There are a couple. I guess I'm most excited about Silent Hills, after all. Especially after finally playing P.T I'm really excited, which is a first in a while when it comes to the Silent Hill franchise, and when I give it some thought, when it comes to blockbuster horror titles. And although I hope P.T isn't representative of what Silent Hills will be in terms of gameplay, and indeed is both too scary and too puzzley for me to bear as a full-length game, I do enjoy the direction it seems to be taking. It's refreshing, and hopefully will have an engaging story, considering it's Kojima and Del Toro designing the damn thing.
Besides Silent Hills, there is also Epanalepsis, a spiritual follow-up to Catachresis (one of my favorite games/horror games from last year), which just might be coming out before the longest night of this year. Catachresis was horror just as I love it - not too scary, with a heavy story focus, and a world of nostalgia, or wonder, or sadness, or something else sublime. Not just horror with monsters and flight-or-flight, but a space inhabited with people (or the remnants of such) and thus infused with complex social, secondary and tertiary emotions which in combination with just the right amount of anxiety, uncanniness and fear might spark something profound.
Then there's also Soma from Frictional Games (Penumbra, Amnesia) to look forward. I didn't enjoy Penumbra nor Amnesia very much, but they're bound to make something which I will enjoy eventually, considering how good their theory and blog is. If nothing else, the discussions surrounding their creations are fertile ground for the video game community and the betterment of future horror games, so there's always that.
Finally, Draugen by Ragnar Tørnquist. If there's anyone doing good story in video games, it's Ragnar with hir Longest Journey series. Inspired by Whedon's writing, and treading by now familiar Dear Esther-esque ground, this just might turn out to be quite awesome.
§§§§§
What about this Halloween then, and the horror games (worth playing, which for example excludes games such as "Among the Sleep") of this year? Well, a lot of short games, that's what. Besides "You Won't Tell Anyone, Right?" by Oxeren, a chilling 15 minutes game dealing with heavy stuff such as abuse, trauma, anger and forgiveness, I would like to single out one artist - Kitty Horrorshow. Hir Chyrza and The Cradle of Eve are among the most disturbing and awesoome Lovecraftian games I've played. Lovecraft (as a genre) has always been something which exalts and inspires me, yet fails to deliver (with some notable exceptions being Eternal Darkness, Nestlings, and a few other games). But these pieces here - wow. Chyrza and Dust City are first person walking simulators, while The Cradle of Eve, Pretty Girl and daymare #1: "ritual" are interactive fictions made in Twine. Continuing with interactive fictions, there is a game which isn't quite horror, but it is Kitty Horrorshow (or well, 1/18th seeing how the game is a collab by 18 different contributors). The game in question is You Were Made For Loneliness, a wonderful entity of unrealized potential - as a game, as a work of interactive fiction, as unfulfilled love, as a missed chance at story synthesis, and much more. Many different strands and voices appear in the game, and although they do relate thematically and complement each-other nicely, there is still something missing there which would make the work a coherent one, say, the voice which remembers actually twining the different voices together somehow, being more than just a vehicle for exploring different voices. But what it lacks in unity, it makes up for in covering the ground which makes up the many faces of love - desperate, across time and space, sinister, earnest, bleak, hoping, caring, yearning. It made me remember what Avellone said about how love is depicted in video games and that they would be going for something else than romance in Pillars of Eternity, something I look forward to exploring:
So if I were to implement a romance subplot in Eternity - I wouldn’t. I’d examine interpersonal relationships from another angle and I wouldn’t confine it to love and romance. Maybe I’d explore it after a “loving” relationship crashed and burned, and one or both was killed in the aftermath enough for them to see if it had really been worth it spending the last few years of their physical existence chained to each other in a dance of human misery and/or a plateau of soul-killing compromise. Or maybe I’d explore a veteran’s love affair with his craft of murder and allowing souls to be freed to travel beyond their bleeding shell, or a Cipher’s obsession with plucking the emotions of deep-rooted souls to try and see what makes people attracted to each other beyond their baser instincts and discovers love... specifically, his love of manipulating others. You could build an entire dungeon and quest where he devotes himself to replicating facsimiles of love, reducer a Higher Love to a baser thing and using NPCs he encounters as puppets for his experimentations, turning something supposedly beautiful into something filthy, mechanical, but surrounded by blank-eyed soul-twisted drones echoing all the hollow Disney-like platitudes and fairy tale existence where everyone lives happily ever after. The really long piece of writing furthest down in this blog post is an excerpt from one of the memories the player-avatar has in "You Were Made...", a piece I think Avellone would approve of.
§§§§§
Now, finally, for some lists. Best implementations of horror in works of interactive fiction - a short list indeed!
my father’s long, long legs (michael lutz). Slow, meticulous madness and the ways in which it affects those close to it. "Basically a short story about a family in which the father, one day, goes down into the dirt-floor basement with a brand-new shovel and begins to dig…and dig…and dig. And he won’t stop digging."
Shrapnel (Adam Cadre). My favorite work from Cadre, together with the most classic of classics that is Photopia. Shrapnel is the post-traumatic stress disorder of Jacob's Ladder combined with the jumbled identity-mismatch and shifting time-realities of Philip K. Dick.
§§§§§
Most interesting horror-like games from 2013 and 2014 not already covered:
Knock Knock. There is a wall which separates the spectral from the carnal. Horror is often about the protrusion of one unto the other, when sacred barriers which keep at bay turn derranged and thus derail the order of things, be it the fleshy id-monsters usurping the phantasmatic super-ego in the form of zombies, or the terrors of modernity haunting the body-politics with its savage instrumentality (well, that too might actually be in the form of zombies, this time as wage-slaves, but I had Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs in mind specifically). Knock Knock seeks to further tear down barriers, and one of the ways in which it does this is by asking you as a player to interact with the world outside of the video game, by means which have origins before and outside the designers creative capabilities. A haunting experience, in more ways than one.
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. The downward spiral of conflating humans with tools, humanity with filth. Here piggy, piggy!!!
Year Walk. Swedish folklore in a forest of mythical encounters. Quite unique and beautiful, albeit mostly an atmospherical experience.
§§§§§
Example of a player-avatar memory from You Were Made For Loneliness :
Each night I spend in front of this enchanted window innocculates me to the mundane. Each night I become more and more tolerant, inured, and I must dig deeper and find stranger sights, or come away unsatisfied, all my nerves intact. I must go deeper into the woods, link by related link.
The mouth of the woods is bright and vivid, wreathed in the familiar and comfortable. Dubstep remixes, clips from popular television, people hurting themselves comedically. Click one and the cabaret begins, glitter and distraction, vapid entertainment in fast, short doses. Continue clicking, following a winding trail of related videos. One might lose hours in this way and find nothing at all, but there are times, after wandering long and far enough into pale-faced circadian interruption, deep into night and well beyond sleep's reach, a link appears to something unusual, something wrong.
Click this link and proceed to watch two minutes of garbled footage with stop-motion dolls dancing naked in a rusty sink. A MIDI song drones and taps, exhumed from some ancient homepage of internet pre-history. Compression artifacts swim across the screen like a membrane, like ectoplasm, distorting everything, masking anything that moves too quickly. Now all of the related videos are strange, unnerving, uncanny, and there are no more cats to be found in the side-bar, no more dubstep remixes to anchor one to the familiar. Just more strangeness, more smiling digital shadow-plays waiting to take your hand and lead you deeper.
'im in the weird part of (the woods) again'
Most shut their browsers, attempt sleep, tell their friends about some of the fucked up videos they watched last night, joke, laugh, ha ha. But when they return to the woods again they stay close to its mouth, close to light and innocuous distraction, wary now of links that would pull them off the path and into slithering uncertainty.
I do not want to stay at the mouth of the woods.
My list of favorites is a menagerie of jittering 3D characters, melting puppets, mask-wearing figures writhing and moaning in dark, dirty rooms. These are my anchors, the lines that lead me directly back to the stranger inner-depths. Many are contrived, manufactured things, deliberate and calculated to seem disturbing, frightening, psychological. These are trite, but at least they bring one closer to the true exhibits: videos not designed to be unsettling but unsettling despite, videos made with candor and sincerity and put forth by people who don't see the strangeness of their own creations, find beauty where others find quiet revulsion. These are the purest, the most deeply upsetting, the most profoundly addictive. In them, one can see the creator's desperation to communicate, to entertain, to be funny or cute or artistic, and the unnerving results of their failures are their own breed of fascinating.
The authenticity, the honesty, is what makes these so deeply frightening. Like the difference between a slasher movie and a snuff film found in an empty house. It is a difference appreciated by few, feared by most, analyzed by seemingly none.
None but myself. And, as I am soon to find, one other.
A favorite video of mine: a pot-bellied CGI farmer stands shirtless in a field of whipping corn-stalks beneath a gunmetal blue sky. His house, a cardboard prop in the background behind him, is empty and unlit. He waggles his finger, singing a droning song with a synthesized voice. His animation loops around on itself, forward to back then back to fore. His eyes are black holes in his immaculate flesh-colored face. The content of the video is too absurd to be deliberately frightening; its creator's intention is unknowable, but I would guess humor, or artistic experimentation. And yet watching that sky, the dark reeds of the farmer's field lashing as in a tornadic wind, upsets me deeply. I have watched this video at least sixty times. The comments are always the same.
dafuq
nightmare fuel
lyrics?
im in the weird part of (the woods) again
Only tonight, just now, as the song concludes abruptly and the farmer's face freezes in a rictus of artifical unlife, I see a comment that separates itself.
nerva_blood_radio (6 hours ago) says:
i have heard this song whispered. i would let that sky take me and pull me apart.
I stare at the comment in surprise, admiration, curiosity. A warmth in my core, something like elation, begins to grow. Elation, or relief to know that there is someone else who can see beauty in the bizarre, who can find wonder in those things that frighten and confuse and disturb so many others. Someone else who can stare at such displays of unflagging surrealism and wish to be lost within them.
I send them a message, something I have never done.
"Beautiful comment. I wish more people had your perspective. How do you feel about robots?"
Three sentences composed in half as many hours. I am fearful; I have never known how to communicate with people. I betray my strangeness even in simple conversation, and they are immediately repelled. But I must reach this one, I think, because they understand the way I understand. I force myself to be concise for fear of sounding desperate. Finally I send the message, along with a link to another of my favorites, a home-made animatronic mannequin singing its praises for its creator, waxing euphoric, twitching artificially to the sound of a cacophonous synth-music arpeggio that echoes its way up from the deepest point of the Uncanny Valley.
Days pass, and in that time I spend more time thinking and hoping and dreading a response than I care to admit. Then it comes.
nerva_blood_radio:
aaahaa... shes a good signer... so happy—— thank you!!!! i like this one tooOO ... maybe youll like it too... click?.......... bye....
I click the attached link.
The title is a garble of meaningless shapes. The comments are in Chinese characters. In the frame is darkness, enough that I'm required to full-screen the video and shut off my second monitor. Compression artifacts swim and churn, poorly-recorded silence warbles in my ears. My eyes adjust, and I think that what I'm seeing is a cramped apartment. A white square, maybe a refrigerator, dominates the left side of the screen, sentinel of a kitchen that is little more than a linoleum-tiled alcove. The video seems to be recorded from a camera that has been left running on a table. There is no sound except the guttering background silence for seven minutes. Then there is a moan, long and wailing and distant as though from another room. It sounds pained, show a derelict might wail in the throes of some chronic malady. Then, in the last seconds, a shape, a fragmented blob of muted light, shifts to the side at the far end of the 'kitchen.' The video ends.
It was a face, I realize.
A face that had been staring at me from the moment the video began. A face so perfectly blended with the swimming low-res shadows that I had failed completely to notice it, until that slight, final movement betrayed it as a living being rather than a cluster of wan light. For seven minutes they sat in utter darkness, staring at a camera left recording on a table. For the first time in memory I look around myself, into the darkness of my apartment, fearing that something may be there with me.
I have never found anything so chillingly sublime. I return nerva_blood_radio's message to thank them, and link them to another of my favorites.
For weeks, this becomes our relationship. Each night I check for their response, view it, shudder physically, respond. There are times when we link one another to something we have already seen, and there is a delight in that as well, an affirmation of kinship. A few times I become brave and ask questions, 'how've you been' and 'what're you up to'. They never answer these, and I stop asking. Soon we exchange personal e-mail addresses so that we can link one another to videos from more obscure sources. Videos in formats that I've never heard of, requiring special codecs and foreign language packs, videos with viewcounts in the single-digits. With each night that passes, their strangeness, their horror, their beauty increases.
I begin to imagine nerva_blood_radio as a sort of digital goddess, a monstrous cybernetic deity, a slithering wire-queen nestled deep down in some web-strewn data-swamp, divine matron of all that seeks a way beneath one's skin. I begin to worship her. I begin to love her. She, this deity, becomes my muse, my reason to wake, the force that drives me and the sole supplier of my greatest addiction. She had exposed me to a world beneath the skin of all that I had known but to which I felt immediately that I belonged, a world of dancing skeletal mascots and videos washed out by grain and comperssion to the point that they conveyed no real imagery at all, only visual chaos and noise and emotion. Emotion that's impossible to explain to anyone who has never woken up sweating and panting and crying from a nightmare they can't remember. A world of people in cramped apartments like mine all over the world, gathered together to present each other with caught fragments of nightmares and glitchy half-broken tone peoms told not with words but with filthy, empty rooms and twitching shapes.
One night she sends me a video with no description. She attaches it directly to an email message, something she's never done before. No context, no source link, none of her usual stuttered, seductive cadence prefacing what I am about to see. Just a single video file, the name of which is a meaningless scramble of characters. I download it, run it with a homebrew video player which translates the name into blocky white characters at the bottom of the frame as the video begins to play:
crushed_locust_doesnt_die
Pavement, a road somewhere, lined with dust and brush. Wan blue-purple light and slivers of orange horizon (dusk) as the camera moves, its wielder breathing hard, walking slowly toward something. A shape, dark and small, immobilized on the road. The camera-holder approaches the shape and leans down, taking a long, deliberate shot of the thing on the ground. It's a fat locust with a long body and a wounded leg, laying on its side in the dust, the far back tip of its thorax burst open as though it had been clipped by the windshield of a passing car. It struggles weakly along the ground. The cameraman giggles, an oily, wheezing sound, lowering the camera until the lens is nearly touching the black, unblinking eye. The camera adjusts its focus. The black eye gleams. More wheezing, more harsh-breath giggling as the camera pulls back and jostles. A foot appears, rubber-booted and wide. A loud grunt and the foot descends on the body of the locust, slamming down on the pavement with a flat 'clap' sound. The foot withdraws and the cameraman is giggling and lowering the camera to survey the wreckage of the locust's body. It is visibly destroyed, the chitin of its green exoskeleton splintered and broken, seeping insect slime. The body is still for several moments, then continues attempting to drag its way across the pavement, its ruined legs continuing to work and twitch despite the assault. The cameraman's breathing halts. The locust glowers up at the camera from the weeping pit of its shattered eye. The cameraman loses composure, swings his arm to the side, camera in hand, and there's grunting and more of that same flat clapping sound, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The cameraman is breathing hard. Camera turns forward again, finds the locust, lowers to the ground. The pulpy mess scraped across the pavement gives no indication that it once was a living creature. Tiny pin-points of orange dusk-light glimmer in the smear, and the body is a shattered memory made of a thousand broken slivers of carapace. A single twisted leg is the only discernible shape, connected to the splattered remains by a thick yellow strand. More wheezing, panicked laughter. Labored breathing.
The leg continues to move, but it is not just the fading rictus of death. It continues to move, continues to push, continues to struggle against the road. The cameraman makes a high, loud, protean noise. The image blurs as the camera swings away somewhere. The video ends.
I stare at the dark terminus of the video and my hands are shaking.
My mind hastens to consider the implications. My first question, strangely, is why did she like this? Death and snuff are not her forté. Her lack of preface confuses me as well. What did she want me to think? What did she think?
Then I begin to consider the greater implications of an insect pulverized into nothing but a dark smear of viscous biology, and yet which continues to struggle, continues to move. There is no way the video was faked, I know. It was filmed spontaeneously, unknowingly, perfectly.
I reply: "Incredible. Where did you find this?"
She responds almost instantly. I wonder if she was waiting for me to view it, staring at her inbox and awaiting my reply as I've so often done with her. I feel vain at this thought, arrogant. Does a goddess hang on the words of a worshipper?
Her reply:
he, he, he!!... i cant tell you that... its a secret... a very very special top secret, they do not want me to have it! do not know i have it!... i took it... and i showed it to you... nobody else... just you... :)... he, he, he!!...
I am floored. I feel exalted, a once-lowly element elevated by selection for something beautiful and tremendous. My breath quickens. I must send her something that rivals the splendor of what she has given me, something that will astound and enchant her as she has me. But I can think of nothing. My god-kissed elation begins to turn to panic. I do not have her sources, her seemingly inexhaustible wellsprings, none of the darknets which must be part of her dominion.
I open a dozen browser tabs and immediately point them all to the most obscure, disparate, abnormal and uncanny places I know. I spend hours pulling threads and biting my nails. No sleep. I keep searching, so eager to return the kindness she has done me, to please her and prove my worth to her after she has shown me such staggeringly particular attention.
I fail.
I lay back in my chair and press my palms to my eyes. I have spent hours, but have produced nothing. I have failed the only one who ever understood me and shared my insight and challenged my perception. My body craves sleep, but my mind rages.
From outside my window, two bright beams flash, a vehicle turning. I hear a tire squeal, a trash can upend itself, a vehicle speed away. Curious and dejected, I move to the window and look out into the streetlit night.
A dark shape moves on the pavement. With no deliberation, I grab my cell phone and go outside.
I walk downstairs, down to the street and out across my apartment's parking lot. I go to where I saw the shape, and though it is little more than a twitching, pulpy mass, I instantly recognize it. It is a raccoon, destroyed by the careless tires of an automobile. But it is more than that. I switch to my phone's camera, begin recording video. This is a gift.
The small mound of viscera is barely discernible as a living animal as it bleeds and writhes in my viewfinder, leaving a trail of congealing blood in its wake. A tiny jawbone juts upward at an insane angle, fragments of bone litter its pelt. It should be dead, and yet it struggles, pulls itself along the street towards the grass of the far side, separating itself into twitching islands of dark gore. And as it does so, I film it. I film it for whole minutes.
I return to my apartment. I transfer the video to my PC, and without editing, without changing its file name, I attach it to an email and send it to her. Then I stare at my inbox, awaiting a response. For minutes there is nothing, and my lungs feel as though they're shrinking. Then a window opens up for an instant messenger I wasn't aware I'd left running.
nerva_blood_radio (02:44:39): !!!!!!!
nerva_blood_radio (02:44:56): aaahaa, haa, haa, its so goooood!
nerva_blood_radio (02:45:09): where did you find it???
(I have not used this program since I've known her. I don't know how she got my handle. I don't care.)
mothstatic (02:46:12): I filmed it myself
mothstatic (02:46:16): on my phone
mothstatic (02:47:00): I heard a truck spin out so i went to check it and it had hit the raccoon but it kept moving like the locust in the video you sent me
mothstatic (02:47:11): I came straight home and sent it to you
mothstatic (02:47:31): you're the only one I sent it to
Further minutes of non-response, and I'm wringing my hands and pulling skin from my lip. I want her to tell her why I did it, why I sent it only to her, that I love her and worship her and that without her I would still be at the mouth of the woods. I nearly begin to type, but she preempts me:
nerva_blood_radio (02:54:01): you are so good to me.....
nerva_blood_radio (02:54:16): i love you!!.....
My heart is beating through the backs of my ribs and I struggle to breathe. I struggle this way for a minute, then begin to type, but a final message from her blinks onto my screen and then she disconnects.
nerva_blood_radio (02:55:21): send me more...
nerva_blood_radio has logged off.
Panic and elation are fighting for control of my spine. I shut off everything, take off my clothes, lay down on my futon. I don't manage to sleep until the sun has been up for hours, and when I do I sleep through until dark.
The next day, she has sent me no messages. I return to the woods and spend hours there, digging harder than I ever have, scouring every corner she ever showed me for something new and shocking and perfect to surpass the video I had taken. I can find nothing. Everything is either manufactured or hokey or senseless or ham-fisted. Even those things that used to thrill me fail to compare to the simple, terrible perfection of a ruined raccoon continuing to struggle across a road with a body that should not be alive.
The next day, the same results. I turn up nothing. No messages from her. I see the first headline news clip announcing some unknown phenomenon that is affecting the biology of increasingly large creatures in various countries. I'm beginning to feel somehow like I'm running out of time. In my inept anxiety I bite the skin around my fingernails until it bleeds.
The next day more news has crowded out the dubstep remixes and reality television recaps and autotuned parodies. From a distance, looking indirectly at the thumbnails of all that is presented to me, I divine an overwhelming bleakness. The sense of losing time heightens. I set about my work.
Hours into the night, I have had no success. Then a sudden, piercing sound comes from somewhere beneath me, down a floor, somewhere in my apartment. I begin to hear more panic-sounds, footfalls, shouts and cries. I take my phone from my desk and run outside, down to the source.
Neighbors I have only met in passing have crowded outside an open apartment door. The apartment inside is dark, and a man within is yelling, blathering wet, meaningless syllables. People are muttering words like 'gun' and 'dangerous,' shouting things like 'don't' and 'doesn't have to' and 'talk this out.' I shoulder my way forward until I can see into the room.
A naked obese man is laying back against a bare far wall. His face is puffy and streaked with tears and mucous. Each time someone addresses him, he howls something meaningless. There is a pistol in his hand. When he is not howling, he turns his head to look out his open window, looking remorseful, almost pensive. Then, all at once, he begins to raise the gun to his head. Already my fingers are around my phone, trying to pull up the video recorder. My neighbors are shouting now, jostling me. I hit record, try to find a shot, but I am being moved and churned and I can see nothing through my phone. The obese man says something I cannot hear, but which sounds like 'never' and 'to heaven,' and he puts the gun to his temple, and he pulls the trigger.
The gun barks, more quietly than I'm expecting. My neighbors are screaming. A dark fan of blood has sprayed a greasy feather-shape across the wall behind the man. He slumps down and lays still for a moment. Then his body is convulsing. His legs kick up and drum down hard against the floor, his arms whip and lash at his sides, his ruined skull lolls back and forth on his neck. His body rolls forward, puts its arms up, begins wriggling like a bloated worm trying to move forward. My neighbors continue to scream and jostle me, many of them fleeing the hallway. I stare down at my phone, at a message telling me that there is no storage capacity left. I stop recording and review the footage I have taken, and it is useless. Indiscernible. My heart writhes in my chest when I think of the perfect moment that has just been squandered, which can never be repeated, which would have been the most excellent offering.
The few neighbors remaining in the hall cover their mouths and turn away. Most have left, either in fear or maybe to call the police. The obese man's body continues to squirm and bleed and twitch and drum its heavy feet up and down. I stare at my phone, then at the body, which seems to be trying to pull itself closer to me. Then I see the gun, and my most perfect idea comes to me.
I check the hallway to see if anyone is looking. Everyone has their backs turned. The suppurating body has wormed its way into a corner and is struggling helplessly. As quickly and quietly as I can, I step forward into the room, step over the body, reach down and take the gun, slipping it in the front of my pants and hiding it beneath my shirt. Then I leave, climb the stairs, return to my room, lock my door.
I dig an old webcam out of a large tupperware container filled with cords and obsolete peripherals. It takes minutes to hook up, install drivers. Then I pull open the instant messenger and look for her name. Blessedly, she's online.
mothstatic (01:52:19) says: I have something for you, can we video
nerva_blood_radio (01:52:21) says: yes.
Sirens are howling. At the mouth of the woods, all of the brightness, all of the distraction, is gone, replaced by stern faces reporting on what is happening to the world, what is happening to the bodies. I can hear my neighbors downstairs continuing to scream and lament. I can hear the feet of the body beating the floor.
The instant messenger window expands. I see my own face, bathed in white light, framed by the darkness of my room. On her end, I see only moving shadows, the vague impression of green light streaking in strange patterns, a silhouette shaped like a crucifixion.
nerva_blood_radio (01:54:12) says: you have been so very good to me.
mothstatic (01:54:37) says: You showed me so much. I would never have found any of the beauty you showed me.
nerva_blood_radio (01:55:00) says: this will be your contribution to that beauty. i will ensure you are remembered.
I adjust the angle of my webcam, roll my chair back so that both myself and the floor around me are in frame, because I expect that is where my body will fall. I take the gun out of my pants.
mothstatic (01:56:09) says: are you recording?
nerva_blood_radio (01:56:12) says: yes.
mothstatic (01:56:28) says: I love you.
nerva_blood_radio (01:56:40) says: prove it to me. :)
The barrel is sliding between my teeth. My finger wraps around the trigger. From somewhere deep within the woods, I feel a cold wind rise.
Spooky Halloween Spectertacular
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/2rlzn2/the-final-bosman-spooky-halloween-spectertacular
§
Extra Credits - Horror That Lingers - How the Uncanny Instills Fear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSKtTBjSBg0
§
Extra Credits - Shiver with Antici-pation - How Horror Games Create a Tension Cycle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyiAR2BXtKU
§
The Evolution of Horror in Videogames | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrZYUN8EoNk
§
Errant Signal - Alien Isolation (Spoilers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh-FjR4lWOY
§
Horror, in general, and escapism, in particular, is often more popular in times of economic downturn, when you want to be somewhere else.”
/.../
There’s a disillusionment from the classic era of cyberpunk that makes a revival now seem fairly natural, I think.” Natural or not, the revival is in full force, and it’s becoming a strong and subversive undercurrent in the indie games space.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/187163-cynicism-recession-and-the-resurgence-of-cyberpunk/
§§§§§
So, what horror games do I look forward to? There are a couple. I guess I'm most excited about Silent Hills, after all. Especially after finally playing P.T I'm really excited, which is a first in a while when it comes to the Silent Hill franchise, and when I give it some thought, when it comes to blockbuster horror titles. And although I hope P.T isn't representative of what Silent Hills will be in terms of gameplay, and indeed is both too scary and too puzzley for me to bear as a full-length game, I do enjoy the direction it seems to be taking. It's refreshing, and hopefully will have an engaging story, considering it's Kojima and Del Toro designing the damn thing.
Besides Silent Hills, there is also Epanalepsis, a spiritual follow-up to Catachresis (one of my favorite games/horror games from last year), which just might be coming out before the longest night of this year. Catachresis was horror just as I love it - not too scary, with a heavy story focus, and a world of nostalgia, or wonder, or sadness, or something else sublime. Not just horror with monsters and flight-or-flight, but a space inhabited with people (or the remnants of such) and thus infused with complex social, secondary and tertiary emotions which in combination with just the right amount of anxiety, uncanniness and fear might spark something profound.
Then there's also Soma from Frictional Games (Penumbra, Amnesia) to look forward. I didn't enjoy Penumbra nor Amnesia very much, but they're bound to make something which I will enjoy eventually, considering how good their theory and blog is. If nothing else, the discussions surrounding their creations are fertile ground for the video game community and the betterment of future horror games, so there's always that.
Finally, Draugen by Ragnar Tørnquist. If there's anyone doing good story in video games, it's Ragnar with hir Longest Journey series. Inspired by Whedon's writing, and treading by now familiar Dear Esther-esque ground, this just might turn out to be quite awesome.
§§§§§
What about this Halloween then, and the horror games (worth playing, which for example excludes games such as "Among the Sleep") of this year? Well, a lot of short games, that's what. Besides "You Won't Tell Anyone, Right?" by Oxeren, a chilling 15 minutes game dealing with heavy stuff such as abuse, trauma, anger and forgiveness, I would like to single out one artist - Kitty Horrorshow. Hir Chyrza and The Cradle of Eve are among the most disturbing and awesoome Lovecraftian games I've played. Lovecraft (as a genre) has always been something which exalts and inspires me, yet fails to deliver (with some notable exceptions being Eternal Darkness, Nestlings, and a few other games). But these pieces here - wow. Chyrza and Dust City are first person walking simulators, while The Cradle of Eve, Pretty Girl and daymare #1: "ritual" are interactive fictions made in Twine. Continuing with interactive fictions, there is a game which isn't quite horror, but it is Kitty Horrorshow (or well, 1/18th seeing how the game is a collab by 18 different contributors). The game in question is You Were Made For Loneliness, a wonderful entity of unrealized potential - as a game, as a work of interactive fiction, as unfulfilled love, as a missed chance at story synthesis, and much more. Many different strands and voices appear in the game, and although they do relate thematically and complement each-other nicely, there is still something missing there which would make the work a coherent one, say, the voice which remembers actually twining the different voices together somehow, being more than just a vehicle for exploring different voices. But what it lacks in unity, it makes up for in covering the ground which makes up the many faces of love - desperate, across time and space, sinister, earnest, bleak, hoping, caring, yearning. It made me remember what Avellone said about how love is depicted in video games and that they would be going for something else than romance in Pillars of Eternity, something I look forward to exploring:
So if I were to implement a romance subplot in Eternity - I wouldn’t. I’d examine interpersonal relationships from another angle and I wouldn’t confine it to love and romance. Maybe I’d explore it after a “loving” relationship crashed and burned, and one or both was killed in the aftermath enough for them to see if it had really been worth it spending the last few years of their physical existence chained to each other in a dance of human misery and/or a plateau of soul-killing compromise. Or maybe I’d explore a veteran’s love affair with his craft of murder and allowing souls to be freed to travel beyond their bleeding shell, or a Cipher’s obsession with plucking the emotions of deep-rooted souls to try and see what makes people attracted to each other beyond their baser instincts and discovers love... specifically, his love of manipulating others. You could build an entire dungeon and quest where he devotes himself to replicating facsimiles of love, reducer a Higher Love to a baser thing and using NPCs he encounters as puppets for his experimentations, turning something supposedly beautiful into something filthy, mechanical, but surrounded by blank-eyed soul-twisted drones echoing all the hollow Disney-like platitudes and fairy tale existence where everyone lives happily ever after. The really long piece of writing furthest down in this blog post is an excerpt from one of the memories the player-avatar has in "You Were Made...", a piece I think Avellone would approve of.
§§§§§
Now, finally, for some lists. Best implementations of horror in works of interactive fiction - a short list indeed!
my father’s long, long legs (michael lutz). Slow, meticulous madness and the ways in which it affects those close to it. "Basically a short story about a family in which the father, one day, goes down into the dirt-floor basement with a brand-new shovel and begins to dig…and dig…and dig. And he won’t stop digging."
Shrapnel (Adam Cadre). My favorite work from Cadre, together with the most classic of classics that is Photopia. Shrapnel is the post-traumatic stress disorder of Jacob's Ladder combined with the jumbled identity-mismatch and shifting time-realities of Philip K. Dick.
§§§§§
Most interesting horror-like games from 2013 and 2014 not already covered:
Knock Knock. There is a wall which separates the spectral from the carnal. Horror is often about the protrusion of one unto the other, when sacred barriers which keep at bay turn derranged and thus derail the order of things, be it the fleshy id-monsters usurping the phantasmatic super-ego in the form of zombies, or the terrors of modernity haunting the body-politics with its savage instrumentality (well, that too might actually be in the form of zombies, this time as wage-slaves, but I had Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs in mind specifically). Knock Knock seeks to further tear down barriers, and one of the ways in which it does this is by asking you as a player to interact with the world outside of the video game, by means which have origins before and outside the designers creative capabilities. A haunting experience, in more ways than one.
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. The downward spiral of conflating humans with tools, humanity with filth. Here piggy, piggy!!!
Year Walk. Swedish folklore in a forest of mythical encounters. Quite unique and beautiful, albeit mostly an atmospherical experience.
§§§§§
Example of a player-avatar memory from You Were Made For Loneliness :
Each night I spend in front of this enchanted window innocculates me to the mundane. Each night I become more and more tolerant, inured, and I must dig deeper and find stranger sights, or come away unsatisfied, all my nerves intact. I must go deeper into the woods, link by related link.
The mouth of the woods is bright and vivid, wreathed in the familiar and comfortable. Dubstep remixes, clips from popular television, people hurting themselves comedically. Click one and the cabaret begins, glitter and distraction, vapid entertainment in fast, short doses. Continue clicking, following a winding trail of related videos. One might lose hours in this way and find nothing at all, but there are times, after wandering long and far enough into pale-faced circadian interruption, deep into night and well beyond sleep's reach, a link appears to something unusual, something wrong.
Click this link and proceed to watch two minutes of garbled footage with stop-motion dolls dancing naked in a rusty sink. A MIDI song drones and taps, exhumed from some ancient homepage of internet pre-history. Compression artifacts swim across the screen like a membrane, like ectoplasm, distorting everything, masking anything that moves too quickly. Now all of the related videos are strange, unnerving, uncanny, and there are no more cats to be found in the side-bar, no more dubstep remixes to anchor one to the familiar. Just more strangeness, more smiling digital shadow-plays waiting to take your hand and lead you deeper.
'im in the weird part of (the woods) again'
Most shut their browsers, attempt sleep, tell their friends about some of the fucked up videos they watched last night, joke, laugh, ha ha. But when they return to the woods again they stay close to its mouth, close to light and innocuous distraction, wary now of links that would pull them off the path and into slithering uncertainty.
I do not want to stay at the mouth of the woods.
My list of favorites is a menagerie of jittering 3D characters, melting puppets, mask-wearing figures writhing and moaning in dark, dirty rooms. These are my anchors, the lines that lead me directly back to the stranger inner-depths. Many are contrived, manufactured things, deliberate and calculated to seem disturbing, frightening, psychological. These are trite, but at least they bring one closer to the true exhibits: videos not designed to be unsettling but unsettling despite, videos made with candor and sincerity and put forth by people who don't see the strangeness of their own creations, find beauty where others find quiet revulsion. These are the purest, the most deeply upsetting, the most profoundly addictive. In them, one can see the creator's desperation to communicate, to entertain, to be funny or cute or artistic, and the unnerving results of their failures are their own breed of fascinating.
The authenticity, the honesty, is what makes these so deeply frightening. Like the difference between a slasher movie and a snuff film found in an empty house. It is a difference appreciated by few, feared by most, analyzed by seemingly none.
None but myself. And, as I am soon to find, one other.
A favorite video of mine: a pot-bellied CGI farmer stands shirtless in a field of whipping corn-stalks beneath a gunmetal blue sky. His house, a cardboard prop in the background behind him, is empty and unlit. He waggles his finger, singing a droning song with a synthesized voice. His animation loops around on itself, forward to back then back to fore. His eyes are black holes in his immaculate flesh-colored face. The content of the video is too absurd to be deliberately frightening; its creator's intention is unknowable, but I would guess humor, or artistic experimentation. And yet watching that sky, the dark reeds of the farmer's field lashing as in a tornadic wind, upsets me deeply. I have watched this video at least sixty times. The comments are always the same.
dafuq
nightmare fuel
lyrics?
im in the weird part of (the woods) again
Only tonight, just now, as the song concludes abruptly and the farmer's face freezes in a rictus of artifical unlife, I see a comment that separates itself.
nerva_blood_radio (6 hours ago) says:
i have heard this song whispered. i would let that sky take me and pull me apart.
I stare at the comment in surprise, admiration, curiosity. A warmth in my core, something like elation, begins to grow. Elation, or relief to know that there is someone else who can see beauty in the bizarre, who can find wonder in those things that frighten and confuse and disturb so many others. Someone else who can stare at such displays of unflagging surrealism and wish to be lost within them.
I send them a message, something I have never done.
"Beautiful comment. I wish more people had your perspective. How do you feel about robots?"
Three sentences composed in half as many hours. I am fearful; I have never known how to communicate with people. I betray my strangeness even in simple conversation, and they are immediately repelled. But I must reach this one, I think, because they understand the way I understand. I force myself to be concise for fear of sounding desperate. Finally I send the message, along with a link to another of my favorites, a home-made animatronic mannequin singing its praises for its creator, waxing euphoric, twitching artificially to the sound of a cacophonous synth-music arpeggio that echoes its way up from the deepest point of the Uncanny Valley.
Days pass, and in that time I spend more time thinking and hoping and dreading a response than I care to admit. Then it comes.
nerva_blood_radio:
aaahaa... shes a good signer... so happy—— thank you!!!! i like this one tooOO ... maybe youll like it too... click?.......... bye....
I click the attached link.
The title is a garble of meaningless shapes. The comments are in Chinese characters. In the frame is darkness, enough that I'm required to full-screen the video and shut off my second monitor. Compression artifacts swim and churn, poorly-recorded silence warbles in my ears. My eyes adjust, and I think that what I'm seeing is a cramped apartment. A white square, maybe a refrigerator, dominates the left side of the screen, sentinel of a kitchen that is little more than a linoleum-tiled alcove. The video seems to be recorded from a camera that has been left running on a table. There is no sound except the guttering background silence for seven minutes. Then there is a moan, long and wailing and distant as though from another room. It sounds pained, show a derelict might wail in the throes of some chronic malady. Then, in the last seconds, a shape, a fragmented blob of muted light, shifts to the side at the far end of the 'kitchen.' The video ends.
It was a face, I realize.
A face that had been staring at me from the moment the video began. A face so perfectly blended with the swimming low-res shadows that I had failed completely to notice it, until that slight, final movement betrayed it as a living being rather than a cluster of wan light. For seven minutes they sat in utter darkness, staring at a camera left recording on a table. For the first time in memory I look around myself, into the darkness of my apartment, fearing that something may be there with me.
I have never found anything so chillingly sublime. I return nerva_blood_radio's message to thank them, and link them to another of my favorites.
For weeks, this becomes our relationship. Each night I check for their response, view it, shudder physically, respond. There are times when we link one another to something we have already seen, and there is a delight in that as well, an affirmation of kinship. A few times I become brave and ask questions, 'how've you been' and 'what're you up to'. They never answer these, and I stop asking. Soon we exchange personal e-mail addresses so that we can link one another to videos from more obscure sources. Videos in formats that I've never heard of, requiring special codecs and foreign language packs, videos with viewcounts in the single-digits. With each night that passes, their strangeness, their horror, their beauty increases.
I begin to imagine nerva_blood_radio as a sort of digital goddess, a monstrous cybernetic deity, a slithering wire-queen nestled deep down in some web-strewn data-swamp, divine matron of all that seeks a way beneath one's skin. I begin to worship her. I begin to love her. She, this deity, becomes my muse, my reason to wake, the force that drives me and the sole supplier of my greatest addiction. She had exposed me to a world beneath the skin of all that I had known but to which I felt immediately that I belonged, a world of dancing skeletal mascots and videos washed out by grain and comperssion to the point that they conveyed no real imagery at all, only visual chaos and noise and emotion. Emotion that's impossible to explain to anyone who has never woken up sweating and panting and crying from a nightmare they can't remember. A world of people in cramped apartments like mine all over the world, gathered together to present each other with caught fragments of nightmares and glitchy half-broken tone peoms told not with words but with filthy, empty rooms and twitching shapes.
One night she sends me a video with no description. She attaches it directly to an email message, something she's never done before. No context, no source link, none of her usual stuttered, seductive cadence prefacing what I am about to see. Just a single video file, the name of which is a meaningless scramble of characters. I download it, run it with a homebrew video player which translates the name into blocky white characters at the bottom of the frame as the video begins to play:
crushed_locust_doesnt_die
Pavement, a road somewhere, lined with dust and brush. Wan blue-purple light and slivers of orange horizon (dusk) as the camera moves, its wielder breathing hard, walking slowly toward something. A shape, dark and small, immobilized on the road. The camera-holder approaches the shape and leans down, taking a long, deliberate shot of the thing on the ground. It's a fat locust with a long body and a wounded leg, laying on its side in the dust, the far back tip of its thorax burst open as though it had been clipped by the windshield of a passing car. It struggles weakly along the ground. The cameraman giggles, an oily, wheezing sound, lowering the camera until the lens is nearly touching the black, unblinking eye. The camera adjusts its focus. The black eye gleams. More wheezing, more harsh-breath giggling as the camera pulls back and jostles. A foot appears, rubber-booted and wide. A loud grunt and the foot descends on the body of the locust, slamming down on the pavement with a flat 'clap' sound. The foot withdraws and the cameraman is giggling and lowering the camera to survey the wreckage of the locust's body. It is visibly destroyed, the chitin of its green exoskeleton splintered and broken, seeping insect slime. The body is still for several moments, then continues attempting to drag its way across the pavement, its ruined legs continuing to work and twitch despite the assault. The cameraman's breathing halts. The locust glowers up at the camera from the weeping pit of its shattered eye. The cameraman loses composure, swings his arm to the side, camera in hand, and there's grunting and more of that same flat clapping sound, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The cameraman is breathing hard. Camera turns forward again, finds the locust, lowers to the ground. The pulpy mess scraped across the pavement gives no indication that it once was a living creature. Tiny pin-points of orange dusk-light glimmer in the smear, and the body is a shattered memory made of a thousand broken slivers of carapace. A single twisted leg is the only discernible shape, connected to the splattered remains by a thick yellow strand. More wheezing, panicked laughter. Labored breathing.
The leg continues to move, but it is not just the fading rictus of death. It continues to move, continues to push, continues to struggle against the road. The cameraman makes a high, loud, protean noise. The image blurs as the camera swings away somewhere. The video ends.
I stare at the dark terminus of the video and my hands are shaking.
My mind hastens to consider the implications. My first question, strangely, is why did she like this? Death and snuff are not her forté. Her lack of preface confuses me as well. What did she want me to think? What did she think?
Then I begin to consider the greater implications of an insect pulverized into nothing but a dark smear of viscous biology, and yet which continues to struggle, continues to move. There is no way the video was faked, I know. It was filmed spontaeneously, unknowingly, perfectly.
I reply: "Incredible. Where did you find this?"
She responds almost instantly. I wonder if she was waiting for me to view it, staring at her inbox and awaiting my reply as I've so often done with her. I feel vain at this thought, arrogant. Does a goddess hang on the words of a worshipper?
Her reply:
he, he, he!!... i cant tell you that... its a secret... a very very special top secret, they do not want me to have it! do not know i have it!... i took it... and i showed it to you... nobody else... just you... :)... he, he, he!!...
I am floored. I feel exalted, a once-lowly element elevated by selection for something beautiful and tremendous. My breath quickens. I must send her something that rivals the splendor of what she has given me, something that will astound and enchant her as she has me. But I can think of nothing. My god-kissed elation begins to turn to panic. I do not have her sources, her seemingly inexhaustible wellsprings, none of the darknets which must be part of her dominion.
I open a dozen browser tabs and immediately point them all to the most obscure, disparate, abnormal and uncanny places I know. I spend hours pulling threads and biting my nails. No sleep. I keep searching, so eager to return the kindness she has done me, to please her and prove my worth to her after she has shown me such staggeringly particular attention.
I fail.
I lay back in my chair and press my palms to my eyes. I have spent hours, but have produced nothing. I have failed the only one who ever understood me and shared my insight and challenged my perception. My body craves sleep, but my mind rages.
From outside my window, two bright beams flash, a vehicle turning. I hear a tire squeal, a trash can upend itself, a vehicle speed away. Curious and dejected, I move to the window and look out into the streetlit night.
A dark shape moves on the pavement. With no deliberation, I grab my cell phone and go outside.
I walk downstairs, down to the street and out across my apartment's parking lot. I go to where I saw the shape, and though it is little more than a twitching, pulpy mass, I instantly recognize it. It is a raccoon, destroyed by the careless tires of an automobile. But it is more than that. I switch to my phone's camera, begin recording video. This is a gift.
The small mound of viscera is barely discernible as a living animal as it bleeds and writhes in my viewfinder, leaving a trail of congealing blood in its wake. A tiny jawbone juts upward at an insane angle, fragments of bone litter its pelt. It should be dead, and yet it struggles, pulls itself along the street towards the grass of the far side, separating itself into twitching islands of dark gore. And as it does so, I film it. I film it for whole minutes.
I return to my apartment. I transfer the video to my PC, and without editing, without changing its file name, I attach it to an email and send it to her. Then I stare at my inbox, awaiting a response. For minutes there is nothing, and my lungs feel as though they're shrinking. Then a window opens up for an instant messenger I wasn't aware I'd left running.
nerva_blood_radio (02:44:39): !!!!!!!
nerva_blood_radio (02:44:56): aaahaa, haa, haa, its so goooood!
nerva_blood_radio (02:45:09): where did you find it???
(I have not used this program since I've known her. I don't know how she got my handle. I don't care.)
mothstatic (02:46:12): I filmed it myself
mothstatic (02:46:16): on my phone
mothstatic (02:47:00): I heard a truck spin out so i went to check it and it had hit the raccoon but it kept moving like the locust in the video you sent me
mothstatic (02:47:11): I came straight home and sent it to you
mothstatic (02:47:31): you're the only one I sent it to
Further minutes of non-response, and I'm wringing my hands and pulling skin from my lip. I want her to tell her why I did it, why I sent it only to her, that I love her and worship her and that without her I would still be at the mouth of the woods. I nearly begin to type, but she preempts me:
nerva_blood_radio (02:54:01): you are so good to me.....
nerva_blood_radio (02:54:16): i love you!!.....
My heart is beating through the backs of my ribs and I struggle to breathe. I struggle this way for a minute, then begin to type, but a final message from her blinks onto my screen and then she disconnects.
nerva_blood_radio (02:55:21): send me more...
nerva_blood_radio has logged off.
Panic and elation are fighting for control of my spine. I shut off everything, take off my clothes, lay down on my futon. I don't manage to sleep until the sun has been up for hours, and when I do I sleep through until dark.
The next day, she has sent me no messages. I return to the woods and spend hours there, digging harder than I ever have, scouring every corner she ever showed me for something new and shocking and perfect to surpass the video I had taken. I can find nothing. Everything is either manufactured or hokey or senseless or ham-fisted. Even those things that used to thrill me fail to compare to the simple, terrible perfection of a ruined raccoon continuing to struggle across a road with a body that should not be alive.
The next day, the same results. I turn up nothing. No messages from her. I see the first headline news clip announcing some unknown phenomenon that is affecting the biology of increasingly large creatures in various countries. I'm beginning to feel somehow like I'm running out of time. In my inept anxiety I bite the skin around my fingernails until it bleeds.
The next day more news has crowded out the dubstep remixes and reality television recaps and autotuned parodies. From a distance, looking indirectly at the thumbnails of all that is presented to me, I divine an overwhelming bleakness. The sense of losing time heightens. I set about my work.
Hours into the night, I have had no success. Then a sudden, piercing sound comes from somewhere beneath me, down a floor, somewhere in my apartment. I begin to hear more panic-sounds, footfalls, shouts and cries. I take my phone from my desk and run outside, down to the source.
Neighbors I have only met in passing have crowded outside an open apartment door. The apartment inside is dark, and a man within is yelling, blathering wet, meaningless syllables. People are muttering words like 'gun' and 'dangerous,' shouting things like 'don't' and 'doesn't have to' and 'talk this out.' I shoulder my way forward until I can see into the room.
A naked obese man is laying back against a bare far wall. His face is puffy and streaked with tears and mucous. Each time someone addresses him, he howls something meaningless. There is a pistol in his hand. When he is not howling, he turns his head to look out his open window, looking remorseful, almost pensive. Then, all at once, he begins to raise the gun to his head. Already my fingers are around my phone, trying to pull up the video recorder. My neighbors are shouting now, jostling me. I hit record, try to find a shot, but I am being moved and churned and I can see nothing through my phone. The obese man says something I cannot hear, but which sounds like 'never' and 'to heaven,' and he puts the gun to his temple, and he pulls the trigger.
The gun barks, more quietly than I'm expecting. My neighbors are screaming. A dark fan of blood has sprayed a greasy feather-shape across the wall behind the man. He slumps down and lays still for a moment. Then his body is convulsing. His legs kick up and drum down hard against the floor, his arms whip and lash at his sides, his ruined skull lolls back and forth on his neck. His body rolls forward, puts its arms up, begins wriggling like a bloated worm trying to move forward. My neighbors continue to scream and jostle me, many of them fleeing the hallway. I stare down at my phone, at a message telling me that there is no storage capacity left. I stop recording and review the footage I have taken, and it is useless. Indiscernible. My heart writhes in my chest when I think of the perfect moment that has just been squandered, which can never be repeated, which would have been the most excellent offering.
The few neighbors remaining in the hall cover their mouths and turn away. Most have left, either in fear or maybe to call the police. The obese man's body continues to squirm and bleed and twitch and drum its heavy feet up and down. I stare at my phone, then at the body, which seems to be trying to pull itself closer to me. Then I see the gun, and my most perfect idea comes to me.
I check the hallway to see if anyone is looking. Everyone has their backs turned. The suppurating body has wormed its way into a corner and is struggling helplessly. As quickly and quietly as I can, I step forward into the room, step over the body, reach down and take the gun, slipping it in the front of my pants and hiding it beneath my shirt. Then I leave, climb the stairs, return to my room, lock my door.
I dig an old webcam out of a large tupperware container filled with cords and obsolete peripherals. It takes minutes to hook up, install drivers. Then I pull open the instant messenger and look for her name. Blessedly, she's online.
mothstatic (01:52:19) says: I have something for you, can we video
nerva_blood_radio (01:52:21) says: yes.
Sirens are howling. At the mouth of the woods, all of the brightness, all of the distraction, is gone, replaced by stern faces reporting on what is happening to the world, what is happening to the bodies. I can hear my neighbors downstairs continuing to scream and lament. I can hear the feet of the body beating the floor.
The instant messenger window expands. I see my own face, bathed in white light, framed by the darkness of my room. On her end, I see only moving shadows, the vague impression of green light streaking in strange patterns, a silhouette shaped like a crucifixion.
nerva_blood_radio (01:54:12) says: you have been so very good to me.
mothstatic (01:54:37) says: You showed me so much. I would never have found any of the beauty you showed me.
nerva_blood_radio (01:55:00) says: this will be your contribution to that beauty. i will ensure you are remembered.
I adjust the angle of my webcam, roll my chair back so that both myself and the floor around me are in frame, because I expect that is where my body will fall. I take the gun out of my pants.
mothstatic (01:56:09) says: are you recording?
nerva_blood_radio (01:56:12) says: yes.
mothstatic (01:56:28) says: I love you.
nerva_blood_radio (01:56:40) says: prove it to me. :)
The barrel is sliding between my teeth. My finger wraps around the trigger. From somewhere deep within the woods, I feel a cold wind rise.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
19/10
§§§§§THIS WEEK§§§§§
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt – Episode 0Who would have thought, a game where you explore the paintings and the secrets therein of artist Bosch? Both music and graphics are unique and exciting. The narrative reminds me much of the works of Joestin Gaarder, an old childhood favorite of mine. It's The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland and Sophies World set in a world of intriguing history, art, religion and the potential growth that comes with the alienation of youth.
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Wonderful neo/cyberpunk noir pastiche which is both hillarously funny and dead-serious as the same time. Despite its very short length, it managed to draw me in and care about the world and its inhabitants which left me wanting more, much more, and also to consider what video games I've played gave me the most laughs (list below.
East van EP/Oracle (ceMelusine)
I love the people behind Silverstring (ceMelusine is part of Silverstring), because of Glitchhikers, and because of Azraels Stop. This game wasn't as interesting, although more evocative than increpares newest "let your mind fall to rest", which too is a form of tarot-reading. Imagery is quite sublime, but it's not something I'm prone to return to, nor give much thought in retrospect, as opposed to the aforementioned games.
Girls Like Robots: NerdfestHey, a girls needs to have fun, right?
Niddhogg (Messhof)
Played it with a friend. Crazy, wicked fun I haven't had since Samurai Gunn! Hopefully will be seeing much more of this. I hate to say this, but I enjoyed it more than Johann Sebastian Joust (and I hate to say it beause I'm all for physicality in video games, alternative controllers and folk games).
Octodad: Dadliest CatchThe second really funny game this week I played! Humor is a rarity when it comes to video games, especially humor which isn't all scripted and script, but comes from the interaction with the world. Seems like a worthy successor to the original game. The coop is killer.
Rehearsals and ReturnsNow when it's finally free to download, I gave it a spin. It is interesting in the way that it feels compelling without having very much there to begin with, but it probably could be realized better somehow. Even just by letting people choose whom to interact with. Since the game is so much about player input, it could have gone further yet and probably be more cathartic for it.
Spelunky
Yeah. So it came out on the PS4 and me and my friend thought we'd give it a try. I can sort of image us sitting there, playing it a month from now, cursing ourselves and the game. But honestly I just don't think it's for me - too frustrating. But I do love cooperative video games and although they seem to be all the rage right now, I still feel there is a shortage on good ones.
Stopped playing: Wasteland 2. Yes, the second part of the game is better. And yet, I started to grow tired well before the second part, and now that I'm like 80% in, I'm giving up for now. I'd give it a 7/10, probably 8 if I'm in a good mood, which I'm not anymore since I feel it doesn't do the things it sets you up to believe it will do. Well, some of that surely is my own fault, but still - I'm tired of wanting to roleplay and act as if the things I feel and do carry weight, only to realize that they indeed do not, and I was a fool for thinking so. The only recourse then is to play a game parallel to the video game in front of you, where the motivations of your characters make sense. But try to mesh this world of fantasy in your head with the one on the screen in front of you and the world of your imagination gives way to the two-dimensional illusions of programming. I get the choice to pick a character which has kids and I can enter the age of this character, say 50+. Do the kids make any appearance of any kind in the game? No. And people still call me "youngster". Sure, I use this person to talk with people, because in my mind this character is the leader of my ranger pack. But it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I can add more charisma to this character so that they gain levels faster and thus become "more experienced" ("older") than my other party members, but meh. A couple of levels of difference after 50 hours?
I just wish I'd come across an RPG where after playing it I wouldn't feel that I tried to give way too much credit to its ambitions, expected way too much in terms of reactivity to the way I play and feel and act and roleplay. There are other problems with Wasteland, such as the fact that "choices" don't seem to matter, and I don't only mean that in the way that there doesn't seem to be any gravitas to ones interaction with the world (although that too is true, since the characters aren't well-developed enough for me to care all that much, basically the same problem I have with Bethesdas games and the former Fallouts, although Fallout 1 & 2 made up for that with a really mysterious, interesting and alive world and its open-ended system of exploring it), but that many of the choices that you'd think matter (do I choose repair mechanic or computer science) seem to come down to... whatever. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for my character which has perception as a skill, because it doesn't matter who has perception as a skill, and because my character isn't changed by being perceptive in any way, and me being perceptive barely matters for other characters as well - mainly it gives me the opportunity to spot more digging grounds where I can dig for buried scraps which means more money. In the end it doesn't matter also because there is probably another way of solving the problem in front of you, and it doesn't matter which one you choose. Chances are you have both options available in the party anyway, unless you want to roleplay and not game the system by having each party members specializing in certain fields, but then you'd just go back to playing that parallel game in your mind, which at least I need some small input from the outside world (game system) in order to stay interested in. If you don't have the skills in the party, eh, just blow the wall up instead of kicking it down. It will just cost you some money. In the end skills become cash. Everything becomes cash. And loot. Loot everywhere. And the numbers don't add up, either, seeing how I've maxed skills and still see the "impossible" icon on chests and locks and whathaveyou, which according to the explanation of how the skills are implemented in the game just doesn't make sense. Sure, it's interesting that you can play "on the fly" and just roll with the punches as superbunnyhop would have it, and fail at half the things you try to do. But eventually I just stop caring due to everything being random - contents of chests and such - and just feel that opening stuff is a waste of my time.
I am disappointed. Planescape seems to be a game about something else entirely, so I do hope Inexile deliver on those promises (every combat encounter will count, etc) even if they believe that what they did with Wasteland 2 was good for Wasteland 2.
LOL
XD
§PATHOLOGIC!!!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1535515364/pathologic/posts (yes, all of them)
§INTERACTIVE FICTION
Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1850151847/ice-bound-a-novel-of-reconfiguration
§
Our design for Ice-Bound rejects both branching-path models of interactive story as well as overly simulationist approaches, targeting a middle-road aesthetic of sculptural construction that marries a focus on quality output with the player's exploration of both an emergent expressive space and an AR-enabled art book.
http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf
§
This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during thd creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness
http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_10.pdf
§
First up is combinatorial narrative, as we think this is the heart of what sets Ice-Bound apart from other story-games. It’s fairly complex, but we’re going to try and distill it down into something easily digestible.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial_narrative/
§
Riffing on the dramatic concept of Chekhov’s gun, which states that everything introduced into a story should serve a narrative purpose, we’ve taken to calling our model “Chekhov’s dollhouse.” Do you put the spotlight on the gun over the mantelpiece, and bring it (and the violence it implies) into your story? Or do you put the focus somewhere else? Unlike branching path models, where making a choice is usually irreversible and high-consequence (even if the consequence is only wondering what you missed), with our model you can freely rearrange the story as much or little as you like before committing to a single configuration, as easily as rearranging the furniture in a dollhouse.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial-narrative-part-two/
§
Conventional game design often denies players the act of interpretation./.../
I just want to raise the question as to why there isn’t a lot of interpretation going on in games. My hunch is because of the canonized idea of games mostly being composed of rules that need to be fairly communicated to the player, vagueness is discouraged.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/further-thoughts-on-the-tarot-and-interpretation/
§
"You are Kickstarting Ice-Bound; an interactive piece of sculptural fiction and, uhm, what is sculptural fiction?"
"It's a term I've started using to describe a break away from the "branching path" model of interactive narrative. I also sometimes call this the "rat in a maze" model, because a) you can't usually see the big picture, b) often have no way of knowing what, if anything, you're missing when you make a choice, and c) it's usually difficult to go back and try again: you either have to restart from scratch, or laboriously retrace your steps. "Some of my recent projects, including Ice-Bound and 18 Cadence, are experiments towards a different approach: one where you can see the whole story at once, and make small, reversible decisions about its form, rather than big, high-consequence choices. The analogy is to the act of sculpting: iteratively making changes, large and small, until you arrive at something you're satisfied with. This is interesting to me because it pushes the player away from being an "actor" within a story, to something more like a "director" or "editor." I've always wanted my players to feel like they're collaborating with me in telling a story, and sculptural fiction is a move closer towards that ideal.
http://indiegames.com/2014/10/aaron_a_reed_on_ice-bound_and_.html
§
Elegy for a Dead World: A Game About Writing Fiction
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dejobaan/elegy-for-a-dead-world-a-game-about-writing-fictio
§OTHER VIDEOS
The True Legend of Hyrule
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qsso4i/the-final-bosman-the-true-legend-of-hyrule
§
Majora's African Roots pt. 1 (Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask) - Culture Shock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un1iv1Ws5XU
§
Extra Credits - Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
§
All Games Are Created Equal
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/r270r0/the-final-bosman-all-games-are-created-equal
§
Should League of Legends Be a High School Sport? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypx5rbkAzpk
§
Why Does Mario's Jump Feel So Awesome? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2oV2DQ2dEA
§
James Recommends - Analysis! - Wasteland 2 - A New Old School Fallout Game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSA7MAQxlE
§
Extra Credits - Big Bad II - What Makes a Good Villain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDx5nG7koA
§
Interplay Part 1: Meteoric Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srdR55V7D-s
§OTHER ARTICLES
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie. Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).
/.../
Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/thoughts-on-alien-isolation-and-horror.html
§
Just as there are real contradictions to the exercise of sovereign exception, the use of such power within the rules of a video game, even one whose trademark is branching-path storytelling, remains a technical impossibility. Mass Effect seems to solve this problem by making the agency of Shepard rather illusory. As players, we are meant to feel that we share Shepard’s sovereign power, but the intrinsic contradictions of that power, mirrored by our subordination as consumers to the game design, give the Spectres a deeper, if more problematic, meaning.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/blasto-sacer/
§
“The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. It very much just kind of meandered.”
/.../
“The driving thing was exploring different ways of using interactivity,” Barlow says. “There’s so much data that games take on board about their player – we know where you are, what you’re looking at, how long you spend looking at things, what you’re doing – but 99 per cent of games don’t use any of that.”
http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-silent-hill-shattered-memories/
§
Water Temple Analysis: Part 1
the design of the Water Temple is incredibly flawed on both large and small scales. But perhaps this also achieves an effect that matches up with what the Water Temple is trying to achieve in the context of the game’s narrative?
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/water-temple-analysis-part-1.html
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt – Episode 0Who would have thought, a game where you explore the paintings and the secrets therein of artist Bosch? Both music and graphics are unique and exciting. The narrative reminds me much of the works of Joestin Gaarder, an old childhood favorite of mine. It's The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland and Sophies World set in a world of intriguing history, art, religion and the potential growth that comes with the alienation of youth.
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Wonderful neo/cyberpunk noir pastiche which is both hillarously funny and dead-serious as the same time. Despite its very short length, it managed to draw me in and care about the world and its inhabitants which left me wanting more, much more, and also to consider what video games I've played gave me the most laughs (list below.
East van EP/Oracle (ceMelusine)
I love the people behind Silverstring (ceMelusine is part of Silverstring), because of Glitchhikers, and because of Azraels Stop. This game wasn't as interesting, although more evocative than increpares newest "let your mind fall to rest", which too is a form of tarot-reading. Imagery is quite sublime, but it's not something I'm prone to return to, nor give much thought in retrospect, as opposed to the aforementioned games.
Girls Like Robots: NerdfestHey, a girls needs to have fun, right?
Niddhogg (Messhof)
Played it with a friend. Crazy, wicked fun I haven't had since Samurai Gunn! Hopefully will be seeing much more of this. I hate to say this, but I enjoyed it more than Johann Sebastian Joust (and I hate to say it beause I'm all for physicality in video games, alternative controllers and folk games).
Octodad: Dadliest CatchThe second really funny game this week I played! Humor is a rarity when it comes to video games, especially humor which isn't all scripted and script, but comes from the interaction with the world. Seems like a worthy successor to the original game. The coop is killer.
Rehearsals and ReturnsNow when it's finally free to download, I gave it a spin. It is interesting in the way that it feels compelling without having very much there to begin with, but it probably could be realized better somehow. Even just by letting people choose whom to interact with. Since the game is so much about player input, it could have gone further yet and probably be more cathartic for it.
Spelunky
Yeah. So it came out on the PS4 and me and my friend thought we'd give it a try. I can sort of image us sitting there, playing it a month from now, cursing ourselves and the game. But honestly I just don't think it's for me - too frustrating. But I do love cooperative video games and although they seem to be all the rage right now, I still feel there is a shortage on good ones.
Stopped playing: Wasteland 2. Yes, the second part of the game is better. And yet, I started to grow tired well before the second part, and now that I'm like 80% in, I'm giving up for now. I'd give it a 7/10, probably 8 if I'm in a good mood, which I'm not anymore since I feel it doesn't do the things it sets you up to believe it will do. Well, some of that surely is my own fault, but still - I'm tired of wanting to roleplay and act as if the things I feel and do carry weight, only to realize that they indeed do not, and I was a fool for thinking so. The only recourse then is to play a game parallel to the video game in front of you, where the motivations of your characters make sense. But try to mesh this world of fantasy in your head with the one on the screen in front of you and the world of your imagination gives way to the two-dimensional illusions of programming. I get the choice to pick a character which has kids and I can enter the age of this character, say 50+. Do the kids make any appearance of any kind in the game? No. And people still call me "youngster". Sure, I use this person to talk with people, because in my mind this character is the leader of my ranger pack. But it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I can add more charisma to this character so that they gain levels faster and thus become "more experienced" ("older") than my other party members, but meh. A couple of levels of difference after 50 hours?
I just wish I'd come across an RPG where after playing it I wouldn't feel that I tried to give way too much credit to its ambitions, expected way too much in terms of reactivity to the way I play and feel and act and roleplay. There are other problems with Wasteland, such as the fact that "choices" don't seem to matter, and I don't only mean that in the way that there doesn't seem to be any gravitas to ones interaction with the world (although that too is true, since the characters aren't well-developed enough for me to care all that much, basically the same problem I have with Bethesdas games and the former Fallouts, although Fallout 1 & 2 made up for that with a really mysterious, interesting and alive world and its open-ended system of exploring it), but that many of the choices that you'd think matter (do I choose repair mechanic or computer science) seem to come down to... whatever. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for my character which has perception as a skill, because it doesn't matter who has perception as a skill, and because my character isn't changed by being perceptive in any way, and me being perceptive barely matters for other characters as well - mainly it gives me the opportunity to spot more digging grounds where I can dig for buried scraps which means more money. In the end it doesn't matter also because there is probably another way of solving the problem in front of you, and it doesn't matter which one you choose. Chances are you have both options available in the party anyway, unless you want to roleplay and not game the system by having each party members specializing in certain fields, but then you'd just go back to playing that parallel game in your mind, which at least I need some small input from the outside world (game system) in order to stay interested in. If you don't have the skills in the party, eh, just blow the wall up instead of kicking it down. It will just cost you some money. In the end skills become cash. Everything becomes cash. And loot. Loot everywhere. And the numbers don't add up, either, seeing how I've maxed skills and still see the "impossible" icon on chests and locks and whathaveyou, which according to the explanation of how the skills are implemented in the game just doesn't make sense. Sure, it's interesting that you can play "on the fly" and just roll with the punches as superbunnyhop would have it, and fail at half the things you try to do. But eventually I just stop caring due to everything being random - contents of chests and such - and just feel that opening stuff is a waste of my time.
I am disappointed. Planescape seems to be a game about something else entirely, so I do hope Inexile deliver on those promises (every combat encounter will count, etc) even if they believe that what they did with Wasteland 2 was good for Wasteland 2.
Funny/Humoristic Games
That's funny...Day of the Tentacle
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Deadline, or, Being Douglas Adams
(Gunther Schmidl)
Grim Fandango
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(Douglas Adams/Steve Meretzky)
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Slavoj Žižek Makes A Twine Game
(Cameron Kunzelman)
The
Apprentice II: Knights Move (Herculean Effort Productions)
LOL
Dink Smallwood
Katamari Damacy
Katamari Damacy
Little Girl In Underland (Lively
Ivy/Erin Robinson)
Psychonauts
Sam & Max Season 1&2
The
Journey Down: Over The Edge/The
Journey Down: Chapter Two
(Theodor Waern)
Thirty Flights of Loving/Gravity Bone
(Brendon Chung/Blendo Games)
Warioware
Inc: Minigame Mania
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog
of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Jazzpunk
Portal 1 & 2
Soviet Unterzögersdorf (Monochrom)
The Secret of Monkey Island (and the
rest of them)
The Stanley Parable HD Remix/The
Stanley Parable Demo (Galactic Café/Davey Wreden)
§PATHOLOGIC!!!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1535515364/pathologic/posts (yes, all of them)
§INTERACTIVE FICTION
Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1850151847/ice-bound-a-novel-of-reconfiguration
§
Our design for Ice-Bound rejects both branching-path models of interactive story as well as overly simulationist approaches, targeting a middle-road aesthetic of sculptural construction that marries a focus on quality output with the player's exploration of both an emergent expressive space and an AR-enabled art book.
http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf
§
This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during thd creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness
http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_10.pdf
§
First up is combinatorial narrative, as we think this is the heart of what sets Ice-Bound apart from other story-games. It’s fairly complex, but we’re going to try and distill it down into something easily digestible.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial_narrative/
§
Riffing on the dramatic concept of Chekhov’s gun, which states that everything introduced into a story should serve a narrative purpose, we’ve taken to calling our model “Chekhov’s dollhouse.” Do you put the spotlight on the gun over the mantelpiece, and bring it (and the violence it implies) into your story? Or do you put the focus somewhere else? Unlike branching path models, where making a choice is usually irreversible and high-consequence (even if the consequence is only wondering what you missed), with our model you can freely rearrange the story as much or little as you like before committing to a single configuration, as easily as rearranging the furniture in a dollhouse.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial-narrative-part-two/
§
Conventional game design often denies players the act of interpretation./.../
I just want to raise the question as to why there isn’t a lot of interpretation going on in games. My hunch is because of the canonized idea of games mostly being composed of rules that need to be fairly communicated to the player, vagueness is discouraged.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/further-thoughts-on-the-tarot-and-interpretation/
§
"You are Kickstarting Ice-Bound; an interactive piece of sculptural fiction and, uhm, what is sculptural fiction?"
"It's a term I've started using to describe a break away from the "branching path" model of interactive narrative. I also sometimes call this the "rat in a maze" model, because a) you can't usually see the big picture, b) often have no way of knowing what, if anything, you're missing when you make a choice, and c) it's usually difficult to go back and try again: you either have to restart from scratch, or laboriously retrace your steps. "Some of my recent projects, including Ice-Bound and 18 Cadence, are experiments towards a different approach: one where you can see the whole story at once, and make small, reversible decisions about its form, rather than big, high-consequence choices. The analogy is to the act of sculpting: iteratively making changes, large and small, until you arrive at something you're satisfied with. This is interesting to me because it pushes the player away from being an "actor" within a story, to something more like a "director" or "editor." I've always wanted my players to feel like they're collaborating with me in telling a story, and sculptural fiction is a move closer towards that ideal.
http://indiegames.com/2014/10/aaron_a_reed_on_ice-bound_and_.html
§
Elegy for a Dead World: A Game About Writing Fiction
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dejobaan/elegy-for-a-dead-world-a-game-about-writing-fictio
§OTHER VIDEOS
The True Legend of Hyrule
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qsso4i/the-final-bosman-the-true-legend-of-hyrule
§
Majora's African Roots pt. 1 (Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask) - Culture Shock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un1iv1Ws5XU
§
Extra Credits - Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
§
All Games Are Created Equal
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/r270r0/the-final-bosman-all-games-are-created-equal
§
Should League of Legends Be a High School Sport? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypx5rbkAzpk
§
Why Does Mario's Jump Feel So Awesome? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2oV2DQ2dEA
§
James Recommends - Analysis! - Wasteland 2 - A New Old School Fallout Game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSA7MAQxlE
§
Extra Credits - Big Bad II - What Makes a Good Villain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDx5nG7koA
§
Interplay Part 1: Meteoric Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srdR55V7D-s
§OTHER ARTICLES
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie. Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).
/.../
Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/thoughts-on-alien-isolation-and-horror.html
§
Just as there are real contradictions to the exercise of sovereign exception, the use of such power within the rules of a video game, even one whose trademark is branching-path storytelling, remains a technical impossibility. Mass Effect seems to solve this problem by making the agency of Shepard rather illusory. As players, we are meant to feel that we share Shepard’s sovereign power, but the intrinsic contradictions of that power, mirrored by our subordination as consumers to the game design, give the Spectres a deeper, if more problematic, meaning.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/blasto-sacer/
§
“The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. It very much just kind of meandered.”
/.../
“The driving thing was exploring different ways of using interactivity,” Barlow says. “There’s so much data that games take on board about their player – we know where you are, what you’re looking at, how long you spend looking at things, what you’re doing – but 99 per cent of games don’t use any of that.”
http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-silent-hill-shattered-memories/
§
Water Temple Analysis: Part 1
the design of the Water Temple is incredibly flawed on both large and small scales. But perhaps this also achieves an effect that matches up with what the Water Temple is trying to achieve in the context of the game’s narrative?
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/water-temple-analysis-part-1.html
Sunday, July 27, 2014
27/7
§DESIGN
Sequelitis - ZELDA: A Link to the Past vs. Ocarina of Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0
§
Extra Credits - The Fighting Game Problem - How to Teach Complicated Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_xG1Yg_QoM
§
Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - Game Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
§
Design Club - Portal: Test Chambers - Tutorial Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_AsF3Rfw8w
§
Design Club - Mark of the Ninja - Stealth Games and Visual Cues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vJNqseX-rs
§
Extra Credits - Choices vs Consequences - What Player Decisions Mean in Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iklM_djBeY
§
Let's Talk About Boring Upgrade Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR-EuyU2hb8
§
Errant Signal - Civilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlEscMLjy0
§MISC VIDEOS
Can We Ever Stop Toxic, Racist, & Abusive Gamers?? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yvISdKG7Ng
§
Why Do People Do Sick and Twisted Things in DayZ? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3B2s-wswcM
§
Extra Credits - The Waiting Game - Why Weird Games Become Cult Hits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptk93AyICH0
§
Why is SEX So Terrible in Videogames? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASCpg8TetY
§MISC ARTICLES
Zelda: Sales Numbers in Context
http://www.zeldainformer.com/articles/zelda-sales-numbers-in-context#.U7qOVbGA91S
§
If “Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen and soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts,” as the age-old sports quote playfully asserts, then Call of Duty is an adult game played by children and Super Smash Bros. is a children’s game played by adults.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/melee-masterpiece-melee-demon/
§
Lovecraft’s protagonists are always men of learning, the brightest sparks of all that we have built; their understanding makes their fall so much the greater.
The terms used to illustrate this dark realization are many. The scholar Timothy Evans (in his essay “A Last Defense Against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft”) describes the structure with reference to the tropes of a detective story, in that the Lovecraftian narrative “leads not to a solution (like a detective story), but to a realization of the illusory nature of truth and the unknowability of the cosmos.”
/.../
In this vein, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an almost textbook Lovecraftian horror. The creeping darkness that hounds the cultured protagonist – remember, he is an archeologist – is a profoundly alien and horrifying presence.
/.../
But Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a very different beast.
/.../
What A Machine for Pigs presents us with is moral cosmic horror – that the universe, despite the walls and roof of laws and morals and the illusion of progress, is a ravenous and bloody place; that the world’s turning is predicated on suffering; that time and time again, despite whatever moral window-dressing we put up to improve the decor, we cannot bleach away fresh bloodstains.
http://gamesarenotart.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/a-machine-for-pigs-and-cosmic-horror/
§
A secret box is a game which is built around some form of content and challenge is trivial or absent. The emphasis is on conveying moments or ideas to the player rather than testing the player's abilities.
/.../
So screw your “walking simulators”. I've got a mountain of secret boxes over here that I'm anxious to explore.
http://www.electrondance.com/screw-your-walking-simulators
§
Hollywood needs a love story. It’s hard to imagine a film like Her without one. But love stories assume not only that direct, sensual connections between beings is possible, but that such relations are our ultimate goal. Mountain imagines Her as if the film been titled It instead. It offers a subtler version of what a life attached to unfamiliar things might feel like. Not comfort or intimacy, but estrangement and confusion, mixed with curiosity and wonder. But most of all, while Her depicts a future on an alternate timeline we must struggle to believe, Mountain reminds us that we need not wait to commune with things. They’re everywhere, overwhelming us, sticking to us, piling up around us. And they are here not to save you, nor to destroy you. They are just here. What if that were enough?
http://bogost.com/writing/mountain/
Sequelitis - ZELDA: A Link to the Past vs. Ocarina of Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0
§
Extra Credits - The Fighting Game Problem - How to Teach Complicated Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_xG1Yg_QoM
§
Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - Game Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
§
Design Club - Portal: Test Chambers - Tutorial Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_AsF3Rfw8w
§
Design Club - Mark of the Ninja - Stealth Games and Visual Cues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vJNqseX-rs
§
Extra Credits - Choices vs Consequences - What Player Decisions Mean in Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iklM_djBeY
§
Let's Talk About Boring Upgrade Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR-EuyU2hb8
§
Errant Signal - Civilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlEscMLjy0
§MISC VIDEOS
Can We Ever Stop Toxic, Racist, & Abusive Gamers?? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yvISdKG7Ng
§
Why Do People Do Sick and Twisted Things in DayZ? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3B2s-wswcM
§
Extra Credits - The Waiting Game - Why Weird Games Become Cult Hits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptk93AyICH0
§
Why is SEX So Terrible in Videogames? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASCpg8TetY
§MISC ARTICLES
Zelda: Sales Numbers in Context
http://www.zeldainformer.com/articles/zelda-sales-numbers-in-context#.U7qOVbGA91S
§
If “Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen and soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts,” as the age-old sports quote playfully asserts, then Call of Duty is an adult game played by children and Super Smash Bros. is a children’s game played by adults.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/melee-masterpiece-melee-demon/
§
Lovecraft’s protagonists are always men of learning, the brightest sparks of all that we have built; their understanding makes their fall so much the greater.
The terms used to illustrate this dark realization are many. The scholar Timothy Evans (in his essay “A Last Defense Against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft”) describes the structure with reference to the tropes of a detective story, in that the Lovecraftian narrative “leads not to a solution (like a detective story), but to a realization of the illusory nature of truth and the unknowability of the cosmos.”
/.../
In this vein, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an almost textbook Lovecraftian horror. The creeping darkness that hounds the cultured protagonist – remember, he is an archeologist – is a profoundly alien and horrifying presence.
/.../
But Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a very different beast.
/.../
What A Machine for Pigs presents us with is moral cosmic horror – that the universe, despite the walls and roof of laws and morals and the illusion of progress, is a ravenous and bloody place; that the world’s turning is predicated on suffering; that time and time again, despite whatever moral window-dressing we put up to improve the decor, we cannot bleach away fresh bloodstains.
http://gamesarenotart.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/a-machine-for-pigs-and-cosmic-horror/
§
A secret box is a game which is built around some form of content and challenge is trivial or absent. The emphasis is on conveying moments or ideas to the player rather than testing the player's abilities.
/.../
So screw your “walking simulators”. I've got a mountain of secret boxes over here that I'm anxious to explore.
http://www.electrondance.com/screw-your-walking-simulators
§
Hollywood needs a love story. It’s hard to imagine a film like Her without one. But love stories assume not only that direct, sensual connections between beings is possible, but that such relations are our ultimate goal. Mountain imagines Her as if the film been titled It instead. It offers a subtler version of what a life attached to unfamiliar things might feel like. Not comfort or intimacy, but estrangement and confusion, mixed with curiosity and wonder. But most of all, while Her depicts a future on an alternate timeline we must struggle to believe, Mountain reminds us that we need not wait to commune with things. They’re everywhere, overwhelming us, sticking to us, piling up around us. And they are here not to save you, nor to destroy you. They are just here. What if that were enough?
http://bogost.com/writing/mountain/
Sunday, May 18, 2014
18/5
§VIDEOS
Game Theory: Flappy Bird, PewDiePie, and Pasta Sauce
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyXcr6sDRtw
§
The Future of Games | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oON6S4fXS4k
§
Does "Indie Game" Mean Anything Anymore? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8iwDkE8mw4
§
Extra Credits - How Games Prepare Kids for Real Life - Education: 21st Century Skills
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoeAmqwvyY
§TEXTS
I'll tell you some stories about balancing Yomi. First I'll give you two myths about game balance, then I'll tell you about tier lists and matchup charts, and then a bunch of specific balance problems we had to solve in Yomi.
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2014/4/18/game-balance-and-yomi.html
§
let's move on to the two hardest problems in horror.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/05/alien-isolation-and-two-hardest_5.html
§
Why we ignore gamers behind bars
/.../
Prisoners play games. How play might liberate or counteract or reinforce a life of confinement is probably for those prisoners to dissect. Not us. From the outside, what we hear—me, Alejandro, Robert, Shane, and now you—is a voice completely disconnected from that experience. They’re asking for information, but they’re asking moreover to be heard.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/why-we-ignore-gamers-behind-bars/
§
Oculus Rift has plenty of potential for changing human interaction, but what about other animals? One project from Iowa State University assistant professor Austin Stewart (via FastCo Exist) imagines how VR goggles could make chickens believe they’re free-range, even when they’re not.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/15/an-oculus-rift-for-chickens-gives-animals-the-freedom-to-roam-without-the-roaming/
Game Theory: Flappy Bird, PewDiePie, and Pasta Sauce
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyXcr6sDRtw
§
The Future of Games | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oON6S4fXS4k
§
Does "Indie Game" Mean Anything Anymore? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8iwDkE8mw4
§
Extra Credits - How Games Prepare Kids for Real Life - Education: 21st Century Skills
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoeAmqwvyY
§TEXTS
I'll tell you some stories about balancing Yomi. First I'll give you two myths about game balance, then I'll tell you about tier lists and matchup charts, and then a bunch of specific balance problems we had to solve in Yomi.
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2014/4/18/game-balance-and-yomi.html
§
let's move on to the two hardest problems in horror.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/05/alien-isolation-and-two-hardest_5.html
§
Why we ignore gamers behind bars
/.../
Prisoners play games. How play might liberate or counteract or reinforce a life of confinement is probably for those prisoners to dissect. Not us. From the outside, what we hear—me, Alejandro, Robert, Shane, and now you—is a voice completely disconnected from that experience. They’re asking for information, but they’re asking moreover to be heard.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/why-we-ignore-gamers-behind-bars/
§
Oculus Rift has plenty of potential for changing human interaction, but what about other animals? One project from Iowa State University assistant professor Austin Stewart (via FastCo Exist) imagines how VR goggles could make chickens believe they’re free-range, even when they’re not.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/15/an-oculus-rift-for-chickens-gives-animals-the-freedom-to-roam-without-the-roaming/
Monday, November 4, 2013
Before Next-Gen Critical Compilation
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/10/27/october-27th/
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/11/03/november-3rd/
§INSPIRATION
By replacing immersion with the frame of attention, which is a word that holds scientific and psychological significance, we can use this frame of attention to make more meaningful observations.
/.../
It’s worth remembering that realism is not fidelity.
/.../
And Anita Sarkeesian says as much in her videos: remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects.
/.../
Failure in games often implicitly suggests that you aren’t grokking a system and that therefore you’re misunderstanding the text. But Cart Life doesn’t require mastery of its systems to understand what it does. In fact, playing Cart Life well misses the point.
/.../
[on Depression Quest] After a really rough time, my character fought his way out of deep depression, just a bit. And I reached a decision tree with five choices, and for the first time, all five choices were blue and available to me. No AAA video game power fantasy, no immersive sim, has ever made me feel as close to having as much agency as I felt like I had in that moment.
/.../
[on Kentucky Route Zero] The choices are not about making change in the game world, but determining the character’s intentions. You can never exhaust all the content in a dialogue tree because it cares more about the beautiful transience of conversation. It’s about what questions you ask, which information you seek, and which you don’t - not because any of it is quest-specific, but because it affects how you perceive your character.
/.../
Failure, choice, realism, these concepts and any value we assign to them are destroyed by these games. They don’t erase failure, or devalue choice, they come from a different frame of mind completely.
/.../
Video games don’t exist.
We invented them.
And we can destroy them.http://samcrisp.tumblr.com/post/62718211352/how-to-destroy-everything-or-why-video-games-do-not
§BIOSHOCK
BioShock Infinite is the worst game of the year.
It’s an unjustified shooter without a single new idea. It’s a self-gratifying spectacle that confuses cunning with depth. It’s a craven, heartless game of false moral equivalencies that uses the suffering of oppressed people as window dressing, as theme, while it explores its own cold metaphysical conceits.
For its lack of humanity, for its fake guilt, for its flat boring gameplay, for its 100 million dollar cost, for its cleverness, for its cowardice, BioShock Infinite is not just the worst game of the year. It’s the worst game I’ve played this generation.
/.../
The BioShock series’ great talent thus far seems to be thematizing videogame conventions rather than challenging them. It has mastered the safe subversion, never mind its conservative heart. Clever self-awareness trumps actual innovation. And gamers eat it up. Because we love to feel smart, removed, safely above it all.
http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame-reviews/
§
... Where the self-examination begins. We start to see something about our own, internalized, beliefs and acceptances of colonialism, um, through shooting people in the face."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FylamIJ19n8
§METAL GEAR SOLID 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-jyF987MQ
§NARRATIVE: WALKING DEAD/BEYOND: TWO SOULS
But on a deeper level, throughout the series, we made decisions about what kind of a man Lee was, and how Clementine would see him. Our choices may not have affected the story outcome or averted his death, but they certainly affected his life—they made him the character we got to know and care about. (Or, depending, dislike but maybe understand.) One could make the same argument about the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages of the world, but given that The Walking Dead was a character study as much as it was an adventure, the fact that our decisions affected Lee's character is more central to the game's meaning as a whole. Game critic Sparky Clarkson has effectively encapsulated why player choice mattered in a post over at his blog awesomely titled "Your choices don't matter." Rather, the choices do matter, he says, but "they don't matter in the way that they appear to."
Lee's choices don't change the world, or alter the fundamental flow of the story. He can do nothing to keep the drugstore safe, preserve the motel stronghold, or prevent the treacheries in Savannah. If those are the kinds of choices that "matter", then Lee's decisions don't. But decisions that mattered in that way wouldn't really fit the themes of The Walking Dead. It's not a world where a man ultimately has any real power to save anyone.
But the choices in The Walking Dead aren't really about changing the world, they're about changing Lee. The player's choices define who Lee is, whose company he values, what principles he chooses to uphold. The world reacts to those decisions, in subtle ways that either reinforce those decisions (for instance, in the developing friendship with Kenny) or play off them (as in the case of Duck's fate). The player's choices matter because they establish a context for his emotional connection, through Lee, to the game world
http://kotaku.com/5964667/yes-your-choices-in-the-walking-dead-mattered
§
Most players are used to a "choice" moment, i.e. "PRESS X TO THIS, PRESS Y TO THAT". Since they never saw that anywhere in the bar, a lot of players didn't know they had the option to leave. [BEYOND: TWO SOULS]
Players are also used to the outcomes of choices being obvious. Someone dying, someone leaving, someone lying, etc. Subtlety and nuance are not things that games are implementing left and right. When something as low-key as a buried phobia rearing it's head hours later in the game is a consequence, it's understandable for it to go over a lot of heads.
/.../
An Adventure game like Beyond that does away with standard HUD elements just doesn't look like it's as advanced as it is. Players are most likely to assume what they are seeing is a pre-determined part of the game, and not results of actions they have taken or not taken. A more immersive and natural storytelling system also makes the game seem less interactive. Quite the double-edged sword.
/.../
It's very easy to miss dozens of important interactions if you don't explore the environment. Because you don't see everything on an overlay, you have to search around to see what can be toyed with. Sometimes, you simply don't expect things to be of any importance.
/.../
So the game's better form of discovery also comes with the chance of unintentionally leaving things behind. Yet another double-edged sword.
http://playersdelight.blogspot.ca/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-most-unique-feature-is.html
§THE UNFINISHED SWAN
The wife he chooses is a wife he creates in his own image, a woman who is “a female version of himself,” and who the King loves dearly. The woman created is a combination of two Greek myths: Narcissus, falling in love with his own reflection, and Pygmalion and Galatea, about an artist who falls in love with a statue he has created, and which subsequently comes to life. The intersection between these two myths leads to thematic intertwining between the narratives. It is one of the clearest cases where creation and love, as in the Pygmalion myth, are tied to self-creation and self-love, as in the Narcissus story. It is as if the King cannot distinguish between them, and the interrelation between these concepts becomes a running theme throughout the game. /.../ The King’s struggle to manifest the perfect self through his creations reflects the dissonance between his two selves. He constantly has his designs fail, he is left by his wife and mirror-self, and eventually he is faced with the possibility that he won’t have a legacy at all; he muses at the end of the game that all his works that “were meant to last forever… would crumble into dust. Or be painted over by someone who would come after [him].” /.../ ... he finally finds contentment in who he is rather than who he would like to be. It is in this spirit that he is able to at last give up creative control, bequeathing his magic paintbrush to his son, Monroe.
/.../ Rather than attempting to prevent outside influence, external support is necessary for Monroe to advance. /.../ This difference in attitude is crucial, and reflects the different mentalities of the characters. Where the King holds up an ideal and strives to achieve it, inevitably falling short, Monroe feels “pretty unfinished himself” and must make sense of his new reality, both in terms of the white world he finds himself in and the recent loss of his mother. He must become a creator in order to create himself, while the King approached it in the other direction, trying to create himself by becoming a creator.
http://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/of-all-his-creations-his-greatest-was-himself-creation-and-self-creation-in-the-unfinished-swan/
§BRAID
Almost every repeated character or item seen throughout the game can be found in a mundane form in or around the Princess’s house. /.../
I noticed an interesting detail when examining the chandelier itself. When you look closely, three distinct figures can be seen across the wood patterning. The one in the middle is clearly female, and she’s pointedly turning her attention toward the figure to her left while the other simply watches. When the chandelier breaks, there’s a specific break in this image as well — the female figure and her chosen companion on one side, and the onlooker alone on the other.
http://leedzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/the-psychosis-of-braid/
§PRIVILEGE
We are quick to use ‘death of the author’ arguments because of the cultural history behind it, and so why not at least consider the death of the player?
http://www.mattiebrice.com/death-of-the-player/
/.../
Can’t we still be taken through experiences without our every whim thought of and satisfied?
§PLAYING
Playing in public in itself is a political act, especially in hard times.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/inside-failed-utopian-new-games-movement/
§
I’ve started walking more in videogames because I was irritated by the way I felt compelled to run.
http://joeblade.com/2013/10/20/running-walking-and-remember-me/
§FUTURE
Make three lists numbering one through 20. In one column, write down 20 legendary, meaningful, culturally significant novels capable of standing the test of time. In the second, do the same for film. I expect that your third column, in which you’d write 20 games capable of doing the same, cannot be completed.
/.../Vice City is, after just a few years, a messy, clunky thing, because what it did has been done better by its sequels. Forgetting its cool setting and story -- I don’t think I’ll be remembering Tommy Vercetti on my deathbed, anyway -- GTA 5 has negated the need to ever play Vice City again. Rockstar Games made its own history irrelevant by giving us access to something better. It will do it again in five years. These are the building blocks of a brand, and not something with any historical value. What other medium seeks out its own obsolescence?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/21/how-long-can-video-games-matter
§
In truth, video games have no timeless masterpieces. There will come a day, sooner than we think, when no one will play Wind Waker. Or Chrono Trigger. Or Super Metroid. No one but curators and historians. And eventually, not even them. Tetris will not last, nor will Super Mario Bros. In a few years, who will be willing to survive fungal zombies for 15 hours just to reach the emotional climax of The Last of Us? For a medium so dependent on its players’ engagement, on their sustained attention, the question is not simply whether old games can technically be played, but will they? I think we sense this. And we want to protect our games while we can. We long to declare masterpieces and preserve them for the future because we are afraid: that one day, the game that meant so much to us will no longer have a player. Or even a legend to remember it by.
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/88903/the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-hd-reprinting-the-legend
§
We'll accept innovations, even a radical one like Ocarina of Time's shift to 3D, so long as they add depth to the skills we already know. Sequels that interrupt the iterative continuity of the series, often end up as a footnote. At best, they accumulate, like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a kind of dark horse mystique.
/.../
Much like the recurring mythos that underlies their respective stories, Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker are not separate games, but the same game extended in slightly different directions.
http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/25/5028042/opinion-why-sequels-are-sometimes-good-for-gamers-and-how-they-can-be
§THE STANLEY PARABLE
I am irrevocably grafted to his story, like hanging on to driftwood out at sea. He floats on without any regard for my splinters. Can I really be blamed for burning it all down? And though I am released from my porcelain casting, I am evoked to serve in this nightmare patriarchy. Which is why I need you; only the living can make choices.
Stanley’s always been dead.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-stanley-parable-review/
§
How they wish to destroy one another. How they wish to control one another. How they both wish to be free. Can you see? Can you see how much they need one another? Playing a game forges a relationship between player and designer and the experience of play is a conversation between them.
http://www.electrondance.com/the-stanley-paradox/
§GONE HOME
What struck me about this single page of Sam’s Diary in Gone Home is that it’s an exception to a rule — not part of a consistent fabric of showing the player what kind of thing they can and can’t do. It’s the only time Katie refuses to execute an action; the rest of the time, as Merritt points out, she acts like a camera, your lens into the world.
http://deadpixel.co/2013/08/not-gonna-happen/
§
Gone Home is played using Katie, a real character. There is much talk of player agency, but I don’t think there’s ever enough talk of character agency. My point is this: Katie might pick up the various things she finds, but she wouldn’t throw them across the floor the way the game allowed me to.
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2013/10/on-gone-home.html
§
Gone Home is too dressed up as a horror to justify comments that it proves forthright tales about teen romance, about lesbian relationships, about nostalgia and broken families, can be made at this scale and succeed. I wonder, even now, if it would have succeeded without tricking the player into playing it as a horror game. The most cynical part of me wonders if it was made into a horror because Fullbright figured it wouldn’t sell otherwise.
/.../
The beauty of the Dark Souls narrative form is the eloquence with which it drops nuggets and hints, and invites the player to want to explore and resolve these mysteries. But truthfully, it only really belongs to Gone Home’s peripheral characters. Sam and Lonnie’s narrative form is little different than BioShock’s, with a voice in your ear clearly explaining everything you need to know at each story beat, leaving little mystery on their part for the player to unlock. It naturally dissects itself to form two not-quite-related parts: the plainly told teen romance, and everyone else’s Dark Souls. Which, I think, could offer an interesting reading of the broken state of the family, but I’ll leave that for another day.
http://normallyrascal.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/gone-home-a-tale-of-three-games/
§GENDER
One woman told me that when she plays as a male character, her teammates listen to her, and take her more seriously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFOVVAhnAns
§
Participants who wore sexualized avatars internalized the avatar’s appearance and self-
objectified, reporting more body-related thoughts than those wearing nonsexualized avatars. Participants
who saw their own faces, particularly on sexualized avatars, expressed more rape myth acceptance than
those in other conditions. Implications for both online and offline consequences of using sexualized avatars are discussed.
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2013/fox-chb-sexualized-virtual-selves.pdf
§
Games media is constantly trying to legitimise the hobby it’s built on: to prove that games can be every bit as valid as movies and art and novels. But for some reason, rather than celebrating titles that claw at the boundaries of what is accepted, the media’s first response when presented with something difficult is to turn its nose up in disgust and claim that it’s damaging the medium.
http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2013/10/if-you-want-to-be-an-adult-stop-acting-like-a-child/
§HORROR
In the end, we are left afraid not due to simple emotional response but because of the game’s implications. Adrenaline wears off. Ideas attach themselves to our mind and stay with us. That may be a more truthful execution of horror.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/176000-the-mirror-of-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/
§
As you design, repeat this mantra to yourself: "I will have no keycard doors in my game." No feeding fertilizer or poison to giant plants. Check yourself before adding puzzles about inserting crystals, gems, or figurines into some ornate locking mechanism. Reconsider any puzzle involving a four-digit number sequence, found elsewhere, that opens a lock.
Do not employ sliding block puzzles. Ever. That includes sliding statues! No!
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/10/useful-tips-for-horror-game-designers.html
§
Earlier today, I had a peculiar reaction to the footage of The Evil Within that oozed through the clogged pipes of the interweb from the Eurogamer Expo and directly onto my screen. As Craig pointed out, the spinny-blade room is so daft that it’s immediately rendered non-threatening. Finding such a machine in a mental institution raises logistical questions rather than the hairs on the back of my neck.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/27/editorial-horror-and-a-maddening-lack-of-imagination/
§
Horror art nowadays tends to stick to clichés, to familiar genre markers. A review of a few of the latest horror games makes this clear, almost painfully so. That said, part of the appeal of the genre, to some people, is its predictability. Horror orbits around a few central themes because they are apparently important to our culture.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/the-possibilities-of-horror-in-games/
§BASTION
Ultimately, I noticed a strange ambiguity concerning the themes of creation and destruction in Bastion right from the beginning; the player is told the Calamity has everything destroyed, yet this is the beginning of a story, Furthermore, the setting is falling apart except for where the kid steps, where the path is actually being created before him.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/creation-vs-destruction-in-bastions-narrative/
§ART
Art is a relational proposition, one of habitus and contingency in relation to the structuring roles of economy and power. I think the better question to ask is “what do games do?”
/.../
Maybe drawing the utopia out can be done through the process of making.
Games like Howling Dogs and Kentucky Route Zero are the material embodiment of this positive impulse. These games would not exist without the blood and horror that is the AAA games industry. They have to exist in stark contrast with it – but at the same time they draw out the utopian, feminist, trans, queer, anarchist ghostly utopia in them
http://dropouthangoutspaceout.tumblr.com/post/59044073396/on-kentucky-route-zero-and-howling-dogs
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/11/03/november-3rd/
§INSPIRATION
By replacing immersion with the frame of attention, which is a word that holds scientific and psychological significance, we can use this frame of attention to make more meaningful observations.
/.../
It’s worth remembering that realism is not fidelity.
/.../
And Anita Sarkeesian says as much in her videos: remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects.
/.../
Failure in games often implicitly suggests that you aren’t grokking a system and that therefore you’re misunderstanding the text. But Cart Life doesn’t require mastery of its systems to understand what it does. In fact, playing Cart Life well misses the point.
/.../
[on Depression Quest] After a really rough time, my character fought his way out of deep depression, just a bit. And I reached a decision tree with five choices, and for the first time, all five choices were blue and available to me. No AAA video game power fantasy, no immersive sim, has ever made me feel as close to having as much agency as I felt like I had in that moment.
/.../
[on Kentucky Route Zero] The choices are not about making change in the game world, but determining the character’s intentions. You can never exhaust all the content in a dialogue tree because it cares more about the beautiful transience of conversation. It’s about what questions you ask, which information you seek, and which you don’t - not because any of it is quest-specific, but because it affects how you perceive your character.
/.../
Failure, choice, realism, these concepts and any value we assign to them are destroyed by these games. They don’t erase failure, or devalue choice, they come from a different frame of mind completely.
/.../
Video games don’t exist.
We invented them.
And we can destroy them.http://samcrisp.tumblr.com/post/62718211352/how-to-destroy-everything-or-why-video-games-do-not
§BIOSHOCK
BioShock Infinite is the worst game of the year.
It’s an unjustified shooter without a single new idea. It’s a self-gratifying spectacle that confuses cunning with depth. It’s a craven, heartless game of false moral equivalencies that uses the suffering of oppressed people as window dressing, as theme, while it explores its own cold metaphysical conceits.
For its lack of humanity, for its fake guilt, for its flat boring gameplay, for its 100 million dollar cost, for its cleverness, for its cowardice, BioShock Infinite is not just the worst game of the year. It’s the worst game I’ve played this generation.
/.../
The BioShock series’ great talent thus far seems to be thematizing videogame conventions rather than challenging them. It has mastered the safe subversion, never mind its conservative heart. Clever self-awareness trumps actual innovation. And gamers eat it up. Because we love to feel smart, removed, safely above it all.
http://tevisthompson.com/on-videogame-reviews/
§
... Where the self-examination begins. We start to see something about our own, internalized, beliefs and acceptances of colonialism, um, through shooting people in the face."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FylamIJ19n8
§METAL GEAR SOLID 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-jyF987MQ
§NARRATIVE: WALKING DEAD/BEYOND: TWO SOULS
But on a deeper level, throughout the series, we made decisions about what kind of a man Lee was, and how Clementine would see him. Our choices may not have affected the story outcome or averted his death, but they certainly affected his life—they made him the character we got to know and care about. (Or, depending, dislike but maybe understand.) One could make the same argument about the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages of the world, but given that The Walking Dead was a character study as much as it was an adventure, the fact that our decisions affected Lee's character is more central to the game's meaning as a whole. Game critic Sparky Clarkson has effectively encapsulated why player choice mattered in a post over at his blog awesomely titled "Your choices don't matter." Rather, the choices do matter, he says, but "they don't matter in the way that they appear to."
Lee's choices don't change the world, or alter the fundamental flow of the story. He can do nothing to keep the drugstore safe, preserve the motel stronghold, or prevent the treacheries in Savannah. If those are the kinds of choices that "matter", then Lee's decisions don't. But decisions that mattered in that way wouldn't really fit the themes of The Walking Dead. It's not a world where a man ultimately has any real power to save anyone.
But the choices in The Walking Dead aren't really about changing the world, they're about changing Lee. The player's choices define who Lee is, whose company he values, what principles he chooses to uphold. The world reacts to those decisions, in subtle ways that either reinforce those decisions (for instance, in the developing friendship with Kenny) or play off them (as in the case of Duck's fate). The player's choices matter because they establish a context for his emotional connection, through Lee, to the game world
http://kotaku.com/5964667/yes-your-choices-in-the-walking-dead-mattered
§
Most players are used to a "choice" moment, i.e. "PRESS X TO THIS, PRESS Y TO THAT". Since they never saw that anywhere in the bar, a lot of players didn't know they had the option to leave. [BEYOND: TWO SOULS]
Players are also used to the outcomes of choices being obvious. Someone dying, someone leaving, someone lying, etc. Subtlety and nuance are not things that games are implementing left and right. When something as low-key as a buried phobia rearing it's head hours later in the game is a consequence, it's understandable for it to go over a lot of heads.
/.../
An Adventure game like Beyond that does away with standard HUD elements just doesn't look like it's as advanced as it is. Players are most likely to assume what they are seeing is a pre-determined part of the game, and not results of actions they have taken or not taken. A more immersive and natural storytelling system also makes the game seem less interactive. Quite the double-edged sword.
/.../
It's very easy to miss dozens of important interactions if you don't explore the environment. Because you don't see everything on an overlay, you have to search around to see what can be toyed with. Sometimes, you simply don't expect things to be of any importance.
/.../
So the game's better form of discovery also comes with the chance of unintentionally leaving things behind. Yet another double-edged sword.
http://playersdelight.blogspot.ca/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-most-unique-feature-is.html
§THE UNFINISHED SWAN
The wife he chooses is a wife he creates in his own image, a woman who is “a female version of himself,” and who the King loves dearly. The woman created is a combination of two Greek myths: Narcissus, falling in love with his own reflection, and Pygmalion and Galatea, about an artist who falls in love with a statue he has created, and which subsequently comes to life. The intersection between these two myths leads to thematic intertwining between the narratives. It is one of the clearest cases where creation and love, as in the Pygmalion myth, are tied to self-creation and self-love, as in the Narcissus story. It is as if the King cannot distinguish between them, and the interrelation between these concepts becomes a running theme throughout the game. /.../ The King’s struggle to manifest the perfect self through his creations reflects the dissonance between his two selves. He constantly has his designs fail, he is left by his wife and mirror-self, and eventually he is faced with the possibility that he won’t have a legacy at all; he muses at the end of the game that all his works that “were meant to last forever… would crumble into dust. Or be painted over by someone who would come after [him].” /.../ ... he finally finds contentment in who he is rather than who he would like to be. It is in this spirit that he is able to at last give up creative control, bequeathing his magic paintbrush to his son, Monroe.
/.../ Rather than attempting to prevent outside influence, external support is necessary for Monroe to advance. /.../ This difference in attitude is crucial, and reflects the different mentalities of the characters. Where the King holds up an ideal and strives to achieve it, inevitably falling short, Monroe feels “pretty unfinished himself” and must make sense of his new reality, both in terms of the white world he finds himself in and the recent loss of his mother. He must become a creator in order to create himself, while the King approached it in the other direction, trying to create himself by becoming a creator.
http://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/of-all-his-creations-his-greatest-was-himself-creation-and-self-creation-in-the-unfinished-swan/
§BRAID
Almost every repeated character or item seen throughout the game can be found in a mundane form in or around the Princess’s house. /.../
I noticed an interesting detail when examining the chandelier itself. When you look closely, three distinct figures can be seen across the wood patterning. The one in the middle is clearly female, and she’s pointedly turning her attention toward the figure to her left while the other simply watches. When the chandelier breaks, there’s a specific break in this image as well — the female figure and her chosen companion on one side, and the onlooker alone on the other.
http://leedzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/the-psychosis-of-braid/
§PRIVILEGE
We are quick to use ‘death of the author’ arguments because of the cultural history behind it, and so why not at least consider the death of the player?
http://www.mattiebrice.com/death-of-the-player/
/.../
Can’t we still be taken through experiences without our every whim thought of and satisfied?
§PLAYING
Playing in public in itself is a political act, especially in hard times.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/inside-failed-utopian-new-games-movement/
§
I’ve started walking more in videogames because I was irritated by the way I felt compelled to run.
http://joeblade.com/2013/10/20/running-walking-and-remember-me/
§FUTURE
Make three lists numbering one through 20. In one column, write down 20 legendary, meaningful, culturally significant novels capable of standing the test of time. In the second, do the same for film. I expect that your third column, in which you’d write 20 games capable of doing the same, cannot be completed.
/.../Vice City is, after just a few years, a messy, clunky thing, because what it did has been done better by its sequels. Forgetting its cool setting and story -- I don’t think I’ll be remembering Tommy Vercetti on my deathbed, anyway -- GTA 5 has negated the need to ever play Vice City again. Rockstar Games made its own history irrelevant by giving us access to something better. It will do it again in five years. These are the building blocks of a brand, and not something with any historical value. What other medium seeks out its own obsolescence?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/21/how-long-can-video-games-matter
§
In truth, video games have no timeless masterpieces. There will come a day, sooner than we think, when no one will play Wind Waker. Or Chrono Trigger. Or Super Metroid. No one but curators and historians. And eventually, not even them. Tetris will not last, nor will Super Mario Bros. In a few years, who will be willing to survive fungal zombies for 15 hours just to reach the emotional climax of The Last of Us? For a medium so dependent on its players’ engagement, on their sustained attention, the question is not simply whether old games can technically be played, but will they? I think we sense this. And we want to protect our games while we can. We long to declare masterpieces and preserve them for the future because we are afraid: that one day, the game that meant so much to us will no longer have a player. Or even a legend to remember it by.
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/88903/the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-hd-reprinting-the-legend
§
We'll accept innovations, even a radical one like Ocarina of Time's shift to 3D, so long as they add depth to the skills we already know. Sequels that interrupt the iterative continuity of the series, often end up as a footnote. At best, they accumulate, like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a kind of dark horse mystique.
/.../
Much like the recurring mythos that underlies their respective stories, Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker are not separate games, but the same game extended in slightly different directions.
http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/25/5028042/opinion-why-sequels-are-sometimes-good-for-gamers-and-how-they-can-be
§THE STANLEY PARABLE
I am irrevocably grafted to his story, like hanging on to driftwood out at sea. He floats on without any regard for my splinters. Can I really be blamed for burning it all down? And though I am released from my porcelain casting, I am evoked to serve in this nightmare patriarchy. Which is why I need you; only the living can make choices.
Stanley’s always been dead.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-stanley-parable-review/
§
How they wish to destroy one another. How they wish to control one another. How they both wish to be free. Can you see? Can you see how much they need one another? Playing a game forges a relationship between player and designer and the experience of play is a conversation between them.
http://www.electrondance.com/the-stanley-paradox/
§GONE HOME
What struck me about this single page of Sam’s Diary in Gone Home is that it’s an exception to a rule — not part of a consistent fabric of showing the player what kind of thing they can and can’t do. It’s the only time Katie refuses to execute an action; the rest of the time, as Merritt points out, she acts like a camera, your lens into the world.
http://deadpixel.co/2013/08/not-gonna-happen/
§
Gone Home is played using Katie, a real character. There is much talk of player agency, but I don’t think there’s ever enough talk of character agency. My point is this: Katie might pick up the various things she finds, but she wouldn’t throw them across the floor the way the game allowed me to.
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2013/10/on-gone-home.html
§
Gone Home is too dressed up as a horror to justify comments that it proves forthright tales about teen romance, about lesbian relationships, about nostalgia and broken families, can be made at this scale and succeed. I wonder, even now, if it would have succeeded without tricking the player into playing it as a horror game. The most cynical part of me wonders if it was made into a horror because Fullbright figured it wouldn’t sell otherwise.
/.../
The beauty of the Dark Souls narrative form is the eloquence with which it drops nuggets and hints, and invites the player to want to explore and resolve these mysteries. But truthfully, it only really belongs to Gone Home’s peripheral characters. Sam and Lonnie’s narrative form is little different than BioShock’s, with a voice in your ear clearly explaining everything you need to know at each story beat, leaving little mystery on their part for the player to unlock. It naturally dissects itself to form two not-quite-related parts: the plainly told teen romance, and everyone else’s Dark Souls. Which, I think, could offer an interesting reading of the broken state of the family, but I’ll leave that for another day.
http://normallyrascal.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/gone-home-a-tale-of-three-games/
§GENDER
One woman told me that when she plays as a male character, her teammates listen to her, and take her more seriously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFOVVAhnAns
§
Participants who wore sexualized avatars internalized the avatar’s appearance and self-
objectified, reporting more body-related thoughts than those wearing nonsexualized avatars. Participants
who saw their own faces, particularly on sexualized avatars, expressed more rape myth acceptance than
those in other conditions. Implications for both online and offline consequences of using sexualized avatars are discussed.
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2013/fox-chb-sexualized-virtual-selves.pdf
§
Games media is constantly trying to legitimise the hobby it’s built on: to prove that games can be every bit as valid as movies and art and novels. But for some reason, rather than celebrating titles that claw at the boundaries of what is accepted, the media’s first response when presented with something difficult is to turn its nose up in disgust and claim that it’s damaging the medium.
http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2013/10/if-you-want-to-be-an-adult-stop-acting-like-a-child/
§HORROR
In the end, we are left afraid not due to simple emotional response but because of the game’s implications. Adrenaline wears off. Ideas attach themselves to our mind and stay with us. That may be a more truthful execution of horror.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/176000-the-mirror-of-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/
§
As you design, repeat this mantra to yourself: "I will have no keycard doors in my game." No feeding fertilizer or poison to giant plants. Check yourself before adding puzzles about inserting crystals, gems, or figurines into some ornate locking mechanism. Reconsider any puzzle involving a four-digit number sequence, found elsewhere, that opens a lock.
Do not employ sliding block puzzles. Ever. That includes sliding statues! No!
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/10/useful-tips-for-horror-game-designers.html
§
Earlier today, I had a peculiar reaction to the footage of The Evil Within that oozed through the clogged pipes of the interweb from the Eurogamer Expo and directly onto my screen. As Craig pointed out, the spinny-blade room is so daft that it’s immediately rendered non-threatening. Finding such a machine in a mental institution raises logistical questions rather than the hairs on the back of my neck.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/27/editorial-horror-and-a-maddening-lack-of-imagination/
§
Horror art nowadays tends to stick to clichés, to familiar genre markers. A review of a few of the latest horror games makes this clear, almost painfully so. That said, part of the appeal of the genre, to some people, is its predictability. Horror orbits around a few central themes because they are apparently important to our culture.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/the-possibilities-of-horror-in-games/
§BASTION
Ultimately, I noticed a strange ambiguity concerning the themes of creation and destruction in Bastion right from the beginning; the player is told the Calamity has everything destroyed, yet this is the beginning of a story, Furthermore, the setting is falling apart except for where the kid steps, where the path is actually being created before him.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/creation-vs-destruction-in-bastions-narrative/
§ART
Art is a relational proposition, one of habitus and contingency in relation to the structuring roles of economy and power. I think the better question to ask is “what do games do?”
/.../
Maybe drawing the utopia out can be done through the process of making.
Games like Howling Dogs and Kentucky Route Zero are the material embodiment of this positive impulse. These games would not exist without the blood and horror that is the AAA games industry. They have to exist in stark contrast with it – but at the same time they draw out the utopian, feminist, trans, queer, anarchist ghostly utopia in them
http://dropouthangoutspaceout.tumblr.com/post/59044073396/on-kentucky-route-zero-and-howling-dogs
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Unnerving/frightening/horror experiences
This is a list with the video games that has scared the most shit out of me. Most of these are not classic horror games with monsters, bur rather disconcerting experiences which through questions, atmosphere, and play make for the most interesting scares I've gotten. My favored type of horror puts the player in the dawning realization of being the evil or going someplace bad with no choice except to comply. It plays with dissolution of identity, of losing sense of self in a world where there is barely any certainty as it is. It makes you ponder your place in the universe, or tries to psyche you out with confused realities. But it also makes you fear the next door, the next hallway, and the next apparition. The games are arranged by category, and the top positions in each category are not necessarily the best games of those mentioned, but the ones that uses what the category implies in interesting ways to frighten.
Perhaps the best horror series ever, in par with silent hill, which only gets
better with every game and deserves special attention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chzo_Mythos
Subdued angst:
http://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/
http://mikeinel.deviantart.com/art/Which-Short-Game-152503626
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/09/browser_game_pick_the_day_greg.html
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1228 (The Marionette)
http://distractionware.com/blog/?p=759 (Judith)
http://www.increpare.com/2010/11/activate-the-three-artefacts-and-then-leave/
http://www.increpare.com/2010/04/the-terrible-whiteness-of-appalachian-nights/
http://xiigames.com/anna/
Existential displacement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_2:_Sons_of_Liberty
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_pathologic_pc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Knights_of_the_Old_Republic_II_The_Sith_Lords
http://www.increpare.com/2010/11/treatise/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Memories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_Kain:_Soul_Reaver_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo
http://playthisthing.com/pazzon
Twisted, uncanny, disgusting and freudian:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_%28video_game%29
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/puzzle/sutef/4195/
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5395.0 (All Our Friends Are Dead/Au Sable)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Frame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer7
Psychological:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_%28video_game%29
http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games6/gameindex/gateway_2.htm
http://snakes.hardydev.com/
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,993 (Mental Repair Inc)
Mind games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_%28video_game%29
http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlexanderOcias/loved
http://globalgamejam.org/2010/depict1
POEtic/Lovecraftian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Eye_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Esther
http://www.moddb.com/mods/nestlings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra:_Overture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Darkness:_Sanity%27s_Requiem
Cyberpunk/identity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Fusion
http://www.moddb.com/mods/korsakovia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex
http://www.joltcountry.com/trottingkrips/shrapnel.html
http://armorgames.com/play/4918/the-company-of-myself
http://www.kongregate.com/games/increpare/the-black-yeti?referrer=increpare
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/08/howard_glitch_the_youtube_indi.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky
Nightmarish confusion
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/542658 (Time Fcuk)
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 (Covetus)
http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=archive&submit=1&searchtype=creator_name&search=TheAnemic (La La Land Series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_%28video_game%29
http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/games/the-museum-of-broken-memories/
http://www.yoyogames.com/games/26339 (7 Minutes)
Atmospheric otherworldliness
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/07/browser_game_pick_looming_greg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Majora%27s_Mask
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Castlevania_IV
http://www.thedreammachine.se/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_%28video_game%29
http://rpgmaker.net/games/2068/ (Beautiful Dungeoneer)
http://www.devilstuningfork.com/
http://ludusnovus.net/2010/07/14/narthex-released/
http://www.asecondface.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_McGee%27s_Alice
Disconcerting/surreal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Payne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Payne_2:_The_Fall_of_Max_Payne
http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/mondo-agency.html
http://cactusquid.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=games&action=display&thread=13 (Mondo Medical)
http://www.gamemakergames.com/archive/the-arm
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/06/trailer_norrland_cactus.html
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7086.0 (Edmund)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_rose
http://aaronoldenburg.net/e_repent.html
http://www.moddb.com/mods/radiator/news/hl2-mod-release-radiator-1-2-handle-with-care
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines
http://www.secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html (Evidence of Everything Exploding)
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/09/browser_game_pick_feign_ian_sn.html
Exploration based fear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Metroid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Prime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_%28SNES_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Circle_of_the_Moon
Twitchers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemned:_Criminal_Origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Space_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29
I do recommend you trying some of these out, most of them are short
indie games which do not take more than half an hour to complete.
Perhaps the best horror series ever, in par with silent hill, which only gets
better with every game and deserves special attention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chzo_Mythos
Subdued angst:
http://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/
http://mikeinel.deviantart.com/art/Which-Short-Game-152503626
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/09/browser_game_pick_the_day_greg.html
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1228 (The Marionette)
http://distractionware.com/blog/?p=759 (Judith)
http://www.increpare.com/2010/11/activate-the-three-artefacts-and-then-leave/
http://www.increpare.com/2010/04/the-terrible-whiteness-of-appalachian-nights/
http://xiigames.com/anna/
Existential displacement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_2:_Sons_of_Liberty
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_pathologic_pc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Knights_of_the_Old_Republic_II_The_Sith_Lords
http://www.increpare.com/2010/11/treatise/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Memories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_Kain:_Soul_Reaver_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo
http://playthisthing.com/pazzon
Twisted, uncanny, disgusting and freudian:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_%28video_game%29
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/puzzle/sutef/4195/
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5395.0 (All Our Friends Are Dead/Au Sable)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Frame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer7
Psychological:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_%28video_game%29
http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games6/gameindex/gateway_2.htm
http://snakes.hardydev.com/
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,993 (Mental Repair Inc)
Mind games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_%28video_game%29
http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlexanderOcias/loved
http://globalgamejam.org/2010/depict1
POEtic/Lovecraftian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Eye_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Esther
http://www.moddb.com/mods/nestlings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra:_Overture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Darkness:_Sanity%27s_Requiem
Cyberpunk/identity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Fusion
http://www.moddb.com/mods/korsakovia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex
http://www.joltcountry.com/trottingkrips/shrapnel.html
http://armorgames.com/play/4918/the-company-of-myself
http://www.kongregate.com/games/increpare/the-black-yeti?referrer=increpare
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/08/howard_glitch_the_youtube_indi.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky
Nightmarish confusion
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/542658 (Time Fcuk)
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 (Covetus)
http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=archive&submit=1&searchtype=creator_name&search=TheAnemic (La La Land Series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_%28video_game%29
http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/games/the-museum-of-broken-memories/
http://www.yoyogames.com/games/26339 (7 Minutes)
Atmospheric otherworldliness
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/07/browser_game_pick_looming_greg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Majora%27s_Mask
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Castlevania_IV
http://www.thedreammachine.se/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_%28video_game%29
http://rpgmaker.net/games/2068/ (Beautiful Dungeoneer)
http://www.devilstuningfork.com/
http://ludusnovus.net/2010/07/14/narthex-released/
http://www.asecondface.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Path_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_McGee%27s_Alice
Disconcerting/surreal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Payne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Payne_2:_The_Fall_of_Max_Payne
http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/mondo-agency.html
http://cactusquid.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=games&action=display&thread=13 (Mondo Medical)
http://www.gamemakergames.com/archive/the-arm
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/06/trailer_norrland_cactus.html
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7086.0 (Edmund)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_rose
http://aaronoldenburg.net/e_repent.html
http://www.moddb.com/mods/radiator/news/hl2-mod-release-radiator-1-2-handle-with-care
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines
http://www.secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html (Evidence of Everything Exploding)
http://www.indiegames.com/2010/09/browser_game_pick_feign_ian_sn.html
Exploration based fear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Metroid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Prime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_%28SNES_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Circle_of_the_Moon
Twitchers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemned:_Criminal_Origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Space_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29
I do recommend you trying some of these out, most of them are short
indie games which do not take more than half an hour to complete.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
