I mean, yeah, that’s me and my friends, and I emphatically do not care about the “culture”, is what I’m saying. I just do not see the point in framing our thinking in an environment that’s explicitly hostile to anything that’s beautiful or interesting. Feels like being asked what’s my monetisation plan.
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Someone should make a 30 hour movie that has a billion dollar budget but it’s just like a live action cinematically rendered dungeon crawler type thing. Like you watch Adam driver slaughter sewer rats in a thirty minute oner then there’s fifteen seconds of dialogue
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It’s like, oh no, the culture has moved on, the free indie game blogs have closed, Glorious Trainwrecks are not going to have a booth at GDC again, Babycastles are not going to set up a real life version of my game that I’ll only hear about years after the fact again, nothing was learned. Should I give a shit? Did I give a shit when I faffed about in Klik & Play as a kid? It’s not my culture, and it’s not my problem if people can’t see further than their careers.
It’s all so easy to ignore. We’ve got fifty years of games. Why focus exclusively on What X Can Tell Us About The Current State Of Games (or, god forbid, the current state of game criticism)? I don’t have anything to tell these people.
Currently I’m working on setting up a MIDI controller to animate a 3D scan of my friend’s face which we will project during a little free live set that I imagine about ten people will be attending. I’m doing it in Godot, which by definition makes it a video game. It’s like Mario 64.
My other professional artist friend worked with kids, each kid made their ideal mountain/island in clay, my friend scanned the mountains, plopped them all into Unity, now you can walk around the mass of mountains and find the kids’ confessions that they recorded into a microphone.
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i feel like the main reason i play videogames is for some kind of “aesthetic experience” similar to the ones i get from like watching movies and reading books and listening to music or going to a museum even (i think the design of the interiors of spaces like museums is a lot like some interiors-focused games like dark souls or quake ykwim, i smoke weed and the grocery store feels like a strange journey dungeon, idk what to tell you)
and like the interactivity and game design and whatever else is as much part of that experience as the soundtrack, and the graphics, and whatever else the constituent parts of videogames are
but i pretty much think that almost the majority of videogames are almost entirely like dismal as “aesthetic experiences” compared to other things you could do, other things that are just like… easier to engage with, have fewer barriers to their access, a book doesnt have batteries ykwim, you don’t have to worry if it’s charged or not, you don’t need a special plastic peripheral in ur house to see an andrei tarkovsky movie at a repertory theater, and these considerations can add up at some point
i’m not exactly saying that i think videogames should “look like movies” (something they seem destined to almost inevitably never be especially able to do?), i think there are a lot of games that are like aligned with my taste that i’ve played, i do think they could basically “look better” or “more artistic” more often though
one of the reasons i keep like paying attention to games, trying to dig up new stuff that i’ll enjoy despite the fact that it only occasionally feels rewarding, is i guess just because i think technology is entertaining, i think it’s deeply fascinating to see these collisions of design and coding and like the entire concept of a medium based around real-time graphics is deeply fascinating to me basically, that’s pretty much unlike any other form i think. it’s similar to a lot of things but not the same as them. i am not exactly like any kind of artist by trade but i see a lot of overlap between practices like photography and real-time graphical rendering… umm obviously there are a lot of different kinds of games out there and not everything is based around real-time graphical rendering but i guess if you’ve read my posts that’s probably the main thread of taste in games that you’d see through them
this is one of the reasons the CRT tube still appeals to me… it just makes the graphics look more toylike or something idk. and it has sort of a retro sci-fi appeal, watching polygons spin around on a vacuum tube is like something the extras in blade runner would do, and you know what, it’s pretty enjoyable at times, you’d be surprised how beautiful some of those spinning polygons can be… i think videogames are a lot like toys. so is a camera… so are a lot of things…
i’ve been fascinated by what i see as a link between the style of cinema of hong kong and silent soviet cinema (this might make more sense if you know that prior to the 2000s the hong kong film industry shot most films silently and dubbed the audio in after the movie was shot) and reading the work of the soviet marxist director guy lev kuleshov (of the famous “kuleshov’s effect”, something they seem to teach people about in film school all the time) … also been reading some of his student sergei eisenstein’s writing too… and something that keeps occuring in these books i think is this idea that these guys pretty much 100 years ago saw cinema as like this new mass medium with revolutionary potential… and i’m that sure it was like pretty cool and exciting to be following the progress of this new medium where people were still figuring out like what it even was or could be , and there’s another parallel here in that i guess it seems like genuine flashes of brilliance and exploration of the possibilities of these mediums show from time to time even in the realm of like the commercial stuff, the popular stuff, but 99% of things seem totally mediocre or suck, and seem to have the effect of sucking up so much of the air culturally that people seem unable to even imagine like new styles or new possibilities, idk. i know someone is always doing interesting stuff somewhere even if i am an English-Language Cinema Has Been Deceased For Most Of My Lifetime truther… i guess it just depends on what you’re into idk lol
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next sb meetup should just be on the amtrak
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Amtraks are so sick. You get a sleeper cabin and get 3 meals and free coffee. It’s good. Maybe I’ll get one for going to GDC
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SBpiercer 1.0?
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ok, i’ll bite:
what?
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https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11024
Sorry, I see Ryan Blueberry did e-mail me about it and I gave my enthusiastic blessing, but I was never in contact with anyone at Babycastles and forgot about it. I only saw pictures a few years later and I think it was credited to “Glorious Trainwrecks” which I felt was a little funny. It’s fine, let’s call it fan work, but you should have made it look more like a house!!!
Wait it says this picture is from “#magfest2019”? Hmmmmmmmmm, all right, it is what it is.
If you do this again, please add the wolf, okay.
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Haha, that’s good to know actually. It’s all right really, I can’t complain because I’m deliberately selfeffacing and uninterested in intellectual property, but I’ll always relish an opportunity to point at the economics of it ^^
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anyways, lots of good thoughts here about what games are or could be, and i wish i had something more interesting to add. i think it parallels much of what we have seen happening in the music and film industries, and my own personal thoughts about the future are pretty pessimistic, but i leave some room for hope.
i think my favorite games, the ones i’ll play until i’m dead, are the ones that feel like meditative practice to me. this isn’t to say i don’t enjoy other kinds of games, but if one day i have dementia and i’m on my death bed, i think i’ll still be able to beat Mega Man 2 in under 40 minutes
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my only contribution to the previous discussion is that i have had many powerful experiences playing video games. some of them in quiet reflection, some when finally surpassing some resistant challenge, and a great many of them while speedrunning (so, playing the same game/level over and over by rote, trying to improve).
indescribable ecstasy. anything that’s not a psychoactive chemical you put into your body that can elicit those kinds of feelings is worth exploring, to me
of course 99% of the time, there’s nothing that spectacular going on. but that’s true of a lot of shit…
there aren’t any other forms of media that could provide the feelings i desire from games now. it’s not even like they could but currently aren’t… it’s impossible.
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I guess this makes me curious to ask how you feel about your own games… Do they get any closer to what’s “inside there” or does it all just feel like a failure to grasp at the real meat of the thing? I bring this up mostly because your stuff essentially got me back into games after having come to a similar conclusion to you post-indie-boom. Like I’m not sure I can flat out say I hate videogames outright, but by god are there a lot of really shitty ones or just deeply uninspiring ones to the point where I feel like it can become very easy to just dismiss the whole medium outright…
I will admit that sometimes my own continued fascination with games can sometimes feel like I’m just sorta circling the drain, hoping to reach that same high I felt the first time a videogame confused the shit out of me in a very pleasant way… But another part of me feels like there must be something of value in these things to dig out like you say. That it could all be reorganized into something much better than what we’re currently left with…
I’m so sick of the feeling of being trapped in a content prison, not just with games but with most media these days… I hate how much this can make me come off as bitter or dull or unfun or joyless but there was a time when I was the opposite of all those things and I would love to have it proven to me that that wasn’t just naivety or innocence or youth or whatever else and that there could be the potential to rekindle that in some way without deluding myself in the process…
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A lot of this convo reminds me of bits of Graeme Kirkpatrick’s “Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game”
Players are often drawn to games by their ostensible stories but if they want to play them they have to switch their attention and focus on the rules. In deciding to play a game this is a decision they have already made
…
Players negotiate games as functioning plastic objects with programmed properties that regulate what can and cannot be done with them. Discovering new properties and adapting them to different situations within the game is integral to emergence in video games (just like learning new moves in chess). To achieve this we have to break with the fiction to explore and examine the game as an object. The fiction never disappears altogether, but it is worn very thin especially by the repetition of these processes. The structure here mirrors the one encountered in Lost. As Lost is a story that cancels out its meaning so that gameness obtrudes in it, so video games are games that rely on fiction yet constantly corrode it so that only awkward fragments remain.The appeal of games resides in the complex implication of play with rule structures (an activity that is meaningless in itself) with the shards of projected fictional meaning that we find on the game interface. Patterns in this relationship, associated with bodily activity, account for its pleasurable character, which cannot be dissociated from its frustrations, especially the moments when we find our progress is blocked by a sequence of events that always seems to result in death. Following this kind of event are the inevitable long periods of repetition, when we master a sequence of moves essential to evade that boulder or kill that monster. During these it makes little sense to postulate anything other than a constantly receding role for fictional meaning. This is not a matter of the game giving us a choice between fictional or gameplay modes - that is too static a way of describing what is happening. Rather, the game projects an interesting appearance and then requires us to play against it. Our task as players is to pursue the difference between the illusory fiction and the game as rule-bound object, often until the first is almost forgotten altogether.
As Adorno pointed out, one function of the artwork was to turn us back to play, to make us see the childishness in our desire to ‘grow up’. Obviously, only an adult can appreciate this message and the play of the artwork is a play with this paradox:
Art brings to light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up. Immaturity via maturity is the prototype of play. (Adorno 2002: 48)
Now this play occurs in the video game but its message is blunted. If the artwork was a call to our humanity and a prompt to greater maturity and autonomy, the video game mocks our inability to achieve these things and invites us to rehearse the childish in a defence against the taunts of an unattainable adulthood. In the seriousness of play we mourn our inability to advance from infantilized consumers to free citizens.
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I like books but the literature community can be pretty toxic.
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imagining you on booktok and i cant stop laughing
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wow, that’s good to hear!
i guess i’m happy i grappled with this stuff years ago and got sorta blackpilled about it. putting your own things out there into the cold unfeeling world is pretty tough. i just ended up getting fixated on finding weird niche stuff out there as a protest against the unfeeling world of professionals and publishers and “shipping your game” and whatever other stuff that gives me nausea chills. it’s still hard for me to make my own stuff creatively and not feel very isolated and like i’m on my own and it’s me against the world.
i’m definitely there too - have been for awhile, even before the pandemic. when i start to feel a crisis about this (usually it’s me wasting time with a lot of meaningless youtube videos or social media) i usually at least force myself to watch some old movie i hadn’t seen before. a couple days ago i saw The Bicycle Thieves for the first time. i have successfully got myself to read actual books too, but that’s been a tougher challenge in general. i also often put podcasts on about things i actually want to know about when i’m playing games too which makes me feel at least like i’m ‘learning something’ while doing them.
i tend to convince myself a lot of things are “research” as a way to justify looking at dumb shit which leads to me wasting a lot of time on stuff that i probably don’t need to know about. it works sometimes tho, your mileage may vary.
edit: oh also recording little snippets of ideas you have throughout the day that just pop up is a good thing to do i sometimes do. i know that’s something that David Lynch suggests doing. makes you feel like you did the work without actually doing the work. works better if you’re out walking around or doing something and not just in screen zombie mode.
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I have no idea what the avante gaurd of the vidcon culture is anymore (if I ever have), but I personally have found great success* in honing my craft for stupider and stupider ends. I call it the “stupider-smarter approach” (I just came up with this name). If you commit to a sufficiently stupid bit (whether it’s stupid relative to prevailing design dogmas, self-indulgence, cultural expectations, or just plain good taste) with perfect confidence and sufficient craftsmanship, people** will hail your work as some sort of unsung genius.
The only issue with this approach is that you have to find new avenues of stupidity fairly often, lest your shtick become boring, staid, and imbecilic. I suppose that’s the issue with the “industry” and “culture” writ-large — people retreating towards proven (exhausted) avenues of stupidity rather exploring the vast universe yet-unimagined stupidities out there (but I don’t interact with enough of the culture so I wouldn’t know).
* personal satisfaction
** usually about 10-15 folks if I’m lucky
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