2010, the year that our newborns slide from birth canal to snug monogrammed jumpsuit. The crushing emptiness of space has been hugged into submission by the interstellar arms of man. Your own private mindgarden IGF champions won the prize with the stupid name, and technology has rendered sex obsolete.

However, artistic revolutionary Fiona, if indeed this non-cyrillic pseudonym can be considered valid, has a drastically different vision of the utopian future of the 80′s that we find ourselves in. The entire game is based on a maddening and infuriating falsehood. In Scavenger, the universe has been torn apart by Space-Capitalism. It was the innate nature of man to subvert the laws of Space Eden. Slowly, over the years, a once lush field filled with the endless majesty of the universe gave way to the detritus of the Space Man, which he now wallows in, filthy, the smell of stale recycled Space Urine on his breath, unable to break the cycle. Addicted. Addicted to that which is inherent. Addicted to his own greed.

Politically motivated lies, though they make for a great gamepiece.

(more…)

The evil that lurks in the hearts of men is exposed via the looking glass of Art Gaming

Theatre.

Before the turn of the century, it stood alone as the only artistically credible medium — its playwrights the Jason Rohrers of that dark, pre-digital age — its players the carriers of a great weight of prestige, rather than merely a great weight.

Yet decades later, the creation of the automobile, the invention of AIDs, and a bevy of man’s other great achievements and modern conveniences have strangled theatre. Times change, and so shifteth the topography of the artscape. What could once only be appreciated by the critic has come to be appreciated only by the pimple faced high school drama student — a pitiful creature whose social nakedness is covered only by a beaten, gray Les Misérables sweater; whose first and only kiss came at the end of Act 2 of Batboy, a play in which he played the titular role.

Where Shakespearean wit and subtle sexual puns once filled modern high school auditoriums with awkward silence, the mechanics of Increpare‘s Theatrics achieve the same for the auditorium of the mind.

(more…)

Imagine two overlapping circles. In the center of one circle, the word “Games”; in the center of the other, “Sexuality.” In the intersecting portion — the lemon-slice that exists between the realm of “Games” and “Sexuality”, the word “Art.”

The concept of sexuality is one rarely dealt with in the indie games community — a mysterious function which accepts an argument of type Effort and return void. To attempt to tackle such a broad and imposing concept would require not only a firm grasp on “Art,” and the ability to talk to a girl (one day, I swear it) but balls quite literally made of steel.

I have admired my distorted reflection in the cold, convex surface of Matias Kallio’s loins, a veritable hall of mirrors held within the groin of one man, and have looked a gay in the eyes — yet I have never seen such a brutal depiction of homosexuality as I’ve seen from this member of the NIGSource community. Yet the head upon which sits the Crown of Gay is not the head of Derek Yu — nay, the King of All Gays — the man who presides upon a throne made of another man’s naked flesh — is none other than Matias Kallio — he who possesses balls of steel and fists to match.

Yet his punches are not akin to the barbarism of our civilisation’s great fighters — Cassius Clay, Jack Johnson, Peter McNeeley — oh no, in fact they show little grandeur or fluidity, only an overly rehearsed combo, a powerful one-two, clearly drilled ad nauseum, a lifetime of work behind these two shots. The opening salvo? A threatening jab, not of bone and sinew coordinated in one glorious effort to dominate another being, but of art. Chased swiftly by the crushing animal force of a left cross (southpaw is the indie of pugilism) of intellect.

Matias Kallio’s ‘seminal’ (heh) work — Queer Village, is equal parts Mondrian and Borat.

You play a nameless character, a tabula rasa upon which to project your own identity. You are you, and you are leaving the comfort of Queer Village with your brother in search of mehrehem. You lose your brother. You must find him.

You glide with ease past sexual boundaries, unconstrained by the Puritanical views on sexuality. The metropolitan lifestyle enveloping you during your childhood in Queer Village stripping away any modicum of decency and self awareness your pitious soul may have once held. Your insatiable sexual appetite — and primal lust for mehrehem — your sole inspiration in life. Your deadful queer existence more a sad inevitability than a series of choices. Your quest not an unfolding book, but one long written, and covered in the dust of prejudice.

You are a gay, and no more than you can blame a dog for its actions can you be blamed for yours. Mattias Kallio has spoken the words on the Guantamo of our tongues, that which haunted our minds yet we thought destined to captivity forever, now given voice, given soul. What words has he chosen to impress upon the carbon paper of society for all eternity?

Gays are people too, no different to you or I. Not.

Queer Village by Mattias Kallio, 2.4 MB

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

- Confuscius

Free will. Choice. The if-else statements that control the program flow that is the human existence — a program that ultimately ends with “return 0;” — a return to naught. To distill the sayings of a character in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4 — to boil it and extract the pure meaning of the dangerous poison of the Kojima Frog — one can become ten. Ten can become one hundred. But zero? A zero cannot become a one.

Bernie’s Treasure Hunter Man is a wonderful gamepiece in the Octacamo-ian guise of a petty game about treasure hunter. The main character, Marvin, or shall I say, MArviN (Note the capitalized letters for they reveal my gambit), must embark on a journey of a thousand miles — or at least, a couple thousand kilobytes — a journey full of peril, adventure, and above all, treasures. The role of treasure in this game plays the same role as it does in Passage (an oft cited game in academic gamepiece circles) — mere distractions from our inevitable returning of 0.

Treasure Hunter Man starts with the birth of MArviN — his descent from the heavens and crash landing on an alien world — Port Kruz. Here he is given a binary choice, two roads diverging in a yellow wood; the leftward path — a path off a cliff; and a rightward path; the path of progress.

I’ll not beat around the bush; I am a thinker; an iconoclast; I oppose the flow of the mainstream and choose to swim upriver to its source — the origin of meaning — the spring of the free thought. As such, I made a choice that reflected my attitudes — a destructive choice, to be sure — one that lead me off the ledge of reason and into the chasm of the unknown.

I went left.

The screen did not scroll — there was no hidden room at the foot of that pit, just the absense of level data — NULL, personified.

But the Game was not Over.

I continued to fall. Surely such an obvious folly could not have simply been an oversight on Bernie’s part. No. This was purposeful. There was intent behind this action. I sat in wait, staring at the screen, for a minute, then for ten minutes (I did not have the patience, nor stamina, to wait 100 minutes, sadly), waiting for a glint of change, but there was none. Two roads diverged in the a yellow wood (the wood flooring of the first level, is in fact, brown) — and I chose the one less travelled. And contrary to Frost’s depiction of this scenario, it did not make a difference in the world — the world continued — unchanged — unmoved. It did not even bat its metaphorical eye.

Now you are probably clamoring “How dare you write dismiss an entire game on behalf of a single bug?”

Bug? There are no “Bugs”, in life. The “Bugs” that inhabit your garden, for example, are not some oversight by our Holy Programmer — they are intentional and integral to the program of Life (not to be mistaken with the famous Game of Life, which is a shoddy portrayal at best). This gamepiece is a statement on choice, the permanence of human folly. There is no Game Over; no Continue. You cannot Save nor Load. The journey of life starts with a single step, but know this — the wrong first step will cut your journey quite short indeed!

Treasure Hunter Man (Direct Link) by Bernie, 4 MB

December 16th. The unsung hero of the Gregorian calendar.

• 1653 – Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth.
• 1689 – The bill of rights is embodied in the English parliament.
• 1773 - The Boston Tea Party, ungrateful Americans waste a lot of tea, in defiance of their cultured masters and creators of civilisation.
• 2007 – Anonymous internet man BenW gives birth to a video game, to little fanfare.

Lamentable is the fate of the pauper. Languishing in obscurity, a fate pre-ordained and hand-picked from inception. As inseparable and integral to his being as the very genes which define him. It is through art we find a voice, and through our voice that we are heard. On December 16th, 2007, BenW requested an audience.

On this day, it is my pleasure to say: request accepted.

In Chain Reaction, you either are, or you control (according to your religious beliefs) a coloured square, occupying space on a tapestry of other coloured squares that endlessly scroll left. The squares that meet with the edge of the screen are detonated, and any squares touching them are also detonated. Hence the name. To complicate this task of “moving right”, occasionally a red square will scroll from the right. Needless to say, contact with the red squares, or contact with detonating squares, ceases your existence.

Ostensibly, you may say “I’ve walked right before. Passage is a bad game”. You’d be right, of course, but unlike Passage, this is art, not some child’s colouring book masquerading as a work of great profundity.

Our fate chases us, an unwelcome spectre haunting our every waking moment, our every sleeping dream. An invisible force pushing us onwards until we shamble from our realm of the living, into whichever nebulous afterlife you do or do not believe in. To fate, this is a mere playground activity, joyfully toying with our very existence, playing tag with all that we are, and moving inexorably towards the next victim.

A haunting melody backs your tango with the end, both the structured, internal ambience, and the unpredictable, external cacaphony, the sagas of life. Neither the most powerful man, nor the most pitiable wretch exert any sway over the omnipresent inevitability. Your time has been predetermined. Your fate carved in stone long before you existed, and shall exist long after you have departed. Not as a touching monument, but as a meaningless etching, a craggy edge amongst a sea of rough, igneous features.

For all your presence of self, your belief in your own free will, you are going to die. You know this. You know not when it is, but some great and mysterious force does. BenW has seen the face of death. He’s studied each remarkable feature of the iris, and lived to make a game about it.

Chain Reaction (Direct Link) by BenW, 8.52 MB

VillaVanilla’s Opal Night will be an episodic Flash game that will feature a system called “Adaptive long and short term, global and local gameplay and narrative“, which is incidentally the most independently pretentious and vague feature I’ve ever read about in the history of my vague and pretentious indie career. I’m jealous.

As far as artgames go, Blueberry’s Advanced Set The Rope on Fire Cartridge not only takes the cake, but it is the cake. This is art games. This is the single pixel period in the “yes.” that answers the silly “are video games art?” debate (note, the answer is “yes.”).

A play on Mazapán’s seminal work, You Have To Burn The Rope, ASTROFC hits all the right notes. The gamepiece (yes, “gamepiece”) has pixels big enough to offend all but the niche retrocore crowd. Have a fancy HD set? Don’t play this game unless you want to remember that feeling you had when you first got it and realized that things weren’t nearly as crisp as you thought they’d be. This is the kind of aesthetic that reminds us of the superficiality of HD, plasma, LCD, CRT, et al.

The gameplay. How do I describe it? The phrase reductoironic comes to mind. If you have yet to play this game, I suggest you get off your highhorse and do so immediately before reading onwards, as the rest of this post may contains spoilers that could potentially ruin your experience of it. Here you are, given a simple task, to defeat the GRINNING COLOSSUS (a stand-in for the mainstream gaming industry? You decide). You are given hammers, but they are powerless against the grinning giant. Brilliant, a biting commentary on traditional gaming conventions. Your actions seem futile. Turns out the only way to defeat the beast is to take a different approach — to burn a rope, as it were.

Or. That is what we are lead to believe.

In fact, burning the rope only exacerbates (worsens) the situation. Maybe I’m reading too much into this (or perhaps, and more plausibly, others aren’t reading hard enough), but if we are to read the GRINNING COLOSSUS as the mainstreaming gaming industry, if our conventional means of attack — that is, conventional games — are powerless to stop it, we must resort to means that are more, dare I say, unconventional. We must create games that take our understanding of video games and turns them on their heads.

We must burn the rope.

But it is after burning the rope that we realize the follies of playing with fire. Our attempt to undermine “the industry” has only resulted in the creation of another tier of it — the “indie games” tier, a BURNING FIRE SNAKE – which industry giants (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) use to hegemonize and encroach on our works. XBox Live Arcade, WiiWare. We are fighting an impossible battle — a battle that cannot be won — and this is a point that is punctuated poginantly and concisely in ASTROFC. All in merely 708 kilobytes. Demake? Hardly.

Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge by Blueberry, 0.55 MB