Playing Through the No Interaction Mixtape

Posted on 05/08/2013 by

In light of all the game formalist whatever nonsense that has been flying around the video game internet recently, Line Hollis made another fabulous mixtape. It is called the No Interaction Mixtape, and I encourage you to go look at it here.

Lots of people put lots of time into making video game mixtapes, and I thought this was a prime moment for me to take a mixtape, play through it, and write down some thoughts about the games. When I was a #teen, a mixtape was a kind of love letter (let’s be real, a mixtape is still a love letter.) So this is me taking Line’s love letter, thinking about it, and passing a note to her in class the next day. And yes, that note would DEFINITELY have check boxes.

festerwood

4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness
The conceit of this game is that if anyone else in the world plays it at the same time as you are your game ends. You cannot complete the game if anyone else is having the same experience you are at that exact moment. So of course as soon as I started it up I was consumed by anxiety–what if someone else plays? What if my time is wasted and I have to start over? What if I get caught in a vicious loop of starting and ending with some random person? Thankfully I made it the whole way through, and I got what I started the game to get: I had a unique experience that no one else in the world was having for four minutes and thirty three seconds. That uniqueness came with an equal amount of anxiety and fear, and I didn’t enjoy the time so much as suffer through it. Was it worth it?

A Mother in Festerwood
I started this game super smugly. I read Line’s small bit of text, read the proverb that opens the game, and started it out. I pushed my child back into the home until he hit his teen years and then I let him start wandering. He went out into the woods and came back home. He went out into the woods, got some treasure, and started coming back home. He was killed by a cyclops. A very effective game.

Six Shots of Whiskey
I didn’t dig this game very much, although I think it is a great example of a zero-player game. No real feels about it, sorry.

Goddammit
Anna Anthropy is the undisputed master of making games that mirror social situations, and sex is no different. I defer to Line on the analysis here–I don’t have anything to add other than I thought the pages of text were going to go on for much longer.

Drill Killer
This game points to the tension of the word interactive in brilliant ways. Most of the game has the player clicking through the game to see facts about the Drill Killer or maybe looking at some up-close drill killings, but a later section features player movement and clicking. There isn’t anything to do other than walk through doors and click on teens to murder them, of course, but I can’t see how that’s functionally different that a CODBLOPZ murder corridor.

Césure
A massive, navigable structure. I wandered around a bit and looked at everything and tried to imagine what it would be for. Like an art museum that takes up your entire imagination; a speculative fiction generator.

Apollo 2
I couldn’t get Unity Web Player to work and I fiddled around with it way longer than I should have so who knows.

Terra Tam: The World Warrior
This is sort of the apex of comedy, but it makes me wonder if the reason that games rarely succeed at comedy, or even attempt it, is because comedy requires the player to go along for a ride. For something to be comedic, it has to be a little unexpected, and if you “interact” your way through a situation, the likelihood of unexpectedness goes way down. Bulletstorm has a wonderful moment where it appears that a boss fight it about to happen, but a pipe falls from the ceiling and makes the monster fall into a radioactive goo pit. You can’t do anything but watch; interactivity has to be taken away for the comedy to work. Something like that is going on here, too.

Queue
This game is about duration and it makes you feel that duration.

Grapefruit
I couldn’t play this because the link was broken! Oh no!

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Rasmussen on Architecture and History

Posted on 05/07/2013 by

Thus, in the Spanish Steps we can see a petrification of the dancing rhythm of a period of gallantry; it gives us an inkling of something that was, something our generation will never know.

Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture 136

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A List of Podcasts I Listen To

Posted on 05/06/2013 by

Podcasts are a thing that come up from time to time in conversation, and I always say something like “I like XYZ podcast, you should check it out!” We all know how that kind of talk goes, though, and without a “here is a link, go here, subscribe while I hawk over your shoulder” thing the chances of someone taking podcast advice is pretty much nil.

Note: I would be very interested in some suggestions of podcasts that are video game/comics/”nerd culture” (ugh!) related and are hosted by women, people of color, or basically anyone who isn’t a group of white dudes.

So here is a list of podcasts that I listen to in no particular order. There aren’t many on this list, but I can say that I listen to them every time an episode is released.

Comedy Bang Bang!
I’ve been listening to this since it was a Comedy Death Ray, and I’ve loved it the whole time. I think the show dropped in quality a bit last fall, but 2013 has made it shine again. Scott Aukerman hosts each episode and features at least two guests. One of the guests is her or himself in a traditional interview format, and the other person plays a character. The podcast is famous for these characters–Paul F. Tompkins playing Cake Boss, for example, or Jessica St. Clair playing the show’s teenage intern. I enjoy the show on the whole, but occasional guests take the show into offensive territory. However, Aukerman does a great job of steering the show away from that kind of comedy, and the show is good for it.

Doug Loves Movies
Comedian Doug Benson travels the country doing shows where he has local and national comedians talk and play games about movies. I like podcasts with a point, and Benson’s games like “The Leonard Maltin Game” or “Bane vs Lincoln” keep me interested from week to week. The guests are generally funny. Once again, a comedy podcast with sort-of random comedian guests can go into offensive territory, but Benson is very quick to step in and say “that’s not okay” for sexist or racist jokes, which I like.

Gayme Bar
This podcast, hosted by Jeremiah and Toupsi and Todd, is the highlight of my week. Everyone is smart and funny, and the guests (when there are guests, it isn’t every episode) are always engaging. Everyone’s tastes run widely enough that it isn’t an agreement-fest, which I enjoy a lot. [Note: I was a guest one time on this podcast and it was wonderful.]

Low Score Podcast
Bobby and Jay host this podcast, and the general gist is that Bobby and Jay are good friends who Skype (I guess?) with each other once every couple weeks to talk about what they have been doing and playing. You get a good sense of progression and iteration–they aren’t afraid to cover a topic more than once if it would make for good conversation. This is another podcast with a “point” in that they have segments they do during each episode: The List where they list off games based on a pre-selected topic (like “Top Five Game Narratives”) and justify their choices, and News, where they run down topical game news stuff. They don’t linger on a topic, they’re both smart guys, and they’re engaging speakers.

Honorable mention goes to Oh No Video Games!, which I listened to one time and did not subscribe to.

That’s it!

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Riff Raff on the Riff Raff Halloween Costume (or, What Does It Mean To Be Riff Raff?)

Posted on 05/03/2013 by

riff

Riff Raff talks a bit about Spring Breakers in this interview. About midway through:

[Riff Raff talks about a store he is going to open that does not sell middle of the mall shit and then]

…but what we’re doing is also selling, through Neff (shoutout to Neff), is Riff Raff Halloween costumes. So now fuck it, James Franco. James Franco, you want it, fuck it everybody can have it, everybody can look like Riff Raff. Riff Raff Halloween costumes.

What comes in that costume?

You’re gonna get like a washable pen to draw on your zig zag beard. You’re gonna get some pretty fly glasses in there. You can get the exclusive pack where its like some more expensive glasses or you can get the cheap pack, you know what I mean, if you’re just trying to use it for one night and get fucked up drunk, break your glasses and all that shit, rip your clothes off, it don’t matter.

. . .

You can also get…swim trunks, get a Neff tanktop, Neff shorts, you can get the earrings, rings, you know what I mean? Some rings. I mean, a durag with braids on it with beads on the end. It is a distinct look to look like Riff Raff for Halloween. And James Franco, I gave him his a year early, and I didn’t know he was going to use it for a movie.

Riff Raff is doing a couple interesting things in the interview. In a previous section that I didn’t transcribe, Riff says that some of the lines are straight lifted from things he has said, but those things were from “like five years ago.” He isn’t just Riff Raff anymore; he is now Jodi Highroller, a kind of Riff 2.0. In this way, Franco isn’t mimicking him; he’s mimicking a chrysalis version of the current Riff Raff.

This distinction leads into the second, much more interesting, thing that is going on in the interview. When Riff Raff says “fuck it, you can have it, everybody can look like Riff Raff,” he is acknowledging that he is purely an aesthetic category. A reformulation: “You want to wear the mask? Wear the mask. You can be me too.”

Riff Raff is making an razor-thin argument here, but it deserves to be pointed out: Riff Raff is acknowledging that he, as an existing personality, is purely aesthetic. It isn’t that you can look like Riff Raff for Halloween; you can be Riff Raff for Halloween. More than that, by the time you’re Riff Raff, he will be someone else.

Riff Raff is a series of aesthetic categories arranged on a flat surface. You can mix and match them; zig zag beard and a chain. Destroy it all, who cares? Riff Raff embodies the aesthetic of late capitalism in the same way that Subway makes sandwiches–put it together any way you want, take it or leave it, the choice is all yours.

[PREVIOUS RIFF RAFF POSTS]

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Rasmussen and Architecture

Posted on 05/02/2013 by

A painter’s sketch is a purely personal document; his brush stroke is as individual as his handwriting; an imitation of it is a forgery. This is not true of architecture. The architect remains anonymously in the background. Here again he resembles the theatrical producer. His drawings are not an end in themselves, a work of art, but simple a set of instructions, an aid to the craftsmen who construct his buildings. He delivers a number of completely impersonal plan drawings and typewritten specifications. They must be so unequivocal that there will be no doubt about the construction  he composes the music which others will play. Furthermore, in order to understand architecture fully, it must be remembered that the people who play it are not sensitive musicians interpreting another’s score–giving it special phrasing, accentuating one thing or another in the work. On the contrary, they are a multitude of ordinary people who, like ants toiling together to build an ant-hill, quite impersonally contribute their particular skills to the whole, often without understanding that which they are helping to create. Behind them is the architect who organizes the work, and architecture might well be called an art of organization. The building is produced like a motion picture without star performers, a sort of documentary film with ordinary people playing all the parts.

Compared with other branches of art, all this may seem quite negative; architecture is incapable of communicating an intimate, personal message from one person to another; it entirely lacks emotional sensitivity. But this very fact leads to something positive. The architect is forced to seek a form which is more explicit and finished than a sketch or personal study. Therefore, architecture has a special quality of its own and great clarity. The fact that rhythm and harmony have appeared at all in architecture–whether a medieval cathedral or the most modern steel-frame building–must be attributed to the organization which is the underlying idea of the art.

- Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture pps. 12-14

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I Am In The New Five Out of Ten

Posted on 05/01/2013 by

The newest Five Out of Ten Magazine is out today.

Edited by Alan Williamson, Five Out of Ten is a magazine of video game criticism written for a general audience of people who, you know, care about that thing. Important to note is that the writing in the magazine isn’t geared toward “gamers” as a specialized audience. All of the essays in the magazine use games as a touchstone for social or personal issues; video games are merely a gate for writers to access personal experiences and stories.

I mention all of this because I am in this issue of Five Out of Ten.

I have two essays–the first is about “second gaming” and how having my most significant gaming experiences come from thrift store purchases as a kid really altered the way I view video games as a medium.

The second is about my ethical vegetarianism and how my politics altered my play habits in Minecraft and other games that take violence towards animals as an integral part of their gameplay.

I’m a fan of Five Out of Ten for a number of reasons, but in particular is the way that profits are shared among the contributors: for every purchase of this issue of Five Out of Ten, I make something around $1. That might not sound like a big deal, but a couple hundred purchases would really help me out. If you like the writing I do here on this blog, or you like my twitter, or you hate me but want to make me rich, consider purchasing the issue.

It comes out to around $5.60 USD, which is somewhere slightly north of a cup of coffee.

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Sam Biddle on Google Glass Evangelism

Posted on 04/30/2013 by

There’s no clear answer as to why Scoble has hundreds of thousands of followers across Twitter and Facebook, given that he’s just a guy who works for a data hosting company. This isn’t one of the great minds of our time putting Google Glass over under a critical lens—Scoble is a loud, rambling man, with enthusiasm for tech toys usually only seen in children. But, habitual blabber that he is, Scoble took to Google+ to explain why Rackspace pays him a salary to travel the world making an ass of himself, wearing a tiny camera into public bathrooms, and writing about it without any break: money. Surprise. “Google Glass is going to need a new kind of cloud computing and Google won’t be able to satisfy all the demand,” Scoble says, and predicts “this will have huge impacts on Rackspace’s business in 2015.”

Glass isn’t just the newest status bauble of Scoble and his buzz-crazed ilk: it’s a future moneymaker, and this is marketing.

- Sam Biddle
“Oh God Robert Scoble is Wearing His Google Glasses in the Shower“

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