I've got a new project in the works. Announcing Interesting Choice: A Webseries As You Like It, a crowdsourced narrative where the viewers decide what happens. In this five(-plus?)-week class project, collaborators Brian Bernhard, Christy Sager and I will be producing a weekly webseries, with each new episode followed by a poll where you are invited to vote on what happens next.
In Upgrade Complete!, you play a Galaga-style shooter to blast enemies and collect money for upgrades in order to max out your game — not just your ship, but everything from the music and graphics to menu buttons to the copyright notice. You even have to buy the shop screen and preloader before you can load up the game. Not only a cheeky parody of mindless grinding games, it's actually well-balanced and surprisingly fun to play.
Tale of Tales makes non-linear, narrative, exploratory "art games" that largely cast off the trappings of traditional games (rules, goals, challenges). Frank Lantz of area/code is a vocal proponent of the idea that video games need to be more "gamelike," and that designers should focus on games as formal systems of challenges. Tale of Tales interviews Frank Lantz.
Continuing in its line of artful, boundary-pushing not-quite-games, Tale of Tales this month released Fatale, an "interactive vignette" inspired by Oscar Wilde's 1894 play Salomé.
Explore a living tableau filled with references to the legendary tale and enjoy the moonlit serenity of a fatal night in the orient. Fatale offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.
There's also The Path, released earlier this year, a meandering, introspective horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood in which six sisters wander in a foreboding forest and one by one lose their innocence. Completely open-ended, the game eschews goals and challenges and invites the player to simply explore and experience.
Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother's house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray.
But young women are not exactly known for their obedience, are they? Will they be able to resist the temptations of the forest? Will they stay clear of danger? Can they prevent the ancient tale from being retold?
You Have to Burn the Rope, a very short game with very well-defined goals. Do what you have to do, then sit back to enjoy end credits that are longer than the game itself. You've earned it, hero!
The Brick Theater in Brooklyn is hosting an event all this month called Game Play, a series of performances and game nights that meld video games and theater. There will be machinima mash-ups, Rock Band karaoke, interactive plays, group MMORPG sessions, and a chiptune dance party.
What I'm really excited for is Adventure Quest, a play by Sneaky Snake Productions based on the classic Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games of the 80's, like King's Quest and Monkey Island.
The town of Perilton has been invaded by an evil wizard, and only our hero can save it! Cheer as he fights for the hand of the mayor's daughter! Gasp as he infiltrates the bloodthirsty Octopus Cult! Watch as he meticulously collects inventory items! Shift uncomfortably in your seat as the narrative gradually implodes! Glance around nervously as characters are brutally murdered for no particular reason! Despair as your faith in a meaningful, ordered universe is shaken! Evoking the Golden Age of home computer gaming, Adventure Quest is both a nostalgic treat and a glimpse into the yawning Void.
For a taste of that classic gaming flavor, the creators designed a brief "walkthrough" for Time Out New York to introduce the world of the play. It makes me wish they'd done a real game, even if only a short one.
You are standing before of the Castle of Perpetual Delight. Blocking your path is a gloomy-looking centaur.
You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.
Utilizing World of Warcraft, Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4, Machinima Theater Auteur Eddie Kim presents four classical theater texts, as performed by online video game characters manipulated by gamers live on stage. Video games as digital puppetry! Technicians will use several X-Box 360 consoles and laptops linked to each other and to gamers over the internet to control digital characters in real-time in front of an audience. See the stories of Niobe and the Japanese poet, Ono no Komachi as never before. A digital movement piece, chiptunes interludes and a version of Alvin Lucier's legendary "I am Sitting in a Room" also will be presented.
You had me at the title.
I'll be attending Adventure Quest this Saturday, and I'm tempted to check out some of the other events, too. It looks like a great line-up.
Game designer Daniel Benmergui of Ludomancy has been experimenting with some very interesting stuff. In some brief posts on the subjects of Experimental Gameplay and Defying Genres, he sounds the call for a radical departure from run of the mill games and tried and true mechanics, and his growing collection of innovative, unclassifiable game prototypes in no way belies these intentions.
I wish I were the moon looks to be the inauguration of a new genre. (Perhaps an inevitable side effect of successfully defying genres is creating them.) The game consists of a small scene of movable characters and objects, and how you manipulate them determines the outcome of the story. This is done with a camera which can take snapshots of the elements in the scene and place them in a new position, a kind of copy-paste mechanic. If there is a goal at all, it is to replay the game different ways in order to discover all of the possible endings — but Daniel freely admits that even this is a "gimmick", and the real point is simply to explore the emotional experience of the game.
While the underlying mechanic is unusual, the style is equally singular, with its simple pixellated graphics, dreamy, poetic atmosphere, and quiet, understated storyline, which is inspired by Italo Calvino's story The Distance of the Moon.
Storyteller is the next game to build on this mechanic. The gamespace is a triptych of three moments in time that tell a miniature fairy tale, and the characters can be moved around in any of the three timeframes to instantly change the outcome of events.
Third is The Trials, which allows for the elements to be duplicated instead of simply moved. This game, like its predecessors, explores themes of conflict, longing, and contentment.
Finally, there is Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans, which also showcases similar themes (love, loneliness, loss), but with a new mechanic: you play an alien (?), floating around the city strategically cutting the lines that join people and letting new ones form. Some may find true love, and some may be left in the cold. As with the other games, this one is about exploring the consequences of your choices.
And this is why I suggest that Daniel has created a new genre: Gregory Weir of Ludus Novus has created (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors, an intriguing game modeled on the style of I wish I were the moon, with a storyline inspired by Lovecraft. You play a tentacled sea creature who is revealed for the first time to the humans of the world above, its attention attracted by the enchanting colors of balloons, and the choices you make determine the outcome of this tricky first contact scenario.
Gregory has been kind enough to share an illuminating postmortem of the game in place of his usual column on GameSetWatch.
Last night I dreamed I was an immense beast, floating in darkness. I knew nothing of the surface world until I fell in love with the majesty of colors.
Echogenesis is an interactive flash artwork in which you are encouraged to explore and engage with a series of natural environments, moving tableaux inhabited by various creatures and suffused with smooth ambient soundtracks. There's no game, no goal, just the experience, like a pleasant jaunt through a virtual biodome.
Tale of Tales is a progressive development studio that fosters a gaming experience that goes beyond traditional mainstream genres. Emphasizing "innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls," their projects tend to eschew competitive goal-oriented formats to focus on folkloric storytelling and the artistic experience.
The Endless Forest is a shared multi-user online 3d environment (it can be run as a game, and doubles as a screensaver) that exemplifies the Tale of Tales aesthetic. The world is an infinitely tiling forest which players are free to roam in the form of strangely eerie human-faced deer. Various items and locations in the environment produce various magical effects, such as changing the pelt or horns of your or another's avatar, and during special events the environment itself might become mutable, and experience transformations such as falling snow or a field of flowers coming into bloom.
Interaction with other players, who are identified by unique glowing glyphs in lieu of names, is entirely nonverbal, conducted in the cervine manner of head shakes, foot stomps, bellows, and nuzzles. Not only are you thus insulated from the possibility of encountering foul-mouthed trolls shouting "PwNeD, N00b" and the like, but people have tried and failed to disturb the tranquility of the environment: "it's impossible to grief the other damn deers!" lament a gang of Age of Conan PvPers, after all their hostile gestures are interpreted as friendly overtures. When there is no wealth or status to accumulate, nothing but the experience itself, there is nothing to threaten.
The Graveyard is not properly a game, but a kind of interactive visual poem using a game-like interface. You "play" an old woman hobbling slowly through a graveyard towards a bench. (Don't try to go off exploring on the side-paths -- as soon as I started my adventurer spirit got the better of me, and I soon got my avatar trapped in a corner off-screen. Stick to the path, lady.) Once you sit on the bench, you are treated to a song. Then you leave. That's the so-called "trial" version -- the full version, available for $5, is identical except that it includes the possibility of death.
With its painfully unheroic protagonist, strictly linear path, and moody, black-and-white visuals reminiscent of an old, distressed film, The Graveyard uses the gaming format to challenge the very idea of what a game is, and explores the possibilities of the medium as an avenue for artistic expression. The Graveyard is uninterested in setting you a challenge; it's telling you a story.
The Path and 8 are two more traditional games both in development by Tale of Tales. Based respectively on the folkloric roots of the Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty stories, they are conceived as story-driven adventures incorporating unusual gameplay features, such as 8's semi-autonomous main character who must be coaxed and guided rather than directly controlled.
Thatgamecompany specializes in games with innovative, offbeat mechanics that offer challenging gameplay in tranquil, pleasant environments.
Their breakout hit, flOw (featured here previously), the game where you play a simple sea creature continuously growing as you consume other creatures, folded a deceptively simple concept into an immensely satisfying experience. It was developed into a download for PS3, and has won numerous awards.
Their second offering, Cloud, which also garnered a couple of awards, was inspired by Katamari Damacy among other things, and features a unique game mechanic in which you fly around the skies controlling masses of clouds, in order to form particular shapes or make rain. It's a dreamy, exciting experience, offering a kind of wish-fulfillment for the longing to fly and a joyful, no-pressure challenge to complete.
Thatgamecompany recently announced their latest project for the PS3, Flower, which from the looks of the trailer will embody a the same sense of beauty and freedom as celebrated in Cloud -- perhaps this time with flower petals standing in for water vapor.
The Truth is What You Believe is an interactive flash work that invites you to "Participate in the world of Tom and Daisey", and promises "total consciousness on your death bed" if you complete it. It resembles a Samorost-style game in that you must hunt pixels to trigger events that will get you to the next stage, but the imagery is oneiric, poetic rather than narrative. It is essentially the abstracted world of a dream collage, where such basic logic as "keys open doors" applies, but otherwise all bets are off. More flash curiosity is to be found on the main site.
Tiny Grow is a charming and diverting little toy where you use a spinner to randomly grow alien plants and plantlike-devices, which you can then manipulate in various ways. There's no goal and no point, just some neat and strange things to play with.
Describing itself as a "digital poem/game/net artwork hybrid of sorts," game, game, game and again game is a kind of anti-game manifesto in an interactive, game-like form, in which the stated object is "move around, think." Executed in scribbles of pen and crayon, spattered with words and fragments of text, this game is a parody of a game, its pointlessness a shouted challenge.
In Flow you are a small, sinuous sea creature, and you must dive deep into the waters in search of things to eat so you may grow and evolve. Simple concept, with simply gorgeous execution. I was immediately entranced. Via defective yeti.
Society is a series of interactive environments each presenting its own set of objectives, where you must explore, learn, and adapt in order to progress. In each of the four stages, you are respectively an alien organism participating in the life cycle of hunting, growth, and reproduction; a translucent, headless creature navigating through a dark labyrinth; a swirling ball of lights navigating a musical soundscape; and a smooth pink ball arranging items on a grid in order to make a path between two points, a mechanical engineering game similar to Blueprint.
Each stage seems to be more abstract than the last, but it is the earliest two that I find the most interesting. You are subtly encouraged to set aside your values in order to approach existence from an alien point of view: as a pink blob of organs in a fleshy, womb-like environment, your two tasks are to catch and eat very cute furry creatures ("ruminants") in order to grow to adulthood, so that you may then enter the breeding grounds to get it on with four different partners and successfully reproduce; and in the next stage, in order to get past obstacles you must drive yet more cute, squeaky ruminants toward menacing black forms that swallow them in what appears to be a very unpleasant death. You are told to do this without pity or mercy, despite the wrenchingness of their cries.
In addition to the intriguing alienness of the whole thing, it's also a beautifully rendered environment, and a lot of fun. The site is French, with English translations for everything (except a couple of the commands in the music stage, which they must have forgotten to translate or something...but don't worry, you'll figure it out.)
Elu and its sequel, Elu Undersea, are two very nice life sim games by a favorite designer of mine, Autofish. They basically simulate an ecosystem in which various sorts of creatures spawn, grow, and interact. You can play as an omnipotent creature, eating and spreading seeds as you choose, or you can turn it off and just let the simulation play out. Cly5m's bold colors and smooth pixel art make this game an attractive treat, fun to play around with or just watch for a while.
These last three games are to download, btw, not play online...but they're small and minimal and no hassle at all, so you may as well.
Seeds from Iteration Games is the game that inspired Elu, and the idea is very similar. Seeds is much busier and more rapid, and a little harder to control, though you can manipulate the environment more directly, creating or destroying any creature. Another fun life sim.
Dexx Entertainment's Pixiquarium 2 is a neat alternative to all those simulated auqariums. In very(!) tiny pixels, you get a miniature aquarium which you can fill with any of thirty different species of flora and fauna, each with its own behavior profile that drives its interactions with the other species. Very, very tiny species.
None of these are exactly "games" in the traditional sense. For the most part, there are no explicit goals, no challenges, no way to win or lose. They all certainly have beginnings, and some of them have ends; others are infinite playgrounds for your enjoyment. They are all (with one exception) of the point-n-click genre, which suggests a game, even if some of these are more aptly termed "interactive flash animation." In any event, they are all engrossing, and beautiful.
Vectorpark contains no text, nothing by way of introduction or explanation. You are presented with a black screen containing three images, from which you may choose your "game". Park, the real attraction, is a broad, surreal landscape that changes and evolves with each mouseclick. Levers is a fun balancing game in which you must arrange a series of hooks and variously weighted objects to achieve equilibrium, without anything touching the water below. The unusual weights are dynamic objects; birds come out of the birdhouse to flap around and perch on the various hooks, changing the balance; the water tank can be filled and emptied; the snowman will melt if placed too close to the sun (one of the incredibly heavy objects you will receive in later stages). Finally there is Thomas, a series of non-interactive but very cool animations you may view.
Fly Guy is an incredibly cute little game from talented pixel-artist Trevor Van Meter. You are a bored suburban businessman, waiting at the bus stop, when suddenly you decide to take to the skies. There you will have a number of fascinating and whimsical encounters. Occasionally you will come up against something that will remind you of your mundane life -- like a copier -- and back down to earth you will go. But don't avoid anything in this game. Try it all out and see what happens.
Skyfish is another dreamy, flying-through-the-air game by Syougo Maruyama, creator of the excellent Samorost-style Kao Fu-Sen. You are a flying fish-person, a sort of reverse mermaid, swimming through the skies along with a number of odd creatures/things. When you touch them, the scene changes, and you are suddenly stroking through water, or space, or a nighttime cityscape. I haven't yet discerned if there is some goal, or if this is merely exploratory. Possibly you are meant to progress through a series of scenes without touching one of the creatures that will send you back to an earlier stage. In any case, the rhythmic swimming and wandering music provide a gentle, soothing experience, regardless of your destination.
Moxomoxo is the work of designer Matthieu Gueritte (visit his portfolio for more wonderful art and animation). It is a surreal, Bosch-inspired triptych of interactive animated scenes portraying the Garden of Eden, the Last Judgement, and Hell. With robots. The style reminds me somewhat of the robot subculture of Futurama -- this is what their robots-only version of religious artwork might look like. It's something you simply must see.
Happy Seed is a curious Japanese animated story. Like many Japanese links, it's hard with no context to tell where it came from or why it exists, but it tells the story of a strange square seed that comes down from outer space, and proceeds to transform the world of the little people who have all gathered around in curiosity. It does this by making everything square -- the little round houses become giant skyscrapers, their spherical vehicles are turned into big, modern blocky things, and in the end, the planet itself becomes one big cube. Flight of fancy, cautionary tale, or paean to the relentless forward march of modernization? You be the judge. It's awful cute, though.
I have a number of other links in this category to share, but I'll save it for another post. Up next: Arcade games.
