A Rapture Reminder

Who needs those smug assholes anyway?

Well, now that every form of artistic expression known to man has been lifted up to heaven in a wondrous cataclysm of celestial fire, games have got some big shoes to fill. For a start, we’ll have to stand in for books, film, paintings, music, theatre, calligraphy, dance, sculpture, cakemaking, pottery, graffiti, architecture, cooking, hairdressing, and porn. It’s just us and rap, now, and we’ve got 6, 571, 978, 629 sinners to entertain. If we want to stand a chance in hell we’re going to have to stand firm, stick together, and broaden this two-bit genre until you could pilot the Goodyear blimp through it sideways.

First thing’s first: Space marines are out, crying is in. If we want to cater to the six and a half zuckillion art-deprived arseholes left in this pit we need mass appeal, and if Titanic has taught me anything it’s that mass appeal = tears and tears = billions of dollars and billions of dollars = a good down payment on the primitive spaceship we’ll need to find and infiltrate heaven. I know some of you people like space marines, but every person likes to cry. Listen, I’ve seen the figures, we are getting only 5.09 rivers from our very best heart-string rippers – that’s more that 563% less than James Cameron gets from walking into a room. Wake up!

Next step to plunging this shitty +3-to-Nerd genre right into the beating hearts of our populous is: Adorable animals. People, the math adds up, I’ve got the venn diagrams right in front of me: Humans want to have sex with animals.

DOES THE MATH ADD UP?!

Now I’m actually pretty impressed with the work being done here so far. My boys tell me there’s been a good 24.5% increase in the eye to head size ratio over the last couple of years, with a 34.4% uptake in adorable looks and 6079 :3‘s this year alone. But it’s not enough. Lolcats! Kittens waking up! Flying rainbow poptart cat (god rest his soul)! The competition does not sleep, it does not falter, it only snuggles and wuggles in implacable adorability until we all flop over dead. They WERE here before us and they WILL outlive us, people, so we’ve got to up our game, and by “Game” I mean “Animals” and by “Up” I mean “Have sex with”. Get to it.

Last item, now, and I think it’s time for a long hard look at ourselves. Get a mirror, put your game console in front of it, look it square in the eye and admit: No-one gives a shit about games. DON’T BACK OUT. SAY IT. SAY IT TO HIS FACE. You know it, I know it, and every single person who left this earth for that eternal orgy up in heaven today knows it. If they’re any good, why doesn’t everyone on earth play them already? Why do movies get an audience of septo-deca-zillion and games only get quadra-zillion? You know why: Because games are shit. And hey, maybe that was fine when we could all just keep this wretched stuff in our bedrooms and shove it under the closet when polite company comes around, but now that the big boys have gone we’ve got to take our man-shooting shit pie of a medium and throw it directly into the face of the world. It’s already been well-established that every person who doesn’t enjoy this hobby is directly hacking a chunk of flesh off its side; The only way we can get away from that and get this escapist poison into the world’s water supply is to rip out games and start from scratch.

B-b-b-but Jack, you blubber, how can we ever rebuild our horrible hobby? What do we start with?

Laughing babies. Ladies and gentlemen, the defense fucks an eagle.

Posted in Indignant paradigm shifts, Ramblings | 3 Comments

Somewhere but not here

My dearest internet, I think I owe you an explanation. Although you may enjoy Jack’s well structured arguments, and biting witticisms. And my words. We are kind of on hiatus. This is until we get the chance to stop writing about games for education, and starting writing about games for the LOVE.

I will probably post something here in around two weeks. It will probably contains words, and pictures. Probabably far too many semicolons.

Until then fare well, we will return upon the dawn. Or some shit like that.

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Michaël Sawyn vs. the Rule-Based Game: Why mechanics matter.

The mechanic is the message and the monster is a metaphor.

Tale of Tales has a reputation to uphold. Ever since their manifesto – “Over games” – stirred up the e-hornet’s nest, founder Michaël Samyn has been the Art Games Man. As the company’s spokesman and most visible member, he’s the go-to guy for that perfect outrageous quote to unite the proletariat in a spot of hatred. You could say he’s the Nega-Ebert – approaching the issue from the other side, but provoking just as much controversy. He’s anti-games, he’s overconfident, he’s pretentious – oh, he’s very easy to hate.

So, as the sands through the hourglass, he posts a new article on the escapist – “Almost art”, following the theme of his previous talks. In “Over Games”, Tale of Tales declared that Games are Not Art, and thus reasoned that in order to make Art, they must create Notgames. “Almost Art” continues the legacy with statements like “…underneath their superficial artistic appearance, videogames are bland, unforgiving, meaningless, cold-blooded, rigid systems.” You can guess how the comments section took that.

It’s this central idea that systems are game’s greatest weakness that I can’t abide, and I think it’s worth providing a counterpoint. So shockingly enough, I’ve written a blog post about it, analysing his position and explaining why cold-blooded systems are the best thing games have going for them. In a further stretch of the imagination, you can find it under the jump.

Continue reading

Posted in Philosophy | 9 Comments

The Dead Island or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the trailer


By now it is statistically likely that you have seen the trailer. If not, it is stastically likely that a friend, a family member, or a loved one has seen the trailer. If not, statistics are irrelevant because you’re lying face down on a lawn, cold, zombified and dead.

That was in poor taste.

If there is anything in this world that will send a relatively non-existent item to the stars, it is the power of marketing; rabid and virulent as the undead themselves as they claw at our brains for another sweet ounce of flesh. But this time it’s opinions, as the philosophy zombies doff their caps to their shambling, distant brethren, and couple with our minds and nerves as we realise that we were the zombies all along, stumbling in unison to the clarion call of morality.

Rapidly decaying allegory aside, The Dead Island trailer presents our fevered minds with the death and reanimation of a child; her parents futile marionettes amongst her fatal steps, as seen in reverse. This is obviously an issue that games have been sidestepping for generations with the uncanny inclusions of invulnerable children, midgets or no children at all, but heartstrings aside, what importance does this trailer hold in the context of the game?

It’s just a trailer, right? Continue reading

Posted in Game Design, Games, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Emergency Future: Humanity Conjecture

Video games aside, there is a lot that has managed to arrest my interest within the sphere of humanity, a considerable amount of which has bled into my central essays on this blog. Regardless of what it is that I am writing about, a general philosophy begins to emerge; a philosophy of industry progression, but also of man.

So I’ve written a blog about the future. But it’s not strictly about the future. It’s about how people behave, how psychology has developed into collective consciences, robots, transhumanists and morality. Also street art. My infatuation with that sultry mistress knows no bounds. Basically, it’s an ideas blog, clawing its way up the side of the technocratic mountain of the future.

See you at the summit.

Or frozen to death

Posted in Blogs, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

You are not welcome here

A house sits plump and in decay on the edge of town; empty, save for the aura is casts over anyone who glimpses its weathered facade and black, empty windows. What is simply an abandoned structure, cast away from the beating heart of society, builds a certain personality for itself. Perhaps it’s the age old stigma of the haunted house, or maybe there is something else within its character that arouses the most irrational of our senses. Fundamentally, a great portion of our reactions and emotions are governed by fear, a response that represents, and mutates into a more palatable selection of responses that drive our actions whether they be creative or destructive. When surrounding the player within an environment, your goal as a designer is to stimulate the player into a response; immediate or delayed, and when this is accomplished, they may shape their own emotional experience under the prompts of your own. Continue reading

Posted in Game Design, Games | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

The Personal Narrative

Dear Esther, copyright - TheChineseRoom 2010
I was wandering through a narrow stretch of path on the outskirts of the suburb where I live, wondering what constituted my human experience. Not long ago, a good friend of mine raised the question of how we think, and how we could possibly perceive our own passage of thought, and this, as I had hoped got me thinking. I aspire to make games that place the player within an emotional position; a position in which they are free to divine from the experience whatever they find meaningful. When a player enters this domain, they are free to express themself in any way in which they see fit, free from the restraints of the game’s obligations; bound only by the formula that stimulates a particular vein of thought and emotion within the individual. In this brief moment of introspection, I realised that everything I had been working towards felt somewhat wrong.

Continue reading

Posted in Game Design, Mods | Tagged , , , | 23 Comments

How are you?

God, how are you? How have you been? It’s been so long I’d almost forgotten your face.

I’m fine, myself. You know. I’ve just been thinking about games, just like always.

On my desktop, there’s a single .txt file called “New Text Document.” Inside is the better part of the ideas, dreams, and asorted brain-drippings I’ve been having for over a year. I think it might be fun to riffle through it and extract the best of it to examine here. As a way to clear the tubes, get ready to post more, and look back at what I’ve been since the years we’ve held this blog. You can join in, if you’d like. No pressure- it’s only the terrible lack of professionalism that I bring to this blog that lets me do this with a clear conscience anyway.

Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 75 Comments

Narrative – the inorganic experience

Like a dog wandering amidst the plains and trenches of sleep, there has been something kicking away in the coils of my mind for a very long time. Well, at least since last year. Last year I began embarking on a project that asked myself to find the very root of fear, and recreate it within a game. The game never happened. Incidentally I wandered off on what was a surprisingly contentious emotional catharsis relating to the ideas that this game had sprouted. At the time I may have been pursuing the game because I felt aggravated with the way that a lot of independent developers were being deliberately obtuse for their own hypothetical indie-cred. Then I realised I was probably being a dick. Developers don’t develop games because they want to enforce their own brand of obscurity across the denizens of the internet, they do it because they believe in something personal. I feel that a better way of examining the situation is through a healthy, caustic dose of introspection, and what better way of doing that than pulling on the roots of the idea, hoping they’re attached to something interesting. Continue reading

Posted in Game Design, Mods | Tagged , , , , , | 13 Comments

A topical update


…To distract from the current lack of topical updates.

As shall be detailed in the next installment of me getting around to writing an article, I have been working on a mod. You can follow it here The Machination’s ModDB-type-thing whenever there is something that vaguely resembles a mod to follow.

Have a nice day.

Posted in Game Design, Mods, Ramblings | Tagged , , | 14 Comments