Ghosty, by Shensetta, is about our fear of the unknown, our fear of death. Instructions of a most cryptic nature, like a riddle told quickly, sprawl upon the screen at a tortoise’s pace:
Your objective is to destroy the ghost and eyes that over populate the world.
Thus sprach Shensetta; and thusly it was received:
Mankind occupies a special place on this planet. When first he learned how to create tools, he wrested the Intercontinental Championship from the animal kingdom, but once he evolved and internalized language, the game was up. The King of the Jungle wilted under the double knee drop of art and science, and a World Champion in Perpetuity stood boldly. Each and every challenger has been felled. Some stay boldly standing, juking against the ropes, but even AIDS and cancer know that a late round stoppage awaits them. The apex predator stands alone, yet every dog has his day.
Jump, Copy, Paste, is about that fateful day.
You are the player. The island is indie games. You must escape the island.
“If you were to be stuck on a desert island, what items would you take with you?”
It is a question that has festered in the minds of fools for ages; a parlor game of sorts — but one that holds a mirror to reality, and reveals the jagged edges of the human condition.
Where We Remain, is Twofold Secret‘s retelling of that story, though twice removed from the realm of the real via the lens of both Video Games, and Art. It is a story of a young lad stuck on a desert island, searching for “the prettiest girl’s name you know,” as the game puts it. Presented with a text entry field for you to type such a name into, and with well practiced accuracy, you type in “Derek Yu,” as you have done so many times into Facebook’s search bar. And then the mirror is turned — the game is afoot — and reality’s pixellated edges come into focus.
Nearly 30 years after John Carmack invented the independent games scene with his seminal, but largely overlooked indie game, Doom, we, the new blood, the tenants of the Yu-coined “New Wave” of independent gaming, are able to look into the rear view mirror that is Indie Games and see progress that is much smaller than it appears.
For the mainstream, it has been a decade of growth, with many game developers casting away the training wheels of their Game Makers and Multimedia Fusions, and adopting a platform that appeals to a much wider audience of babies, the Nintendo Wii. Mainstream gaming took its first steps as a more adult form of storytelling with the heart-rending death of the the protagonist’s love interest, and one of video game culture’s most endearing female characters, halfway through Japan’s influential game, Cave Story. But what of indie games?
The gameplay of Where We Remain is simple — move your character around a procedurally generated island, avoiding a malevolent whirlwind whose sole purpose is to find you. Sanctuary can be found within the many caves that pockmark the island’s face, though safety from the storm, you soon learn, may be the lesser of two evils.
On this island of independent games, we are trapped.
2010, the year that our newborns slide from birth canal to snug monogrammed jumpsuit. The crushing emptiness of space has been hugged into submission by the interstellar arms of man. Your own private mindgarden IGF champions won the prize with the stupid name, and technology has rendered sex obsolete.
However, artistic revolutionary Fiona, if indeed this non-cyrillic pseudonym can be considered valid, has a drastically different vision of the utopian future of the 80′s that we find ourselves in. The entire game is based on a maddening and infuriating falsehood. In Scavenger, the universe has been torn apart by Space-Capitalism. It was the innate nature of man to subvert the laws of Space Eden. Slowly, over the years, a once lush field filled with the endless majesty of the universe gave way to the detritus of the Space Man, which he now wallows in, filthy, the smell of stale recycled Space Urine on his breath, unable to break the cycle. Addicted. Addicted to that which is inherent. Addicted to his own greed.
Politically motivated lies, though they make for a great gamepiece.
The evil that lurks in the hearts of men is exposed via the looking glass of Art Gaming
Theatre.
Before the turn of the century, it stood alone as the only artistically credible medium — its playwrights the Jason Rohrers of that dark, pre-digital age — its players the carriers of a great weight of prestige, rather than merely a great weight.
Yet decades later, the creation of the automobile, the invention of AIDs, and a bevy of man’s other great achievements and modern conveniences have strangled theatre. Times change, and so shifteth the topography of the artscape. What could once only be appreciated by the critic has come to be appreciated only by the pimple faced high school drama student — a pitiful creature whose social nakedness is covered only by a beaten, gray Les Misérables sweater; whose first and only kiss came at the end of Act 2 of Batboy, a play in which he played the titular role.
Where Shakespearean wit and subtle sexual puns once filled modern high school auditoriums with awkward silence, the mechanics of Increpare‘s Theatrics achieve the same for the auditorium of the mind.
Love — oft cited, never attained. A theoretical phenomenon, never directly observed by a single indie game designer — though often scrutinized and conjectured towards. Love — the quantum physics of the art world — that which will never be understood by the very obese chimps who are most vocal about it.
It is that which drives man to commit unspeakable acts — to forgo the metaphorical treasure chests of life for the the base, animalistic pleasures of a girl’s tender touch.
Yet never has the theme been so misrepresented in Art as in Andrew Brophy and Andy Wolff‘s latest gamepiece, SEWERS, a game that, in keeping with its namesake, conveys little more than human excrement, travelling endlessly through the tired pipelines of the minimalistic 2D platformer, eventually dumping its ineffectual payload into a sea of shit, where it will continue to fester until it is consumed by the primitive, single celled ghouls that lurk a million fathoms beneath the intellectual stratosphere inhabited by pondscum.
In a word, it’s shit.
(more…)
Ultimately, the real monster is you
Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back has arrived, and the layman has consumed it, briefly revelled in it, and ultimately cast it aside as a child’s plaything. A mere distraction. Distraction from what? No doubt you’ve noticed in the absence of Pigscene the alarmist talking heads of the Liberal Media informing you day by day of the collapse of the global economy, and all too often the word “crisis” is bandied about. Yet there’s an ethereal crisis that inhabits our mortal realm — invisible to some, proving the existence of the political spectrum as a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum — a crisis Terry Cavanagh sets out to expose.
Therein lies the intricate beauty of Cavanagh’s creation, Atlas Shrugged wrapped in Etch-a-Sketch’s clothing, equal parts genius commentary and puerile, callow indulgence. The player, embodied by the character, seeks escapism from the harsh realities of life, turning to an abstract world free of the laws of man, yet still possessed of the great freedoms The Constitution of the United States of America provides — running, jumping, shooting varmints in the posterior.
Truly, things are just peachy. In your pleasant, pastel surroundings, you gayly hop, skip, jump, bag a few animals, live a life of frivolity. And then something happens. You’re plunged into darkness, enveloped in the crushing grasp of The Invisible Hand, and in this darkness is a spark of illumination. Things weren’t peachy. They were Red, they were just, they were pro-life. (more…)
Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War. A misleading title at best, a poorly written account that is devoid of any intellectually stimulating thoughts regarding Art — focusing instead on the inanities of War. War, a concept as old as Art itself, yet so disparate that not even a book called The Art of War could bridge the two. War and Art, like two twins, separated at birth, never to learn of their biological link. That is, until two artists penned a figurative The War of Art, a work that seamlessly integrates two concepts, doing in one day what Sun-Tzu could not do in his entire lifetime. I speak, of course of cactus and Terry Cavanagh‘s latest gamepiece, Xoldiers.
The game makes Passage look like an autistic child’s crayon scribbles.
Like Passage, Xoldiers metaphorically comments on life through the act of walking right. You play not as a single entity, but as a collective — a 3 x 3 grid of soldiers who are armed with guns, grenades, and the ability to lay down. You must travel rightward towards the palace, facing insurmountable opposition in the form of enemy tanks, jeeps, and buildings, but none more opposing than your own team, for you see, your unit works as a whole — if one soldier gets caught on an obstacle, your entire unit cannot progress further.
“Leave no man behind”.
If Passage comments on love by saying it will prevent you from collecting treasure boxes, Xoldiers comments on love (albiet a different, more homosexual kind of love), by saying “there is no place for love in the battlefield. Love for your brothers will only hinder you from fulfilling your mission.”
Now, I know homosexuality is a bit of a touchy subject (especially with artists), but I am not pulling out this homosexual thing from the ether. The troop’s commander says quite explicity that “War is a man’s game”. And when it comes to man games, two’s company, nine’s a crowd.
Xoldiers (Direct Link) by cactus and Terry Cavanagh, 1.62 MB
If man’s actions are his quill, and the world his papyrus, then the tale he has penned is a sorrowful story of deceit, greed, and callousness. One of the most active members of the Social Commentary Video Game Movement (SCVGM), JW, has released yet another game. This one, Lynchmob HD, a sordid glance over the shoulder at the civil rights movement, as we enter an enlightened age of a hip and happening world leader who can play basketball, and might even be able to dunk. A world with endless possibilities. A world which melts the societal boundaries between black and white; ground and sky; gay and not gay. However, I live not in the glorious empire of the USA, and so I feel no shame in proclaiming that I am white and not gay.
As with all great artists, JW knows his audience, and panders to them almost — but not quite — excessively. Independent gamers are exclusively white, middle class young men who want for nothing. Though such a detailed depiction could come off as snide, the player character depicted so richly with the high definition graphics alluded to in the title feels very real, and very genuine. The game looked stunning in full 1080p high-def — the individual pixels that made up the pixel-like characters of the game were almost indistinguishable.
The premise is simple: avoid being overtaken by the affluent and vulgar green and blue hued corners of society — the stagnant, algae infested waters of no-change as characterized by pre-Obama America. You are a single, white pixel — a pebble that will cause a ripple; which will cause a wave; and eventually, God-willing, a tsunami of change that will engulf all third world countries and drown them in the purifying waters of tolerance of the Afro-American race. But the fatcats will not have it — immutable — they wish only for your untimely end, and it will come at their hands. They form a great mass of bodies, wailing and gnashing their teeth, hungering for your death like some kind of ancient Roman bloodmonger. I literally shed a tear the first several times I played this game, knowing that through my W, A, S, and D keys I had connected with the spirit of so many young African Americans killed in this abhorrent manner prior to the civil rights movement. Fear and uncertainty in my eye, like an abused dog, I knew in those moments of primal instinct, survival driving every twitch of sinew, exactly how it must have been.
Lee Harvey Oswald tried to change the world with a single bullet, but his plight was in vain. Likewise, Lynchmob HD places in your hands, a rifle, and with that rifle, the ability to kill your oppressors by clicking on them. Yet this will not stop their advance — they are too heavy in number. They must be dealt with with Change. With Hope. With a mere nudge, your pebble wills the great stone of Hope into motion, creating a giant wave of destruction. No, not destruction, for such a word carries with it a negative connotation which cannot be associated to the Afro-American freedom fight. No. A giant wave of African American centric-intolerance destruction.
This isn’t so much a role playing game as it is an experience, a portal into the past. As we bring the handmirror to society’s face, we must be prepared to view its ugly wrinkles — and this period of racial intolerance was of the most unsightly variety — and face them unflinchingly. The face of our world is a beautiful face, but it is pockmarked with such unfortunate history.
The civil rights movement may have ultimately delivered the accutane, but the scars remain, and we must bravely face them if we are to survive in this new era, this great, bold era, where the world’s imaginary black friend can dunk.
Lynchmob HD (Direct Link) by JW, 1.01 MB
Imagine two overlapping circles. In the center of one circle, the word “Games”; in the center of the other, “Sexuality.” In the intersecting portion — the lemon-slice that exists between the realm of “Games” and “Sexuality”, the word “Art.”
The concept of sexuality is one rarely dealt with in the indie games community — a mysterious function which accepts an argument of type Effort and return void. To attempt to tackle such a broad and imposing concept would require not only a firm grasp on “Art,” and the ability to talk to a girl (one day, I swear it) but balls quite literally made of steel.
I have admired my distorted reflection in the cold, convex surface of Matias Kallio’s loins, a veritable hall of mirrors held within the groin of one man, and have looked a gay in the eyes — yet I have never seen such a brutal depiction of homosexuality as I’ve seen from this member of the NIGSource community. Yet the head upon which sits the Crown of Gay is not the head of Derek Yu — nay, the King of All Gays — the man who presides upon a throne made of another man’s naked flesh — is none other than Matias Kallio — he who possesses balls of steel and fists to match.
Yet his punches are not akin to the barbarism of our civilisation’s great fighters — Cassius Clay, Jack Johnson, Peter McNeeley — oh no, in fact they show little grandeur or fluidity, only an overly rehearsed combo, a powerful one-two, clearly drilled ad nauseum, a lifetime of work behind these two shots. The opening salvo? A threatening jab, not of bone and sinew coordinated in one glorious effort to dominate another being, but of art. Chased swiftly by the crushing animal force of a left cross (southpaw is the indie of pugilism) of intellect.
Matias Kallio’s ‘seminal’ (heh) work — Queer Village, is equal parts Mondrian and Borat.
You play a nameless character, a tabula rasa upon which to project your own identity. You are you, and you are leaving the comfort of Queer Village with your brother in search of mehrehem. You lose your brother. You must find him.
You glide with ease past sexual boundaries, unconstrained by the Puritanical views on sexuality. The metropolitan lifestyle enveloping you during your childhood in Queer Village stripping away any modicum of decency and self awareness your pitious soul may have once held. Your insatiable sexual appetite — and primal lust for mehrehem — your sole inspiration in life. Your deadful queer existence more a sad inevitability than a series of choices. Your quest not an unfolding book, but one long written, and covered in the dust of prejudice.
You are a gay, and no more than you can blame a dog for its actions can you be blamed for yours. Mattias Kallio has spoken the words on the Guantamo of our tongues, that which haunted our minds yet we thought destined to captivity forever, now given voice, given soul. What words has he chosen to impress upon the carbon paper of society for all eternity?
Gays are people too, no different to you or I. Not.
Queer Village by Mattias Kallio, 2.4 MB