harmony corpsepit

dog mural

2026-01-26T00:00:00Z

When I was a kid I remember a big wall mural of a dog in a football jersey. It was connected to the world cup, but looking back on it now it seems to be a remnant of the earlier 1990 world cup rather than the 1994 one I’d have been most aware of at the time. It wasn’t an official mural, it had the feeling of something painted by a talented amateur, on a wall somewhere in Ballyfermot.

I think what stuck with me is not so much that I didn’t know what the dog “was”, but how other people knew. Like, it obviously indicated football, in some manner… but how did the artist know to draw this particular dog? How did the adults around me know what this dog meant, or was referring to? Another terrifying idea: how did these adults not know precisely what the dog meant, or where it came from, but still manage to live their lives? The idea that this mysterious apparition didn’t need to be acknowledged or explained, that people would simply walk around it knowing that they didn’t know, was unspeakable to me. And videogames too had something of the same feeling. It was bizarre to think of the adults I knew, people who seemed to live in a very dry world of implied, unstated everyday knowledge, simply letting something like Sonic The Hedgehog into the house without much thought or compunction. In the midst of serious houses you’d find this gremlin, household spirit.

As a child I had a small speech impediment and unreadable handwriting, so the idea that language was a tool for communication always felt like a bit of a reach to me. Language seemed like an opaque and elaborate game you’d be punished for not playing, or for playing incorrectly. The linguistic meaning of any given sentence seemed less important than the phatic meaning: that I am talking, you are listening, you are talking, I am listening, that we are playing the game according to the rules. Any meaning communicated aside from that was more of a shadowy, unwanted passenger, something to be denied or hidden away if it was ever pointed out.

The appeal of videogames to me was never so much that they were something to get good at, the world was full of things you had no choice but to get good at, many of them as miserable and idiotic as videogames themselves. I think I was attracted to the idea that these things were a blind spot, a vast unacknowledged space where the usual rules seemed not to apply. And that seemed to harbor its own secret measure of contempt for the world around. Language in videogames was as garbled and inane as “real” language insisted it was not. The implied nature of the world, the hierarchy of selves and self-fashionings available in everyday life, was also emptied out – suddenly “you” were a ball, a paddle, a human fly, in malign parody of man-as-the-measure-of-all-things.

Negation is in you and so is in everything you look at. You could spend your life curating an endless VH1 list of moments that changed everything. The lesson of the dog mural might be how easy they are not to notice, holes in the earth that we step around unseeing. What terrifying sign am I looking at right now, capable of changing everything if I could only work out what it meant?

games pour rien

2026-01-14T00:00:00Z

I’m trying to think of a better analogy. Say you have a car – you take off the hood, and it still works. You take away the doors, and it still works. But now somehow imagine that you remove the wheels and it still works, you take out the engine, it still works, you remove the frame, it still works… when nothing’s left, but something’s there, and importantly when it still works.

In the early 2010s it sort of felt like there were two movements happening simultaneously, a rejection of gameyness and the reintegration of the same. Games as things that didn’t necessarily involve score, death, danger, action, puzzles… and then games which reincorporated those in their most sawed-off and abrupt form, without the carefully rounded corners of their vestigial ‘00s industry equivalents. This latter movement meant pulling from then-neglected genre byways – from Rogue and roguelikes, the punishing opacity of the Wizardry tradition, masocore platformers. And my impression has been that while the two tendencies co-existed, the former seemed to fade as the next grew strength.

Mechanics-lite artgames were treated at first as something close to money (or free aesthetic effects) on the table – new territory opened to explore once you stepped over the old limitations. And then the feeling dried up a little, since it turned out there were still limitations, difficulties, just different ones, the cowboy fantasy prairie turning out to be a vast and ambiguous swamp… and at the same time, oh shit, here was Dark Souls. Hotline Miami, the Spelunky commercial release, many other things fresh in the very directness with which they foregrounded their own gameyness… but Dark Souls in particular seemed to be taken as a standard bearer for the idea that the existing territory of gameyness had barely been explored, that there were whole and hidden worlds there to discover.

Which is of course still true, even now the excited rediscovery of procedural generation and “-RPG” as genre suffix might be a little less exciting to us all by now. The ungamey itself is a set of imaginary histories to choose from. Sound novels, odd PS1 experiments, ICO and Seiklus and Knytt and Proteus, Dear Esther, Gone Home... But I think one reason I feel drawn to it is that I started out making adventure games, in fact am probably still making adventure games. And adventure games to me represent another tradition in which people gradually, without any particular direction in mind, started taking away elements of the car, and found that it still functioned. No score? No time limits? No unwinnable states? No death? “Verbs” slowly pared down further and further until they became the barest of contextual gestures, “look” and “use”, eventually down to one click, the prod of attention itself? And then m-maybe even no puzzles, that last terrifying boundary, which the genre always seemed to keep getting closer too and then pulling back in confusion from… sometimes strolling across it like it wasn’t there, as if it wasn’t all that big a deal, in hypercard decks, multimedia experiments…

You take away the very last thing that you’re certain makes a car and find that it keeps going after all. But should it? Surely there’s been a mistake? Maybe the universe hasn’t quite caught on to what just happened, maybe the thing just keeps functioning due to some cosmic version of coyote time..? For a field of earnest programmers it may have felt downright unethical to build entire functioning software products around such an eerily unfounded effect, the kind of thing you might expect to vanish when you prodded at it, or even recompiled. There’s something horrible about the idea of building a machine and then finding out you didn’t, that you put parts around the shape of a different machine, one that functions through some set of rules you can’t anticipate or see… Reduced to a member of a cargo cult, or someone rubbing graphite on a paper sheet, registering indirectly stray dips and channels of the surface underneath.

An artificial cultural form is what we make of it; each addition changes our sense of the things that came before, everything we make now will be transformed into dim precursor by later generations baffled that nobody around it seemed to notice what was CLEARLY the most important development of the time, saying instead like Pilate in the Anatole France story, “Snood? I don’t seem to recall the name.” So I’ve never been that interested in definitions of videogames. But I remain entranced by anything that tries to take the wheels off the car, to pull something load-bearing from the depths of this imagined form and find with surprise that it still holds, that we ourselves are making it hold. An aesthetic of removal in art tends to circle around ideas of necessity that have no place within videogames, bastard and gratuitous offspring of the funfair and the army. And I doubt attention alone can sustain the 80 hours now synonymous with value for commercial products. Maybe that’s why it still feels like a surprise, a delight, to push absently against some wall and pass right through it. To brace for pushback or rebuke that never comes, that taut attention suddenly unmoored, loosed through the air and rolling away somewhere under the couch.

year of the cow

2025-12-30T00:00:00Z

lately i've been thinking of the cover to thelonious monk's "underground". it shows a barn, a studio made up to look like a barn. monk is at a piano, dressed up like a member of the french resistance. in the background of the shot we see a flag with a swastika, a nazi official tied up (dead?) in the corner, maps tacked to the walls. a live cow, an armed woman in stylish scarf and fatigues, the graffito "vive la france!". food is piled up on a table in the foreground, along with bottles, glasses, pistols, grenades. it's a meticulously set up photo, invitingly warm, full of detail. both the composition and theatricality seem to be indicating freedom, celebration, relief. but monk himself doesn't look relieved - staring out warily at the viewer, isolated and alert. playing piano with a machinegun under his arm. he looks like he's planted there, waiting things out, waiting for something to happen - something bad, something good. is the war over? or is he too far underground to tell, to worry about anyone who might hear him play?

(gil mckean's liner notes seem to apologize for a cover he calls a trifle bizarre - the barn is explained as being in fact monk's own manhattan apartment, filled with mementos of a fictional life in the resistance, including stuffed and mounted "honkie kraut". it's like the move into the contemporary is trying to resolve what feels uncertain, contradictory, in the photograph, but if anything it makes it seem more tangled.)

john berg's art direction for the cover won a grammy; the jam had a song about going underground that became a #1 single. there's a kind of pose maybe intrinsic to how the idea comes up in art. how far underground can you be if you're able to talk about it - to risk drawing attention to yourself? in 2025 hard not to think about the lives for whom any form of visibility comes with a chance of imprisonment or death. so what else does it mean? the harshest statement in going underground is "the public wants what the public gets" - what makes the line sting is the possibility it's not being sarcastic. the year before the song came out is when the conservatives swept into power in the UK on quite a large margin - this after everything we might call radicalising or liberatory in punk. what if the public really did want what they got? as a pop band, a band defined by some sense of speaking to or for that public, what would this mean?

we're still quite a ways removed from populations denied the possibility of public existence. so maybe in art 'underground' just means a shiver - of premonition, that it could happen to you, of memory, the things you can never afford to forget. necessarily privileged, the domain of those who can still afford to speak and have something to lose. but registering in miniature some felt change in the relationship to public life itself. not necessarily a dramatic change, more like, a cooling - the sizing up, costing out of possibilities that might once have seemed inherent to the world. a narrowed sense of what to expect from other people, from yourself. you grow to assume the chill in the air, you no longer remember what it was to walk outside without a coat.

part of the attraction to me of art that gets called experimental is in a refusal of these terms. to be brash and noisy, to make leaps that aren't explained in the assumption that someone out there will get it regardless, to refuse the kind of costing in which we might say each new idea must be paid for with the dutiful recycling of three received ones. to make it new, be absolutely modern - whatever that means, now that the modern can feel like the feudal with an app store paint job. i can't disagree with people claiming this kind of art in particular is, to use the hated phrase, "what we need right now": insisting on possibility and pleasure against the horizon of austerity, against almost a decade of sustained reaction. but. i also find that's not the art i'm making, that it has not been, for a while. that at some point i climbed into genre fiction, into narrative, like a mole burying itself in the dirt, and i'm still there. whatever it is i believe or find good it's like i see through a veil. and what art has become to me somehow is building endless, winding tunnels, underground.

there's pleasure on the album cover, food and drink, but the scene is too closed for us to imagine friends or comrades could enter to enjoy them (the machinegun lady in the background is so posed and still she might as well be as dead as the nazi official). there's a picture of de gaulle, but the de gaulle of the resistance years instead of whatever it is he represented by 1968. it's a directly political picture, bluntly stressing a connection between style and politics... but also it's not, there's no politics at all, because politics implies other people - perhaps what we have instead is an afterimage of politics, politics as familiar texture, shorn of hope or expectation.

and nobody else can get inside the image. he's looking out as if daring you to try, or warning you not to. pleasure is alive, but of who that pleasure's for, or what it means, nothing can be assumed. he's playing for the cow.

the itch.io adult content ban

2025-07-24T00:00:00Z

[some posts written fitfully after the announcement that itch.io would be de-indexing and in some cases removing 18+ games, at request of credit-card companies and right-wing lobbyists Collective Shout]

congratulations to all the virtual women no longer being trafficked through the itchio servers. our placement agency has found them new work at the Meta platform content moderation farms, where their job is sorting through 20,000 videos of apes being disemboweled in search of moments that are “react worthy” for 2c/hr

i like the formulation Women And Girls that all these ngos use. it makes me think of some schrodingerian wave/particle entity which is simultaneously a small child and an adult, and so permanently cancels any distinctions we might situationally apply between “small child” and “adult”. do Women And Girls get to go to a bar, or participate in anything but the most supervised-playdate versions of public life, competition, art? i guess what’s left is “homeschooling”.

thoughts on itchio and infrastructure:

i think itchio is a twitter era site, from back when it was a positive to have a stripped down page with minimal “community features” (newsground badges and what have you) that you could just link to from a socmed profile. guest checkout, fast payment, no fuss no muss. the expectation has been that finding and talking about a game happens somewhere else, and this maybe needs to be reconsidered now that every social site is doing its best to stop people ever leaving a curated feed.

itch was also built around access to payment processors. i remember this being relatively unusual by the standards of freeware-focused game hosting sites at the time. and i think many people, myself included, are guilty of the indiscriminately peppy charge :clap: for :clap: your :clap: work rhetoric that was in vogue at that time. the advantage of charging for your work is you get money (sometimes, extremely unpredictably); a disadvantage is that your work ends up built around the extremely narrow sufferances of a credit card company; and i think another disadvantage is that many of the people you have most in common with will never play your stuff, because everyone’s broke. the people who most need to charge money for their games are also people who don’t have a lot of money to spend on other people’s games. i do think it’s kind of led to people being alienated from their own peers a bit - to a landscape where students, broke people, people excluded from the official economy end up all trying to hock games to the same nonexistent middle class consumer, while having their own time and shared terrain eaten up by f2p, fortnite, roblox, gacha and anything else without that upfront cost.

and i know, i know, “how many peers can i exchange for a cup of coffee”. the answer is none; it’s not an economic relationship. it MIGHT, fitfully, unreliably, overlap with the economic: mutual aid, knowing someone with a spare room or a gig. this stuff is halfassed and indirect, but the indirectness also means it’s a little less exposed to a storefront’s ability to wipe your entire body of work with a single policy change. it also seems to me that the precondition to collectively working out something less fitful is trying to build these networks with each other, rather than everyone being in the one relationship of tenant-to-storefront.

the wonderful power of friendship is not a substitute money, and i don’t actually want to discourage anyone from charging for their work. but i do feel like it’s increasingly important to be specific in the ways we engage with the official economy, and to wind back the kind of indiscriminate blurring of personal, artistic, financial that was the twitter-era mode, the idea that you should expose as much of your life as possible to payment mechanisms to maximise the chance that you might get the golden ticket. every part of your work that touches a storefront is one that storefront can fuck up. i think it’s good to start thinking about spaces-without-markets that could interface with spaces-with-markets in limited and deniable ways, so that we at least retain SOME infrastructure when the latter inevitably go under; i think it’s good to distinguish work-for-peers from work-for-a-consumer-audience and give both their place. a peer can potentially be a comrade, a storefront will only ever be a fitfully inattentive enemy.

negative tendency

2025-06-20T00:00:00Z

I feel a little at odds with myself around videogames these days.

When I started in the late 00s it was mostly taken for granted that videogames sucked. The famous beige shooters of the time (so unlike the vibrant neon shooters of today) were the most obvious outwards sign of how the whole format seemed to have stalled, alongside licensed platformers, increasingly rote and charmless rpgs, etc.

To me this negativity was both useful and aggravating - it was useful in that it acted as a spur to do things differently, and to search out and celebrate those works that seemed to anticipate all the weirder possibilities that were still being left on the table (Killer7, Ico, etc). But it was also undeniably chauvinistic: so much work was dismissed solely on the basis of a recieved impression, or distant genre stereotype. The focus on what videogames would be seemed to turn into an ahistorical license to ignore whatever it was they actually were; I remember being puzzled that so few of the people calling to reinvent videogames seemed to have any curiosity about the format as it had already developed, all the weird byways it had already gone down. It was fun to explore some of those byroads - pirate carts, Seaman, Mel Croucher, microcomputer games with odd changes in framing perspective or tone - all the interesting things that seemed to be left out by the narrowing contours of a newly codified sense of what videogames were, or should be.

I think at least some of that insularity has been worn down in 2025. It's not a novelty to see serious and respectful criticism around previously dismissed genres (the visual novel, the dating sim), or people highlighting interesting touches in games that would have previously been treated like chum for some variety of angry videogame nerd. If anything seems beyond the pale now it's negativity itself, the implicit violence in all generalizations - when you say videogames suck, which videogames are you talking about? Have you played them all? Why are they bad? According to who - to you?

And when I say I feel a little at odds with myself, it's because as much as I'd like to see this change as welcome... in the same way as I can't help but group together the chauvinism of mid-aughts gamechat with the ignorant masters-of-the-universe posturing of the newly emerging tech castes of that era, or the empire building fantasies of people who seemed to see the whole world as a blank slate for the imperial imagination... in the same way, I can't totally disconnect this change in emphasis from the context from which I saw it emerge: a context that to me is one of protracted political failure. The Restoration, the brief shake-up and eventual further entrenchment of established powers - the slow removal of other possibilities. Not so much capitalist realism as capitalist stoicism, the sense that things stay the same and what changes is how we respond to them - a corresponding turn towards spirituality, self-help, various forms of hustle. It's not so much that I think efforts to discover new and interesting facets to Fester's Quest (Sunsoft, 1989) are part of some deflating retrogressive project. It's more like, I can't help but feel a little less excited by that stuff when it ends up dumped on Substack next to similarly open-minded and reclaimative arguments for the unsuspected virtues of, say, the Catholic Church. If it means something to argue for greater subtlety and attentiveness when something seems at risk of being swept away, then what does it mean to keep doing it when nothing seems capable of being swept away anymore, however rancid it may be?

It also depends exactly where that subtlety is applied. I could live with a universe of Fester's Quest Revisionism, but part of the aforementioned decade plus of political failure has been a victory lap of monopoly capital - the inalienable right of anyone with enough money to decide what the rest of us have to change our lives around. There's a form of culture this produces, but also forms of cultural reception that sit downstream. The person wiped from long hours or a second job who finds themselves sinking into the same game every night. The dispersed friend group who play the same bland MMO as a way to catch up. Virtual gambling as symbolic relief to the seriously precarious. The streamer pulled into the wake of whatever game is able to most reliably promise a stream of new content. The game critic who has to find a way of writing about the only five games you can make money writing about.

And stricture becomes sensibility. The last ten years of videogames criticism have been focused on identifying and appreciating craft - and as noble as that is as an aim, to me it's tainted by the fact that if your living depends on being able to write about eg Grand Theft Auto then you better appreciate the craft because there's nothing else fucking there. The beautiful statement by Pliny, that no book was so bad that no good might be gotten out of it, starts to curdle a little bit when it becomes justification for locking someone in a basement with 5000 Hardy Boys novels.

I'm wary about too-consolatory sophistication - the elevated philosophy of the middle ages peasant who declaims that all worldly things are vanity, as they perish age 22 from drinking water contaminated with human shit. It's not even that this makes what they say untrue, exactly - it's more like, I'd credit it more if I felt like other possibilities were still on the table.... I can't help but wonder if our new flexibility of viewpoint around videogames reflects a sense that the things themselves are no longer at any risk of changing. Discursively there's more room to breathe than ever, infinite subtlety, metadiscourse spawning from metadiscourses... every possible point of view around the newest Rainbow Six game, precisely because the prospect of "newest Rainbow Six game" now is such firm footing, more immutable than stone, a safer assumption than that of our lives, our odd and wormy desires...

And maybe if you like Rainbow Six that isn't so bad. I think what ultimately makes me feel a little at odds with the culture around these things is a sense that everyone likes videogames, now - - or at least everyone still inside the format, everyone who makes these things or plays them or talks about them. Liking videogames is now the entry ticket - it's not so much that we've resolved whatever tensions we might have with the format as that they've been pushed outwards, into a boundary around the thing itself. You Must Be X Unequivocal About Videogames To Ride, and if you're not, maybe this just isn't the place for you. Gamers only - well and good, part of the fabled maturation of the form, why not leave videogames to the people who like them? But it means I have to think about where I stand, as someone who mostly likes videogames when it seems like they might be becoming something else.

pc-88 fragments

2025-06-08T00:00:00Z

A side-scrolling action game in which two main characters (he and her) arrive at the church to have a wedding while defeating a mummy man, werewolf, a thief, a mysterious thief, and a ghost who disturbs you. Mummy men, etc. take the heart on the way, touch it and defeat it, or kick and defeat the football on the street. (Wedding Bells)

An action game for dwarfs with the dial of the phone in the background. (Dial Number)

An action game in which a rabbit Pinky eats his favorite vegetables while digging a hole and fighting the enemy. (Pinky Chase)

This is a world similar to the natural world. If you look to the left, there are only snakes. When you look at yourself, yes, you have become a snake. It is a town that is eaten unless you eat it in the midst of severe competition for survival. (Snakes and Snakes)

A game where you control the keys to catch the bad boys without getting caught by the boss kid. Fixed screen action. (A Bad Kid Comes To Town)

You are the only drunk in town. He takes one child around the bar and continues to fight with his wallet in his hand. They are yakuza, violent taxis, etc. (Drunk, Trek)

This isn't just a simple game of strip poker, but a game in which you pester a computer lady while taking into account psychological coefficients, biorhythms, and so on. (Playboy)

A game in which you rescue a princess who has been kidnapped by a spider, the embodiment of evil. (Spider Rescue)

This adult adventure game focuses on the sexual techniques of Hatsue, who became a hot spring geisha to repay her debts, and Danpei, a professional in the field. The matches take place in various locations, including the bathtub, the washroom, the bedroom, and under the futon. The player plays Hatsue. Use secret techniques such as bubble dancing to get Danpei to work and you win. Can you block Danpei's special move, the screwdriver? (Hot Spring Worm Geisha)

Convoy is a large truck that runs all over the US continent. The player runs through various places as instructed by the computer. Includes maps of the entire US. (Convoy 5000)

In this game, Smile-kun jumps onto a hanging ring and crushes a monkfish that emits shock waves from its mouth. The shock waves emitted by the monkfish are laughing gas, and if you are exposed to them, you will faint. (Smile)

When you move MAN, ladders and paths will appear naturally. In this game, you must navigate these paths and ladders skillfully while being careful not to hit enemies, and collect all the red poles. (Dark World)

The player's mission is to enter the ghost town alone and rescue the imprisoned people. The player is only given one ambulance. However, this car is a very sturdy and super powerful monster car. Use this car to drive freely around the town and eliminate the enemies. (Saber Part 2)

In this game, you control a raccoon dog to rescue a child who has been held captive in a building. The monk throws a ball to attack you. You can also throw a ball to defeat the monk. (Chobin)

Linda is the best pig-rabbit in the world, and her special skill is imitating the ugly rabbit. People always call her pig-rabbit, so one day she finally decides to lose weight by jogging... But things don't go well, and she falls into a hole and gets lost in the underground world. A mysterious monster is after her... That's the story. Written by the famous Toshio Tabeta. (Linda Linda)

A simple war game released as an introduction to computer simulation. The game progresses through a text screen. Pearl Harbor is just about setting targets, but it takes some skill and it's hard to achieve better results than in real life. (Attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Malayan Sea)

A real-time game where you control the beautiful girl character Minky Momo. The game involves putting fruits falling from above into a basket. At first, you can clear the level by just picking up the slowly falling objects, but when four balls start flying around the screen, you start to panic. If a fruit hits your head, you die. (Minky Momo's Panic Ball)

google translated game descriptions from the pc-88 library at https://www.gamepres.org

on solo dev

2025-06-07T00:00:00Z

am i still qualified to talk about this? i haven't really been "solo" in a while - i've worked with the musician tommy tone for over a decade now, and recently em reed and alex degen have both worked with me as part of larger projects. but i was a solo dev for a while and what i mean by that is this: that i was making games where i didn't have to talk to anyone.

i specify this because the idea of solo game development has become a kind of charged topic. i think this is due to a confusion between two distinct settings: that of funded commercial game development, where a single person handling everything is extremely rare, and that of unfunded hobbyist game development, where it is extremely common. adding to the mix up is that the idea of making a game yourself is thought to confer extra glamour, respect, monetary reward. it very well might, in the setting of commercial game development. i do not think this is particularly true for the other kind. i've never had the impression, when telling some bored acquaintance that i make computer games as a hobby, that it sounds any more impressive or less seedy when it's something i'm doing by myself.

anyway, i also wanted to start with some limited definition of what i mean by solo dev because there's also an idea that "solo" is some kind of unreachable metaphysical end-point, which would involve not just making the game but also perhaps the engine for the game, the language which runs the engine... mining your own silicon, creating the universe which produces the silicon... even aside from this ultimate horizon people might insist that at the very least, surely we know enough about game development now to realise it's impossible for something to make it all the way to public release without at least one person playtesting it (ha, ha, ha).

i believe part of this comes from a well meaning urge to critique a supposed capitalist emphasis on individualism. i should say i'm firstly not sure how much it's worth taking that emphasis at face value - couldn't you say as well that individualism is exactly what's impossible under a system where everyone's fighting for the same resource in the same way, facing impoverishment or death for ever deviating too far from the archetype of the Business Man? from memory this is something like oscar wilde's argument in the soul of man under socialism, with the pleasant implication that a formally equal society would be one where everyone had the resources to become as individually weird as possible - a universe of hyper-dandies, each beavering away on their own anno 2000 iterations of The Yellow Book.... these grander objections aside, i think all that's needed for a word to be usable is for it to act usefully as a distinction in some context. does "solo" really mean nothing but a PR emphasis?

i think the strangest thing to me about the solo development discussion is that nobody seems to have much curiosity about exactly what it means as a mode of work - that is to say, specifically for the context where it might most meaningfully be applied. let's put aside the vague idea that making something yourself necessarily makes it more personal, grounded, authentic etc - an opinion which rarely survives first contact with the terrifying impersonality of the itchio new releases page. we might still say that the conditions by which a thing is made are then reflected in all kinds of ways in the content, the emphases, the sensibility of the thing itself. what solo dev means to me is that you don't have to tell anybody anything. you don't have to explain what you're doing or why, don't have to articulate what's funny or corny. your project folder can remain as discombobulated as possible. you can, for a while, work in the happy illusion that your various private idiocies are not causing anyone else harm (that part comes after the game releases).

i'm not saying all collaborative work has to involve mechanisms of formal triage and debate. the last decade or so i was mostly not working on solo things, but they still didn't involve much direct discussion - usually i feel happiest starting off something myself and then building some space in advance for someone else to fill in, in ways i don't really want to dictate to them. the same qualities that make me good at working on things by myself also make me a mediocre collaborator, and i think would leave me deeply unsuited, maybe evil, in some more formal team structure. it's surely true to say this stuff is more of a spectrum than a binary - but does that mean your specific position on that spectrum says nothing about the specificity of the work itself? the good things, the bad things, the things it does or doesn't take for granted, the revealing oddities of structure that come from abandoning the idea of balance? the kinds of friction produced when tools that assume commercial team structures make it into individual hands, and vice versa?

one final thing: again, i think that lingering in the background of this stuff is the idea that solo = individualism = capitalism and teamwork = collectivity = democratic socialism, or something. but surely part of the interest of art itself is that it flickers, excuse me, dialectically between these two poles: the totality of the historical moment and the individual work refracting it, the collective materials of art (history, imagery, language, tools) and the individual consciousness that registers and changes them before sending them back to exist as one part of some wider moment. all work is read both ways, through both lenses, and part of aesthetic sensation itself is our own uncertainty around just where each begins and the other ends. i assume in advance that collective work, like solo work, has its own tendencies and qualities; what remains in both is to discover what they are, what they mean, rather than simply assuming a collectivity it's our job to produce.

indie soapbox

2025-06-06T00:00:00Z

thanks for everyone who came to the indie soapbox in glasgow this month, where i got to give a small talk alongside simon meek. i've copied the intermittently-referred-to text below.

Hello, my name is Stephen and I've been in the knock-down drag-out big-money biz of making my own computer games as a hobby for the last 17 years, for reasons I can no longer recall.

When I think about what drew me to the hobby, it was basically that I liked the feeling of moving a little guy around. I'd downloaded one of the free, pirated versions of RPG Maker as a teenager and when you fired up the program this was the first thing you'd see - a large and empty grass plain that you could wander around as the default player character. The game itself would have no content yet, no reason to move from one side of the screen to another. But for some reason I still found it compelling enough to keep on opening up and moving around in.

I think RPG Maker particularly is set up with an expectation that the game is more or less an excuse for content - that you'll put up with a certain clunkiness or limitation of the default verbs as long as you can add in your own little guys and start writing their stories. But my experience was that the content ended up being an excuse to keep exploring that clunkiness - that when I started adding battles and towns and dungeons and narrative elements, it was to have an excuse to continue coming back to whatever tiny, stupid thing I found compelling about just moving a guy around a field.

If I ended up trying to make a "real game" it's not so much that I wanted to as that I hoped that the ritual of game development would end up getting me closer to whatever it was I found interesting about RPG Maker itself, or about the computer itself, which was more or less the excitement of pushing a button and seeing something happen. Kind of in the same vein as the very first interactions I'd have with a computer - things like changing a screensaver, or the desktop background, or writing something in WordArt.

I think things like that can be hard to talk about with the language of orthodox game design, where the emphasis is more on things like challenge, or complexity, or conversation with the designer - the sense of an ongoing push and pull. The assumption here is of intentionality; that of trying to do something, and having this intent frustrated in some way. But what attracted me instead were trivial gestures - where you didn't even want something particularly, and found yourself doing it anyway without issue. To move from one side of another of an empty room, to change a screensaver from one preset to another. Things where neither the original intent or the end result are things you care about, but which nevertheless you find you're acting out.

One of my first memories of PC gaming was playing the flight game Crimson Skies - at the end of a level your character gets an ancient gold coin. And when the gold coin comes onscreen there's a button next to it that says "print". So I pressed the button to see what would happen, and the printer started whirring, and I got a print out of a golden coin I had no interest in, and could not spend.

To me part of the interest of computer games is the way they tend to act as snapshots for the decisions you didn't care about, for little drifts and scatters of attention that are lost as soon as they appear. You press a button without knowing why, you perform an activity without really wanting to, and you're confronted with this alienated, ghostly image of your own wandering mind in the form of a little sword guy squirming aimlessly across an empty field.

And to me that's both why I like videogames and why I don't like them. I don't like videogames because it can feel like the odd, empty hypnosis of watching your own thoughts play out in this way is almost too strong an effect to let anything else inside. I'll play a game, and I'll be moving the camera around and not looking at anything. I'll be hitting the button to talk to people and not reading any of the text. I'll play something for an hour and then feel like I've been doing nothing, that I've been doing less than nothing, not thinking, not even daydreaming. Because despite whatever accomplished thing the game insists I've been doing - killing people, acquiring gold - I've really spent that time just staring at my own reflection, at this glimpsed double of myself in the unnecessary actions that take place on the screen. And it can feel draining, as if to complete and fill out my doppelganger in the screen also means having to empty myself out - to dedicate myself totally to the task of pushing buttons in order to temporarily sustain this spectre, which vanishes like smoke as soon as I turn off the machine.

On the other hand, and despite this, I do keep coming back to videogames. And I think it's because I remember them so strongly - somehow the memory of videogames is always very potent to me. I'll remember a fragment of texture, or a functionless room, or the slippery feeling of grinding against some invisible collision box, and often these half-memories seem stronger to me, more charged and mysterious, than the experience of playing the game itself. It's as though the very empty, mechanical nature of that back and forth with the screen was also what allowed the elements of that screen to pass directly into the night mind without a filter, a kind of automatic writing in reverse. Or else that all the dead, indistinguishable time we spend with videogames were enough to make the little bits of them that survive in our heads seem even stranger, as if they were fragments of another game that never existed, some vast and invisible computer game it was our task to rediscover.

Maybe that's why memory is such a strong recurring theme in alternative computer games. Now before I continue that thought, I should say there are a few reasons why alternative games would keep returning to this theme.

The first is that "the future of videogames" has always been ringfenced by capital. It's always been seen as existing just over the horizon of ever more powerful home computers, high definition graphics and audio rendering, motion capture and so on. So to make a game with no investment capital is already to exist outside the future of videogames. Hobbyist games are read as "retro" no matter how much they do or don't resemble any actual particular computer games of the past. So for games in this space memory is a theme that's thrust upon them whether they want it to be or not.

The second is that these games often do in a sense exist in the past, in that they're often made in cheap and easy to use game engines reverse-engineered from the industry requirements of yesteryear. RPG Maker 2000 is a perfect example - a nonprofessional tool for making games in the style of the big budget games of a decade earlier. Even engines like Unity and Godot tend to be built on assumptions around how a camera works, or how a physics body should move, that have been established through the previous decade plus of cutting-edge commercial 3D games.

So these game editors are themselves built to be "gamey". Firstly in the sense that they are themselves repositories of videogame conventions; secondly in that trying to reach a nonprofessional audience often means trying to make the tools fun and gamelike in themselves; thirdly in that their use in tiny nonprofessional settings, where generating a new build to play is not this complex process, frequently means falling into a rhythm of tweaking things, playing the game, tweaking more things, playing the game some more. I guess what I'm getting at is the feeling that these game editors can themselves be games; that when I make a game in Unity, I am also playing a videogame called "Unity" and the game that comes out is a kind of byproduct of that experience.

Now, I'm not saying that's the case for all games produced this way. And often what gets canonised as "good game design" is specifically advice meant to push back on this tendency and make sure the end result remains intelligible as a work in itself - advice like consider the player, do regular playtesting, come at the work from an outside perspective and so on. But for people who are outside the industry and hence outside that expectation of an audience, this kind of memory sediment can be a powerful effect to explore in itself.

A third reason is that all computers are memory machines. They have memory, they use the metaphors of memory, they absorb and incorporate the imagery of previous memory technology like notepads, desktops, folders and reminders. A memory palace is a classical technique for retaining information by spatialising it - by constructing in your head a kind of virtual museum in which faces and names are stored in particular objects and locations. A home computer in this sense is also a spatialised memory container. And for anyone making videogames on a personal computer, full of old photographs and notepad fragments and letters from friends and things tucked into drawers, it can be hard to maintain a clear line between the two. The videogame can act as an extension of or a consolidation of the implied memory palace that is the computer in the first place. And for games made by hobbyists, people who might be working without structured design documents or meeting notes or changelogs, the game build itself can more literally than most end up being the museum for its own development. A place where fragments are heaped and sorted through and the lines between used and unused content may not be clear.

This is actually one of the things that most stood out to me about the famous early indie game Cave Story - the blurred quality of the game's storytelling, a sense of elements returning and mutating across all these discarded builds you'd never get to see, and the way this gave the game itself a sense of off-kilter density that I think would have been lost without that hobbyist game feeling of haphazardly accretting prototypes.

So those are three reasons why alternative games would keep coming back to the theme of memory. But what I'm interested in is actually a fourth reason. And to get at that one I'd like to bring up a different term first, the idea of the "motivation of the device". This is a term from the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, and in memory what it means is something like - in the novel Don Quixote, we tend to assume that the meaning of the work is something of a parody of the courtly romance. And the technique by which it's parodied is by playing the register of high-minded chivalry against that of a more down-to-earth and deflating everyday setting. So the idea that you have the intent of a work of art and then you have the tools that achieve it.

But we could as easily flip it the other way around, and say that what Don Quixote is about IS the startling literary effect of switching registers, of playing two forms against each other to unsettle and mutate them both in surprising ways. And where the nominal moral, the parody of knightly romance and about the dangers of reading too many books, functions as a kind of excuse or pretext for playing with these new effects. Instead of the moral or theme of a work as its ultimate meaning you have moral or theme as a device which enables new kinds of formal play. And I think the benefit of this framing is that it assumes this play of forms is generative beyond the theme of the work, that it's a strength rather than a defect when putting these things together seems to raise new and startling effects beyond what we expected from the stated theme.

To state a work is about something is to bring in some collection of pre-established images and associations for the thing to work off of. But it also clues us into what kinds of effects we should be looking for from the work itself. For a game to be about memory is to raise certain expectations - that it may be very personal, fragmentary or dreamlike. But there's also a deeper perversity, in that we're used to considering a work of art in terms of intent, while memory is by its nature unintentional. What we remember is often not what we'd like to remember, and it's often unclear why we remember one thing and not another. The things that lodge in memory may be good or bad, distinct or indistinct. We use the term memorable to denote things which are distinct and surprising in experience, but often the images of memory are indistinct in experience - the things we don't know that we've seen until we remember them later. A stretch of road, a bedroom ceiling.

Trying to deliberately cultivate memories can be to encounter this perversity head on. When I was young my parents took me on a trip outside Dublin, and I'm sure they were hoping that I'd have lasting memories of all the beautiful Irish countryside we drove through and all the picturesque small towns that we stopped at. The only thing I remember from these trips was a cigarette vending machine at one of the hotels we stayed at.

Now, a cigarette vending machine is a videogame. In many way a cigarette vending machine is the ultimate videogame - it's an image of technology and desire, control and volition and pleasure and addiction and money. I remember hanging out around it, aimlessly pushing the buttons and wondering if it would make something happen. And it's tempting to think that I remembered this one image because that experience, of pushing buttons and wondering what would happen, would be something I'd then explore in other ways for the rest of my adult life.

I think it's more true to say that anything in memory becomes a symbol - that any object of the world becomes a symbol, once it's severed from experience and returned to us through memory. An object is a world and also the vision of a world. And if alternative videogames are about memory I believe it's not so much that they want to be memorable as that they want to see what memory will turn them into. A memory game is one that accepts incompleteness in the hopes of someday being completed in some way they can't expect or recognize.

And of course all videogames end up being changed in unexpected ways by memory, but to recognize this in advance can be to change your own notion of what it is you're trying to make. It can seem more economical to make a 30min game that someone remembers 30 seconds of than a 30 hour game that someone remembers the same 30 seconds of. Rather than unity we might find ourselves making work that's fragmented, in hopes this better equips it to survive the fragmentation to come.

For the last four or five years I was working on little horror games in my spare time. They're often modelled on b-movies, and take inspiration from the scattershot nature of b-movies. The accidental effects, the way the tone can change from scene to scene, the hungriness of cheap art in the way it indiscriminately roams around looking to gobble up effects - the pattern on a piece of wallpaper or upon somebody's dress, the face of a particular character actor, stray lines of aspiring crude or poetic dialogue. A comics artist I liked a lot, Richard Sala, talked once in an interview about a time in his life he dedicated to watching b-movies - they'd always be on the TV at 2am so he'd set an alarm, get up at 2, watch the movie in the dark, and then climb back into bed and sleep. He said it felt like the perfect way to watch these things, as if they were dreams you were half remembering the next day.

And when I made horror games I liked to imagine them being played by someone who was half asleep, the hope that the games themselves somehow made sense or remained intriguing even if you weren't paying attention, if you were drifting in and out from scene to scene. That the narrative would make a kind of emotional sense, but that all the stray details, little lines of dialog or ideas or the question of how one thing related to another, might stay with us instead as half-remembered mysteries. Shapes we fill out with ourselves in a different kind of recognition to what plays out on the computer screen. I'm interested in games that destroy themselves on screen the better to be played in memory.

Of course, the flaw in my argument is obvious to anybody listening. If we can't anticipate what we will or won't remember then there's no reason to think a game structured as memory will really be any more memorable than a game structured after anything else. Whether it's experimental narrative or FIFA the memory will take what it will and discard the rest, and eventually return with something rich and strange.

And despite my talk about the empty feeling I get from playing videogames, I'm not really interested in suggesting anything that's better or more moral. What intrigues me about memory is in fact that it's so totally amoral. In a way it seems to me a model of what Keats meant by the term "negative capability" - "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"...

And something of this negative quality, this willingness to exist outside of positive reasons, is I think what I always found most beautiful and astonishing about videogames themselves, about cigarette machines and RPG Maker games and all the aimless and directionless mazes of perception as embodied in these things. So maybe the virtue of memory as a theme is that of setting yourself an impossible task, one whose success or failure can't be measured, one we can't QA test for - I don't think there are any videogame playtesting sessions where you ask someone to play a thing and then come back ten years later and tell you what they thought. That the undecideability of the task could be a form of fidelity with the undecideability of the format itself, a dream of living without knowing exactly what it is we represent.

mr gimmick

2025-06-04T00:00:00Z

my feeling around videogames is that interactivity is a gimmick. i don't necessarily mean that dismissively - i'm a big fan of the 3d friday the 13th, where every few minutes the movie stops abruptly so that someone can poke something into the camera, reach into the 3d plane for a lightswitch or to hand the audience a joint, etc. as flaubert sez, a feast on every page. delightful as this is, i guess what i mean by gimmick is, the feeling of a closed off artistic device, an effect that means the same thing every time. the context of reaching into the frame changes through the movie but the effect is always "makes you laugh and go waoh."

and videogames, reliant on the gimmick of pushing a button and seeing something happen deep within the alienated blackness of a computer screen, sometimes seem condemned to the same hell as "non-gimmicky 3d". well-integrated 3d or gameplay or smell-o-vision or whatever, immersive, unnoticeable, subtle etc... like a tasteful version of the william castle prop skeleton... who wants that?

the great power of a gimmick is that it comes as a remit to explore surfaces. you can do anything you want in a 3d movie as long as someone pokes something into the screen every two minutes. the immediacy of certain effects can be a license to omit other ones entirely. and an "effect" is not quite an "emotion", can be something more on the ambiguous realm of sensation, that network of sensations that underlie and support our habitual emotional life. you can follow a stupid gimmick and find yourself somewhere surprising, wallpaper you don't recognize, not sure how you got here or why it made sense at the time.

eternity is in love with the productions of time, videogames are always seeking depth but depth itself seeks surface, seeks the gimmick. i prescribe a return to traditional values: pushing the button to make the clown disappear.

consequences

2025-05-16T00:00:00Z

that we cheat ourselves by cheating at a game, fail to "truly engage with the game systems" by robbing ourselves of consequence. if only!! but consequence can't be removed, only ever displaced. to play goldeneye with unlimited health, unlimited ammo, to vaguely go through the motions of the spy routine, screen flashing red as we're peppered with harmless bullets - this just means dealing with a different kind of "consequence", the consequence of following our desires in all their circular strangeness. without the escape hatch of being able to say "ah, without this obstacle - this guard, this limitation - THEN i'd be happy, THEN i'd be fulfilled".

artificial scarcity - is that consequence? it feels too close to the world i live in to interest me much. i always end up talking to people at work who'll insist that without a job, without the consequences of NOT having a job and the way those consequences frame and direct our behaviors, that we simply wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. to which i always think, well, maybe YOU wouldn't, man... failures of imagination projected as helpfulness, the small annoyance of someone announcing they've solved for us a problem that perhaps we wouldn't have minded wrestling around ourselves.

the freud line about moving from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. a similar distinction: interesting vs uninteresting forms of unhappiness. to want something, to lack shelter or respite from the blunt animal miseries of exploitation, scarcity and torture - surely part of the cruelty of these is how they overshadow all the other ways that we might be unhappy. and how meagre their countervailing images of happiness turn out to be, money, food, ammo or red potion. compare to the strange and elaborate unhappinesses involved in simply being alive, in the directionless abundance of perception itself, that stuck tap endlessly pouring out into a drain. isn't that something worth fighting for, something everyone deserves?

the beauty of cheat modes is that they depict a world where everyone has access to the higher unhappiness - freed from meaning, given tools and time to seek out ever more perverse forms of self-destruction.

aesthetics after art

2025-05-13T00:00:00Z

thinking about em's new piece and the debate on poptimism that prompted it. for me one reason why the high / low art distinction is hard to imagine remaking is that high art itself was partly responsible for erasing it. the futurist assertion that a racecar is more beautiful than the victory of samothrace, the dada and surrealist arguments that art must be destroyed so everyday life could be remade in the image of the same freedom - i think it's completely true to say that despite these claims, the idea of "art" occupied an invisible place of distinction in even the most iconoclastic modernist thought, was never identified completely with "culture" in general. but the strongest claims of these movements survived past them - the heirs of that negation, the henry flynts and jean debuffets, spent years carefully sawing through any remaining special claims that the idea of a high culture was reliant on. to me poptimism begins with paul morley's ZTT, the new pop label named for a futurist sound poem and dedicated, in the most "serious", theory-laden way, to entryist chart success over subculture marginalism. which is not to say i buy into that, either - morley's role as official hype-man and theorist-svengali now feels like a depressing bridge between malcolm mclaren and the likes of shingy or doctor luke.... despite this there's still a lingering sense that to reestablish the category of "high art" is to betray that category absolutely, to existinguish whatever it is that keeps this work from sinking into the museum of dead forms.

em's piece points out the disspiriting way that "there's creativity everywhere~" tends to mean in practice that "it's creativity to get a job copywriting soft drink advertisements~". which also makes me think... to me one of the strangest tendencies of the last decade is that: everyone talks about labour, but the distinction of "alienated" labour never seems to come up. and i get it, because it seems hopelessly naive as a claim when the very idea of unalienated labour is so often used as the prescription for unpaid overtime. "do what you love." it's hard to hear after a while without reflexively looking for the stapler being thrown at some intern's head. and the dynamic goes both ways - if writing advertisements is an "art" then is "art" just writing different kinds of advertisement?

it's as hard to locate unalienated work as it is to identify freedom in an unfree world. when every moment of freedom is conditioned and shaped by invisible limits - does believing it it at all just make you a mark? and yet as theoretically groundless as it may be it's hard not to feel like there is indeed some distinction between the labour of telling a bedtime story and the labour of working in a foxconn plant.

"non alienated life" is i think less a political idea than an aesthetic one - an idea from schiller and the romantics, fourier and the utopians. perhaps that's why it feels kind of embarrassing to talk about, when even the aesthetic content of a work of art feels sort of shadier and less legitimate to talk about than things like sales figures and other abstract bogeys of significance. in both cases there's a sense of furtiveness about simply wanting something, and a desire to launder that desire through more impassive seeming shapes. well, you know, i wouldn't have said anything, but since THEY want it...

my own feeling as well is that the modernist dismissal of art is itself a secret fidelity to the aesthetic, to the swift movements of pleasure and surprise, interest and disinterest that tend to outpace the claims of any particular tradition. it's not exactly the case that we lack "the aesthetic"- it lives on as a kind of sludgy, circulating lymph of public life and discourse: moodboards, image macros, gifs of the guy in the office making a face... maybe what seems missing to me is any sense that the pond slime of our own preferences could mean anything, could act as any counterweight to the heap of graven images we find ourselves saddled with. maybe against a "poptimism without pleasure", we need a "pleasure without pop"?

gambling

2025-05-06T00:00:00Z

all art right now consists of a bet that desire could mean more than an empty form of satisfaction - that faced with a distinction between frozen and inadequate forms of symbolic enjoyment (handing over $60 to participate in new mario game, etc) and the real thing, the latter would win out. there is no reason at all to think that this is true.

duty

2025-05-02T00:00:00Z

it sometimes feels like the entirety of games criticism is set up to justify doing the thing you wanted to do anyway. "i've had a fixation on making mario levels since i was 8 - here's why that's What We Need Right Now." here's why it's good, or important, or if you're on the commercial side here's why it's necessary to hit retention targets and appease the shareholders, etc.

for me the question abt vgames right now is - if you knew it was evil, would you do it anyway?

to use terms like right and wrong, moral and immoral etc - are you willing to abide strictly by these terms? to change your life in accordance, if it means giving up what you really want? or if you knew it was bad, or impossible, would you try to do it anyway? the latter is not to say something is beyond judgement, of yourself or other people. it's just to say those judgements are not why you did it - it's to resist camoflaguing your own desires in highminded terms of duty, to act as though you had no choice.

to be a hobbyist game developer is to say you did something because you wanted to. the famous yeats line: in dreams begin responsibilities. what i think of when i read it is that ethical obligation begins in desire, in all its strangeness. the desire to cause pain, the desire not to cause pain, how we make sense of these things, how we weigh them against each other. by this i mean not that desire must (or can) be brought in line with our own ethics - it's to acknowledge the murky realm of fantasy that the ethical itself springs from, and to resist displacing it into the other realm where we do whatever we do because it happens to be right.

i want to see games made from desire, because i want to know whatever it is that desire is worth.

(and perhaps this seems a step back from the arguments about political games, social change, etc... but to me the same dilemma applies. the histories of 20th century socialism are often unencouraging, and they certainly put an end to any idea that a better world would simply be inevitable, scientifically emerging untainted from any embarrassing forms of idealism. would you need to know the New World was certain before you fought for it?)

redundancy

2025-04-29T00:00:00Z

a lot of how we talk about videogames seems to take it for granted that you're making art for a world where no other art exists. i'm more interested in what it means to make work in the full knowledge that so many people are also making work. what's still worth doing? what can you leave undone? like it doesn't feel worthwhile for me to put intricate combo systems in a game if it's something other people - who are actually interested in that kind of thing, who have ideas and opinions about it, who are dedicated to it - are doing the same thing.

all games become one in memory. the distinction between "collective" and "individualist" gamedev (roughly corresponding to an idea of what's "politically good" vs "politically bad") tends to rely on the artificial boundary of a studio. socialism in one company..! but we are unfortunately all stuck talking to, working with and around each other to some extent, even without the benefit of formal employment contracts saying so.

the most egotistically "individual" art becomes "collective" as soon as it's experienced by someone else, as part of the totality of everything they see, part of what fills out that space of possibility.

discourse meta

2025-03-25T00:00:00Z

i think what finally depresses me most about videogames is a sense that the way we talk about these things grows ever more nuanced and sophisticated, while the things themselves remain the same old shit. in the wake of political failure, when nothing else seems possible, speech attains a new spirit of freedom in being able to apply any possible lens to a subject in the happy knowledge of none of it mattering. is the catholic church a repressive apparatus? do bears REALLY shit in the woods? are videogames bad or do we suffer insidious false consciousness, where if we truly understood the craft and working conditions, the subtleties etc, then we might finally coerce ourselves into satisfaction.

many people have written thoughtful, nuanced things about meeting the format where it's at and accepting the bad with the good. and to me it's like hearing talk about the great chain of being and the folly of worldly vanities from some middle ages crop farmer about to die at 25 from drinking water infused with human shit. it's not that what they're saying is wrong per se - more like, it'd have more weight if it didn't feel like the only game in town.

Mystery Meat 3 - Platform Studies

2022-09-01T00:00:00Z

Platform Studies

**VARIOUS DOS GAMES **– Have I had it wrong about platformers this whole time? In the indie period they were _the _privileged vessel for "game design" in all its empty intentionality - ah, but what if I put the block there instead of here? Hee hee hee... ho ho ho! But all those guys have moved onto making Sokoban levels now, and with hindsight it’s easier to see why this genre transformed into the totem that it did. If indie games were not-AAA, they were also not-shareware – part of defining themselves as distinct from the chaotic hobbyist past was through overidentifying with Nintendo instead. Platform games in this context were doomed to automatic significance –simultaneously the site of orthodox game design’s most well-known case study and of the shareware era’s most delirious mistakes, a staging ground for the new era.

Playing around in random DOS platformers you run again and again into the same features: rambling maze levels, collectibles of unknown purpose, weirdly doomy and intense synth soundtracks. "Dark Wolf" frontloads you with earnest fantasy worldbuilding text and then you play as a tiny wizard guy hopping around vast and empty garden worlds. The licensed “Trolls” game, on the more commercial end of the spectrum, feels like a pretext for demoscene-like special effects: exploding stars that shoot out of every powerup and bounce crazily around, so that the greatest threat of the enemies is that you won’t even see them among all the visual noise. There’s a sense of things that are platformers just because that’s their nearest idea of what a videogame looks like – once they achieve that family resemblance they can stop, mission accomplished. Yes, there’s a platform, and a ladder, and a crystal. Who cares what happens after that? Uh, pay $15 for the full release to find out :sweating: :sweating:

Hopping dreamily around the big containers, enjoying the huge rich skyboxes until I step on a goblin and am killed instantly – well, that’s the videogame way. But rather than tally up their merits and faults I want to say that what appeals to me is this very sense of things not fully integrated. They feel like collections of test levels, like what a game is before it’s finished becoming itself: before the ingredients blend, back when they retain their own mysterious private character. The music is too intense, the panorama too dreamy, the platform structures too abstract, the monsters too punishing – we experience these things as fragments, as combinations, discovered and lost as we’re moving around. A test level is a laboratory for desire: a place where new effects can be developed, through chopping and mixing, and that can act as a provisional container for combinations that strike us (even when we’re not sure what to do with them yet). Art has limits, but desire does not, and if there’s something that resonates about these games now, it’s in this same sense of limitation suspended –postponing game design for a dream of infinity.

THE SUPERNATURAL OLYMPICS - Every game is potentially a container-game. Ulillillia's most well-known work may still be his video series on Bubsy 3D, in which he converts it from a list of goals or authored challenges into a collection of "oddities" - what's the highest point on the map? What's the fastest speed Bubsy can reach? Posted a few years before even the first GDQ event, these were my and possibly other people's first exposure to the same kind of against-the-grain method of play as speedruns and the pannenkoek2012 Mario 64 Half-A-Press explainer. But what stood out most at the time was the perversity of applying this kind of close read to Bubsy 3D, of all things - a game that played a similar role in the emerging game design canon as Satan did in christian mythology. If even Bubsy levels could be transfigured into gardens of delights, what couldn’t? And what would game design mean if this were the case?

In the best shareware tradition, Ulillillia's own "The Supernatural Olympics" takes these questions and turns them into a floaty platform game. Platform here is singular - the whole game consists of running and jumping around a single vast, unbroken plane, while a densely layered background panorama rolls by in the distance. There are some nominal, optional goals, to do with getting to a particular speed or height... But mostly it's about the sensual pleasures of movement tech and of abstracted, virtual space, of space with the giddy unboundedness of math. What if I told you that you could keep multiplying figures together to get ever higher values – and still never leave the domain of real numbers?! Unlimited hours of gameplay, and a form of desire which has been with the medium since inception.

The test level never has to end – from within the shareware ruins, The Supernatural Olympics projects forth a strangely Apollonian aesthetic of clarity, lightness, space.

ANYWORLD – But let’s go in the other direction for a while. If The Supernatural Olympics extracts the openness and clarity from the DOS platformer, what are we to do with the parts that are left over? All the blocks, noise, clutter, game-junk – all those half-finished mechanics, scavenged sprites, example areas, all the material of game development, all the scaffolding, all the rubble.

Anyworld is a Gary Acord game, and the RSD Gamemaker website helpfully identifies it as an “Acord megamix”, sampling assets, characters and locations from all across his previous games. But even without that context we can tell something is up. The gameworld is non-representational even by the loose standards of videogame representation. Your character’s movement is a completely f***ed cross between top-down movement and sidescrolling platformer – which one applies at any moment seems to depend either on the area of the screen you’re in, or on the erratic priorities of the game engine. The viewport jitters around you and never seems to line up exactly. Pushing one of the dedicated directional jump buttons hurls you bodily out of the screen, so that any navigation becomes a matter of vague preference. Wandering or falling through a colour abyss, you encounter fragmented areas in totally different forms of perspective to those that your character occupies as well as scavenged bits of different shareware games. Touching the tiles that the level is made of causes them to unexpectedly flicker and change, revealing scattered pieces of seemingly earlier, long-buried builds.

Reportedly Acord himself was known in the DOS hobbyist scene as a prolific chopper-upper of other people’s work – not just sprites, but whole levels taken from the engine’s sample games appear here in transfigured form. But more striking is the sense of self-collage, of that same chopping, rearranging impulse turned inwards on itself. There’s no longer a point where collaging might end and the game begins; we’ve gone from the test-level-as-laboratory to something more like an alchemist’s workshop, where the endless reshuffling of matter becomes a door to hidden knowledge… Platform games without a sky, where the “platform” to be navigated is the game build itself, rent from within by terrible volcanic pressures. In another context the name “Anyworld” would seem utopian and open – here it seems to gesture at a secret anonymity of matter itself, one that extends into and infects all the lush pastoral landscapes of the genre’s various green hill zones.

A while ago, I read the phrase “an education in desire”;

and was surprised I hadn’t seen it before, when it seemed to connect so many things so well

Anyway, I believe platformers can be educate in a similar way

In their dreamy complications of the ground and sky.

— Kissy Jr

Mystery Meat 2 - World Of Museums

2022-08-27T00:00:00Z

MUSEUM MELTDOWN – Outside the museum you will see a burning dumpster. There is ammo just behind– collect it, then head in through the security doors and shoot the troopers waiting on the other side. To your left there is a medpack. To your right, a pornographic cinema containing multiple Pig Cops and a shotgun. Directly ahead of you is a big white corridor filled with Art. Proceed directly towards the Art.

Museum Meltdown is a 1996 Game Art piece that reproduces the real-life Arken Museum of Modern Art through the magic of the Duke Nukem 3D map editor. Now, Game Art is not the same as Art Game – it’s an older and more gallery-centric thing, taking “videogames” as a form of masscult found imagery to play with, in the vein of appropriated advertisements or panels from old romance comics. At best the result is a kind of creative misreading - an alternate read of what videogames _are _that generates a new idea of what else they could be, as in Suzanne Triester’s Fictional Videogame Stills. At worst it turns the format into schmaltzy gesture, like Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds”. But note that both pieces are or derive from physical originals – Treister’s exist as photographs of her Amiga screen, Arcangel’s “Clouds” piece is (or for a long time was represented as) a physical Super Mario Bros cartridge that he happened to modify. In this sense both works are suited to the requirements of the art world, the museum world, with its premium on individually significant artifacts.

If we take a museum to be a container for unique objects then any museum situated in a videogame will tend towards being a parody, or inversion, of the parent concept. Videogames are built around lossless digital reproduction – of sprites, of models, things with no “original” except maybe code that can itself be painlessly copied and moved around. I think of the dinky little top-down museum areas in games like Pokemon and Earthbound, populated with generic repeating “exhibit” sprites that just function as block obstacles; I think of the “Dwemer Museum” in Skyrim, reverently containing the same bits of recurring dungeon junk and lore books you come across everywhere else in the game but on plinths this time (look at them and the UI will automatically inform you: Weight 5, Gold 15). If you look up “museum” on gamejolt or itchio you’ll see, firstly, more Five Nights At Freddy’s fangames than you may have thought possible; secondly, a bunch of Unity games built around the availability of public-domain photogrammetry scans of famous sculptures (as well as paintings sourced from google image search). Rather than containers for unique objects, museums in videogames tend to resemble big tuna nets catching whatever bits and bobs of imagery are already circulating most widely – paintings so ubiquitous that they’ve long since stopped being identifiable as works in themselves and now merely point towards an idea of “painting” more generally.

Well, let’s get back to Arken for a while. While I’ve been talking at you my body has been perforated by Pig Cops and Flying Drones – it’s a surprisingly brutal level map, and after a while I had to turn on God Mode just so I could see all the rooms. Is this what Kant meant by disinterested contemplation..!? Wandering through the galleries I see blurred copies of famous Art Masterpieces: Nighthawks, Warhol prints, a screaming pope stuck in a cube, a Jeff Koons metal bunny (which I was unfortunately unable to blow apart with my minigun - a serious game flaw). Each exhibit turns out to contain another batch of enemies and after a while the feeling of cleaning them out resembles the fatigue of trying to see everything at a real-life museum. Ah, another room of masterpieces to check off my list, huh… Of course, you can also go and explore the weird secondary spaces of the building instead: the gift shop and canteen, bathrooms and event spaces. But the Build Engine abhors a vacuum – in the absence of art, all kind of weird default assets from the main game come to fill up these spaces instead. You can find a little moon landing diorama, an arcade game, tables piled high with Duke merch, a karaoke machine, and of course the obligatory interactable pole dancer. Outside the windows, Flying Drones skitter aimlessly around a flat and empty landscape.

Museum Meltdown can be found floating around online. As a custom map, there’s not really an original - maybe this helps to explain how strangely gamey and difficult it is, feeling closer to hobbyist map networks than to the institution it portrays. Apparently the mod was once showcased in the same museum, and I wonder how that worked exactly - were cheat codes provided or did the assembled gallerygoers have to get good and learn to circle strafe? Well, even the isolated map is quite compelling. As you keep playing the various garbled, low-resolution artworks meld into one - what you're left with is an image of the museum itself, as a container that contains nothing in particular, an organizing principle lost in its own dream logic, extending interminably into corridor after corridor... Well, maybe it's not so different from the videogame form after all.

**IB **– Case in point: how useful museums are as a setting! Visual interest – modular, themed rooms – environmental storytelling, informational signs – cavernous marble halls – interminable backrooms and storage areas, begging to be filled with crates (the level designer’s friend). And of course if you make videogames yourself it can be nice to have a setting which invites some showing off. All the little touches of background filler, vases, paintings, etc, can now come to the fore as art objects in their own right, placed flatteringly on plinths for the admiration of the viewer.

Of course if your museological ambitions are higher than providing set dressing for a Sierra game you will probably run into trouble. Haruhiko Shono's "Alice: An Interactive Museum" is great, surprising, weird - but does tend to come to a complete stop whenever you're asked to actually sit down and look at one of the Kuniyoshi Kaneko paintings placed around the environment. Desperately you click around, and sometimes something happens, but... it's as though videogames prompt a very different kind of looking than the kind we might want to apply to an art object, something quicker and more scattershot, jumping from point to point, unseeing. You can put paintings in a game - our eyes brush past them on their way to somewhere else.

RPG Maker horror game Ib, set at a haunted art retrospective, sits somewhere between the two poles. On the one hand it enjoys, and makes use of, the abstracted idea of "museum" as occasion for set dressing. Big empty rooms, tiny scrambled background paintings, storage closets, mannequins. On the other hand: for a game about haunted art it's important the works themselves should have SOME presence, maybe greater than the little 32x32 tiles can provide..

What populates the museum? The answer Ib gives is: Special Effects. Sprites change, sounds play, things move, handprints, footsteps, moving eyes, dolls come to life. The lights go off, and on, and you're in a new place. Doors change where they lead.. I'm making it sound very rote, very horror. But a certain disconnected toybox quality is part of the effect - the museum, or the gallery, is a box full of sensory toys. Some are surprising, some are amusing, some are horrible, some will take you new places - you don't know which are which. The sense of equivalency in both the museum shape and the RPG Maker engine - containers that can seem blandly indifferent to whatever they contain - heightens the sense of these effects as mysteriously ungrounded and capricious, as weirdly similar to the aesthetic experience of a museum itself.

I've been writing here about museums, digital art, the singular object - maybe it's time to address an elephant in the room. One of the many excitements of 2022 is having your choice of Amway-brained speculation cults, each of which is promising to return uniqueness and presence and incidentally profit returns back to digital art. (Remember 'aura'? It's back - in pog form.) But the various critiques that already exist to one side - there seems to me something so alienated and forlorn about the idea that our perceptions themselves would simply abide by whatever vague, legalistic fictions of scarcity and ownership that we choose to apply to digital forms. As if we could simply will away the unsettling aspects of these things, their intangibility and coldness, their indifference to our own instincts of quantity. Instead, Ib follows this emptiness, and multiplies it - puts one alien container inside another....And in doing so, rediscovers the realm of the senses.

**MUSEUM MELTDOWN 2 **- That's right!!! It's a series. Part 2 takes place in a reconstructed version of the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania and feels like something of a concession - there are much fewer enemies around, so even inexperienced Dukeheads can appreciate some art (although tougher boss monsters hang out on the maintenance floors). The architecture is more straightforward this time although I appreciate that's not strictly their fault, and most of the art pieces are the same. But overall I have to recommend this over the original for two reasons:

You can blow up the Jeff Koons bunny with a rocket launcher this time (a Flying Drone comes out and attacks.)
Certain areas will prompt Duke to engage in art criticism. For example the room with Jasper Johns art will prompt him to enthusiastically intone "COOL." And the Edward Hopper zone will cause him to reflect, "THIS SUCKS." He has no reaction to Piss Christ - maybe it didn’t register given Duke’s own longstanding relationship to pissing on things.

There is a third one of these games, made in the Half-Life engine, which I haven't played because I refuse to install Half-Life - from videos online it seems to feature environmental storytelling in the form of bodies lying around, and you can smash up the exhibits with a crowbar. But can this truly be the end of Duke's travels? The readme file included with the maps offers words of wisdom.

Please use this map as a base for your own levels.

Make your own exhibitions.

Examine it, rip it apart and learn from it

and do copy it. Don´t forget that stealing is

Everything.

— Kissy Jr

Mystery Meat 1 - Cubic Independence Movement

2022-08-21T00:00:00Z

(backed up from the now-closed gameoeuvre.org group blog)

BEAUTYCOPTER: It's hard to be a helicopter - on the other hand, that's how it is. The days stretch out before you like a dull ache, the ache of Beauty, like seeing a really perfect cloud formation on the way back from the Eurospar and thinking, well it's nice but what am I meant to do with that? You can stand there and try to look at the sky and still remember that you're holding unrefrigerated milk. There'll come a point where you have to turn your face away. And tomorrow there'll be another thing to look at, possibly just as beautiful, moreso, less so, other, maybe you won't leave the house but it'll still be out there, waiting to be acknowledged, a drain, a hole, an unanswered blinking message.

The helicopter, a physics toy with few animations to worry about, is one of the preeminent videogame entities. In Operation Vulture III: Cyber Chopper for DOS you float joyously around dropping bombs upon a metropolitan city, and not even enemy fire is able to puncture a certain sealed and dreamlike quality about your travels - the toylike floatiness, the uncrowded sky, peppy SimCity-esque music that plays as you fly through pseudo-3D parallax skyscrapers while joyously firing machineguns at anything that might explode. By the time of Beautycopter the war is, at least, offscreen - now the skybox itself is the primary hazard of the job, offering such a rich aesthetic surplus that it constantly threatens to pull you off-course. You accept the weird duty of aesthetic contemplation in the same way as all the other chores - flocks of sheep, animals in the breakroom, the demands of the spa guests in their pursuit of luxury. There's something confused and forlorn feeling about the guest's attempts to appreciate Beauty, something that's more real to me about Beautycopter Pilot's wistful and delicate distance from the same. You acknowledge it and skirt it and leave again and keep coming back. Watch out, pilot. Your mission is to survive a world with so much pleasure.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE WIND WAKER: I want to remember the ocean but all I can remember is the grid - ah! "The gamer's curse." Basically, the world is a square that's broken into smaller squares, each of which contains a Thing, and you must go from one Thing to another, and then sometimes back to the same Thing again but from a different angle... You lay your wind-direction like a rule across the world of squares and try to get from here there in the fewest moves. And eventually the sea itself starts feeling like a dream appendage of this other world, the grid world - as if your movements are that of a strangely interminable, solitary chess game, made entirely of knight's moves, crossing and recrossing themselves in an orgy of redundancy. Wait, I have to go back there? That's where I just came from!! My fucking talking boat couldn't have mentioned this before?! It's an AAA game which means after a certain point the prospect of your own wasted experience is the coin you're playing for, the thing you're betting on being able to somehow, by close of game, transfigure or redeem. And indeed, after playing for a while you will get to the end and achieve narrative closure. But the grid has its revenge - as the game is over, as the years go past, it continues silently consuming the ocean in your memory. And when you try to go back, instead of an open world you find: a rubik's cube, feverishly shifting and turning itself in simulation of errands long forgotten. North, north, west... Wait... West, west, up, left, south, southeast, left, up...

ALPHA WAVES: At last - a game which can contain both action AND emotion (as separate modes, as god intended). In practice, it feels like an enjoyably tech demo-y Jumping Flash precursor. Your abstract little robot guy bounces around platforms in a succession of big, empty cube-shaped 3D rooms, trying to find doors to get into more rooms. "Emotion" mode just turns off the timer. But that's not all - there is also a map you can look at, in-game, a map so abstract and featureless that when I first saw it I thought it was just a music visualiser. Each box on the map is another 3D room to jump around, arranged into coloured territories given names like "Relax" and "Stimulate".

To be clear: the game itself absolutely does not have enough variety to justify this relentless amount of tiny, boxlike jumping zones. But something about this odd mix of uniformity and specifics- the flat assertion that such and such a room existed in exactly _this _precise spatial arrangement with all its fellows - was compelling to me, somehow... I found I wanted to explore this land, go as far in some direction as I could. As you continue through the cubes sometimes the music will change, or the colour palette. You'll get a new enigmatic level name at the bottom of the screen (the most endearing microcomputer tradition) and every so often might spot some non-standard polygon construct, or even an animal, some drifting manta-esque creature. But the prospect of these didn't excite me as much as the other thing: the desire to get lost inside the grid, to carve some winding, lugworm-esque path from cube to cube until you get to another zone, another country, a place you could never find your way back to. You could live there: start a new life, out in the cube suburbs. In fact, after a while you lose steam and slow down - there's only so much finicky 3D platforming that a body can take. And maybe you know by now that you'll never hit the edges of this space. But there's the possibility that you could, someday.

Videogames give rise to desires they can't satisfy as well as the ones they can. The former might be more interesting, or anyway they last longer.

Kissy Jr.

donkey kong city

2018-07-21T00:00:00Z

sprite comic essay about my favourite videogame, “donkey kong city” https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2155