On rrrrrrrroll

I have had rrrrrrrroll open in a tab on my desktop for a month or more, always trying to figure out what I should write about it. Clearly I am never going to get there.

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Maybe that’s the point. rrrrrrrroll is about a single concept, as you can see. You take an object (that object can be a person) and you put it in motion; that motion never stops. It never moves from its place. It is stuck, for good.

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It is a beautiful summation of life under contemporary capitalism. You can be beautiful and shape the small world around you in every way to make it idyllic, but you’re fundamentally trapped in a tiny frame, performing the same motions over and over again.

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I’ll give Deleuze and Guattari the last word on rrrrrrrroll:

They are three aspects of a single thing, the Refrain {ritournelle}. They are found in tales (both horror stories and fairy tales), and in lieder as well. The refrain has all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable “pace” (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole. [A Thousand Plateaus p.312]

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The Necessity of Michael Bay

Recently I had a Facebook friend post this link and write “Is it just me or is whole Polar Vortex thing starting to feel like a Michael Bay movie?”

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In case you don’t want to check out the link, it is to an NPR story that essentially explains that the polar vortex that the United States is the violent byproduct of global warming and the strange systems that govern out precariously-balanced global climate. In other words, we’ve thrown and awful monkey wrench into the ecosystem and now we’re reaping the whirlwind (literally).

But why Michael Bay. Frederic Jameson famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism, but what does it mean when our apocalyptic thoughts go not to The Road Runner‘s endlessly-replicated media wastelands, but instead to the methodical destruction of all of the modern comforts of life in the advanced capitalism of the United States?

I use “methodical destruction” advisedly here, because I really do believe that Bay’s films tangle with some fundamental anxieties of the here and now. For me, Transformers: Dark of the Moon had very little to do with robots fighting; instead, it was about the collapse of Chicago, about the ruination of modern life, and the anxieties of an immaterial world where what is known and familiar becomes overwritten with totally unpredictable phenomenon. It is this last point that drives most Bay films: prison breaks, meteors, aliens, and even the attacks on Pearl Harbor are at the core of the films that Bay creates. He might be the most important filmmaker of rupture that we have right now.

Once again, why does the polar vortex call to mind Michael Bay? It doesn’t seem real. It seems to be from nowhere, a “freak” occurrence unprecedented in the order of things. Seeing Lake Michigan creep into Chicago, covering everything in ice, literally killing people who are caught in it — all of this was an elaborate fantasy a decade ago. Now it is pushing its way into our lives, moment by moment. It juts out. It is the uncanny effect of the World smashing into our daily lives.

Michael Bay is our beacon of hope. We need a semi-Romantic art that helps us believe that we can conquer nature and live on. We need someone to imagine catastrophe for us, to give it shape, and then to make us believe that. We’re almost certainly beyond the tipping point of global warming. The equator will burn and ice will encroach from the poles. The chances of recovery from this are small, and virtually impossible now, especially since many people the world over refuse to even believe that the process is occurring. But we have Michael Bay. We have the strange faculty of human hope.

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Best of This Cage is Worms 2013

This is coming a little late, but I like to do this for my own records. This is a comprehensive list of the posts I think were the cream of the crop in 2013. You can see 2012’s list here.

Other things of note before I start:

January
On Alan Wake
On 1996
A Moment of Pause in Just Cause 2
On Riff Raff or Swag Rap or Pure Aesthetics

February
On Depression Quest
Nonhuman Life: Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude

March
On Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto
On Astrid’s Animation [about Skyrim]
On Kentucky Route Zero Act 1 
On Fictional People, Lies, and Underlying Processes

April
You Buy It I Write It: Rogue Warrior
On Loss of First Person Control
On Monster Loves You! 
Interesting Bioshock Infinite Posts, Podcasts, and General Things
On Bioshock Infinite

May
On Bulletstorm‘s Echoes
On The Yawhg [please ignore my repeated misspelling of the title]
David P. Gray Interviewed By ClassicGames
On Weaponized Architecture 
On Small Town Gay Bar 
On the Max Payne Franchise
On Red Dead Redemption
Playing Through the “No Interaction Mixtape”

June
Suspicion Under Everything: Riff Raff Meets Boris Groys
On The Last of Us 
The Most Wonderful Part of Remember Me

July
On the Inhuman Drama of Pacific Rim
Ticketing After the End of the World
Trouble in the Neighborhood
On Rogue Legacy 
On Living the Apocalypse in The Last of Us Multiplayer

August
A Collection of Criticism About Gone Home
On Jenn Culp’s “Makeup Mondays” [I really love this post]
On Darius Kazemi’s “Scenes From The Wire”
In Watermelon Sugar and Game Design

September
Twenty Years of Myst 
Why Is Grand Theft Auto V so Conservative?
Two Scenes From a Grand Theft Auto V Playthrough
On Deadword
The Indiecade Judges’ Comments on Alpaca Run 

October
“an immature and outrageous satire”: on GTAV, Satire, and Irony
On The Ricky Litany
A Moment in Whiteness

November
Call of Duty: Ghosts: A Hill
Call of Duty: Ghosts — Death as a Language
On Kingdom Hearts 
Indie and AAA and a Complex Relationship

December
Games of the Year 2013 – Part 1
Games of the Year 2013 – Part 2
On Legendary 
State of Decay – The First Two Deaths

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I Have Launched a Patreon!

So I finally decided that in a world of Patreon there was no reason not to at least attempt to recoup some of the costs of this blog and my video game creation through direct subsidization by the audience.

Here is the Patreon page. If you like this blog or my games, please consider putting some cash my way. It is based on a “monthly” model rather than a “per object” model, so that means you’re paying a flat rate for an entire month of blog posts, games, and whatever else I manage to produce.

If you can’t, or have no interest in, putting money through Patreon, it would be a major help if you could just get the word out! Tweet about it, put it on your Facebook page, and swindle the young and old alike.

Some projects that I have lined up: a JRPG about hip hop, more posts in the Designing Horror series, a post about Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of justice, something long about Spelunky, an essay I’ve had in the works about “reflexive games” for about six months now,  a post about learning the basics of fighting games, a game about the shield from the Halo series, and other junk that just floats around down here (we all float down here).

So if any of that sounds like something worth paying for, then by all means go here. If not, keep enjoying it!

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Riff Raff on the History of Videogames

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Riff Raff was on the “Replay” show for Gameinformer recently, and after he utterly slammed the hell out of Toejam and Earl II, he designed a game. At the top, he gave a little bit of a history lesson paired with some criticism.

There’s been a shitload of games over the past twenty, thirty years. More difficult levels, more reality levels, it’s all bullshit, okay? . . . The best games were right around 1988 to about 1997. And that’s giving it two years, because I would say 1995. Erase this whole mentality. Remember Goonies, Indiana Jones, fun times. Not all this reality shooting people and murdering them and stuff. You used to be able to play games and you could kill people but it was, you know, have fun with it. They would just, like, disappear. They weren’t graphically just laying there are you were beating them with a pipe and it makes you want to throw because it makes you feel for the actual videogame guy because its so realistic.

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Zoya Street and Aevee Bee on Discursive Violence

Zoya Street has a piece up at Medium with the subtitle “addressing peer hostility,” and it is about the ways that rage and violence, pushed through social media, marked and defined the past year. He does a great job of collating a number of posts by different people in the games community who have felt victimized by the flows of abuse that have shot through the small critical community around games seemingly unfettered over the past year.

Aevee Bee has a post up on the same topic, essentially arguing for an increased generosity toward one another across the board, and criticizing the tactical choices that a number of games critics and developers have chosen in the recent past.

I’m really making this post as a signal boost. Not only do I think that these posts need to be read as widely as possible, I think they need to be read together, one after another.

My own small addition to this is that I think Zoya is really onto something by taking a historical look at the term “tone policing,” and I think there is a lot to be gained by thinking through that with Aevee’s idea that “anger isn’t violence, violence isn’t anger.” Pairing those two concepts means that we should be looking at the field of discourse around games and make active decisions about what kind of behavior we want to see there and how that behavior can be different from what we’ve been enacting before. This is a moment where an immense dissatisfaction with the state of things should have all of us questioning the ways we are communicating. If widely adopted and defended tactics are having an opposite effect than their intended effects — if they’re disempowering rather than empowering — then we all need to change. I’m at the heart of this as much as anyone else is.

Spurred by these pieces, I’m going to make an active effort in the coming year to point out instances of bullying and violence that I see on twitter (and social media more generally). As I wrote a little while ago, I’m going to do it plainly: “You are being a bully.” This is a small act, but I think it might be important. I want to signal to people being shouted down, silenced, made afraid to speak, that there is someone seeing this and recognizing that they’re being treated poorly. Along with this, I’m going to refrain from this behavior myself. I’ve been working on for the past six months or so, but I’m tired of pile-ons and massive subtweeting or drive-by critiques of articles in 140 characters. I’m going to make an effort to be better.

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The World of Bioshock 2

I recently played through Minerva’s Den, the DLC for Bioshock 2, and while I was on twitter complaining about feeling literally betrayed by everyone who has ever talked that game up to me, Jack de Quidt said this about the differences between the first and second games in the series:

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I had to work up a proper answer, so I wrote about it over at Sagacity. I’m copy and pasting it here for posterity, mostly because I think it gives a good framework for something that I might want to write about the games in the future:

“The reason that I’m not down with that is that B2 is all about showing off how Rapture itself is a byproduct of the power relations that exist inside of it. The brutal singularity of the first game, and the cramped spaces that really drove that kind of subjectivity home, are utterly replaced by a different aesthetic in the second game. This new aesthetic is of openness, freedom, the ability to do whatever you want in a wide field of options. The new Little Sister ADAM missions are a big part of this, but so is the change of arsenal in the game–you actually have defensive options, can make tactical choices that don’t involve “go forward, go back” exclusively, etc.

So when you say that B1 matched the “space/city/tone” better than B2, my response is that you’re not taking into account that B2 is trying to radically rearticulate what Rapture IS as a space. More than that, it is trying to assert that the Rapture of B1, which asserts itself as the “true” or “authentic” or “canonical” Rapture, is really just an interpretation of the city that was driven home by the forces in power and how they bore down on the player.

That’s a lot of words. I really just mean that your feeling isn’t a unique one (and I think it was one felt by a huge part of the audience on the release of B2), but I really think that the game demands that we’re open to new ways of thinking about the city as something other than “the dark crampzone from Andrew Ryan’s libertarian hellmind.”

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Games of the Year 2013 – Part 2

The first half of this list is here.

I liked a lot of games that came out in 2013. Once again, these are in no particular order!

Depression Quest

I still stand by what I wrote about Depression Quest when it came out earlier this year:

The short of it: Depression Quest is not only good, it is truly revolutionary. It sets standards for relationships with games. It sets standards for relationships with ourselves, with our bodies, with our minds. It shows us what we can do and what we are, like a mirror that gives you the future and the brutal present all at once.

I don’t have anything to add about the game that I didn’t write in that review, but I do want to point out that the sheer amount of harassment that the developers have experienced because of their releasing this game points to the fact that the game really has shaken the foundations of videogame culture. I think lots of us like to claim (and I do mean “us” in that I am included) that what we are making changes the culture around videogames, even if that effect is slight at best. Depression Quest is working in big, public, massive ways; it deserves to be archived and placed in critical histories by both academics and popular writers alike. Our job is to make sure that Depression Quest isn’t lost to time, overrun by the tide of small games that come out in dozens by the week. It is hope.

simian.interface

This game makes this list because it feels good to play. That’s it. It has a layer of cyberpunky whatever over the top, like a minigame based around a William Gibson fragment, and I like that just fine, but the power in simian.interface is the feel. I feel like a genius when I intuit how the panels slide into one another. I feel truly cybernetic when I understand the minuteness of the mouse movements necessary to complete a level. It is beautiful.

Room of 1,000 Snakes

I have played Room of 1,000 Snakes more than ten times. Every time I play it I smile. Specifically, I smile when the snakes start pouring into the room, and that grin never leaves my face. It stays with me afterward, for hours. I’m smiling right now thinking about it.

In a year dominated by roguelikes and their design trappings, Room of 1,000 Snakes is a weird creature. Nothing changes. It is fully linear, barely interactive. There is no system to master, nor is their anything like a system there at all. In a year where systems and their applications to previously underexplored territory were where it was at, y’all, this game just sort of stands there and shrugs its shoulders and pours a big ole basket of snakes all over your expectations.

Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective

Arcane Kids, the developers behind Room of 1,000 Snakes, followed it up with Bubsy 3D. This is a game where you control a very boring character from the history of videogames. You take that character to LACMA. You look at and walk through the James Turrell retrospective. It is everything that is on the label.

The unnecessary trappings are what make this game special. Bubsy 3D is a Nintendo 64-style collectathon with numbers out of other numbers and things onscreen that you can run around and pick up, but there’s never any explanation as to why you would ever do that. You do it, though. You go and collect those little sparkly balls because they’re there. Much like how you came to this game, you just show up, you experience it, you wallow around in the space, you go from one area to another. Eventually you get to some recreations of James Turrell artwork, and you mostly just trundle through there in a way that you would never be allowed to do in real life.

Bubsy has powers, though, and you do whatever the hell you want. This is a good game.

Steel Novella 2083

Folmer Kelly might have made this game for a jam or something. There are fewer than ten maps, and you can really only jump and shoot. The game isn’t difficult. It takes less than five minutes to clear completely. There’s no narrative to speak of. It looks and plays like an NES game. Those are all objective statements about the game, but that’s really I can say. It has been lodged in my head since it came out months and months ago. I haven’t forgotten it yet, and because of that, I feel like it needs a spot here. What a good thing.

Space Wrestler

Look, I don’t have a single thing to write about this game. It is super fun to play and the basic system can and should be implemented as a minigame in basically every game that requires little silly minigames. Here is the copy about the game from the developer’s website:

‘Mad Meteor’ Mike was the greatest wrestler the world had ever seen, after winning the Ultimate Championship Belt in 1986 he became powerful enough to ascend to the cosmos and become an all-powerful Titan of Wrestling…

Now ‘Mad Meteor’ Mike travels between galaxies, slamming space-crystals which sustains his amazing powers to warp through space. All that stands in his way are the Evil WrestleLords who hunt him endlessly…

It’s time to Jam and Slam! Guide ‘Mad Meteor’ Mike through different randomly generated galaxies, target the Space Crystals to leap and slam through space, use Wrestle-Magickx to destroy the evil Wrestlelords who endlessly hunt you and go for the high score!

Gravity Dog

This game is also really short, and it is about a dog that can control gravity. If you’re a person who often thinks “I want to make games,” you could do a lot worse than play this. Devoid of narrative text, Gravity Dog clearly communicates the goal of the eponymous dog — he wants to get off this planet! — and does so through very good showing and exactly zero telling. In this regard, Gravity Dog is a significantly better game re: its narrative than The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite combined.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

I haven’t finished this game yet, but I really like it so far. I like the idea of using boats to shoot at other boats. I also like that the franchise has totally admitted to itself that the only way that you can really make this world compelling is to make the protagonist a totally ignorant manchild who doesn’t even have a semblance of morality in his entire being. Then they can patronize the player about ethics and morals for hours and hours!

I also really, really like the non-pirate modern day sequences. I like hacking consoles and reading backstory more than I like being an assassin, I think, so I don’t know what that says about this generation of games. Also, in the “current time” sections of the game, you exist in first person mode and there is no “character” there that I am aware of. For some reason, I assume that the character is a woman. I don’t know what that means.

To get down to ground here, the reason that this game is on the list is that I’ve played most of the AAA releases that have come out this year, and their steady rhythm has sort of beaten me down. Assassin’s Creed IV is not a game that I feel obligated to play, nor does it make me feel bored when I am playing it, and because of that it is one of the most successful blockbuster games of the year. I think it deserves a lot of credit for livening up a series that could very easily become very stale, and I’m excited to see this design iteration continue into the next console generation.

Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing

If I had to pick a game that was my one true favorite of 2013, it would be either this one or Angvik. The Icarus Proudbottom franchise is chock full of Satan and ancient owl people and Icarus Proudbottom himself, who just LOVES typing. IPTT is full of systems that seem to smack up against one another at will, but at the end of the day, it is a very clean typing game that revels in its own nonsense humor.

In a year of games about very serious men doing very serious things to other very serious men, I think it is important to point out that we’re increasingly headed into a weird pseudospace where videogames look a lot like film in their genre constraints. The Last of Us functions as a mashup between a summer blockbuster and clear, overendearing Oscar bait that wears all of its very serious feelings on its sleeve for everyone to see and take to heart. IPTT reminds us that there are smart games that are capable of telling a story that is engaging but which do not contain any scenes of killing a human with a brick. Games are a plenitude, and these GOTY lists have a way of homogenizing what we have down to a very small slice. Resist that impulse.

my father’s long, long legs

Last entry. Very short. Michael Lutz’s father has very long legs. I have to assume that this horror tale is totally autobiographical, because how else could it be told with such rich description? This game is a twine game, and short of DQ, it is probably the best game I have seen that uses the medium. While I am totally on board with twine as a tool for making things, the pure text game genre has never done anything for me as a player, and it really does take some ingenuity to get me invested in words on a screen. mflll forces me to become invested.

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Games of the Year 2013 – Part 1

These are my games of 2013. They are in no particular order. There will be something like 20 of them, and so this first post has ten and the next post will have another ten. That’s all you need to know up front.

Angvik

Angvik is, for the lack of better terminology, a 2D Dark Souls. You travel from left to right across a number of different venues attempting to collect weapons and armor to fight your way through the world. Each time you are hit, you lose an armor piece. When there are no more left, you turn into a pile of bones. The end comes softly. 2013 is the year of the roguelike or the roguelike-like, and Angvik is a clear signal of the strong design principles that can come out of insightful thinking about that style of game. Angvik is an intense meditative experience that can never be captured with whatever words I can throw together about it. You can buy it for $4 here.

Tomb Raider

As I’ve said before, I think that Tomb Raider might be the perfect videogame. There’s some complexity in what I’m trying to say with that phrase, but what it comes down to is that I think Tomb Raider is incredibly successful at deploying all of the design concepts of contemporary games. Some people have claimed that The Last of Us is the culmination of this generation of gaming, but it is Tomb Raider‘s gung-ho wading into totally irreconcilable violence and emotional connection. Beneath the running and gunning and bow shooting and mystical creatures, Tomb Raider points out the gulf between genuine connection with players and the design desires of the videogame creation community. It is complex. It is a knot.

Castles in the Sky

I’ve already written the best thing I can about Castles in the Sky, so I can’t really match up to it or add anything here. The game is doing wonderful things with the medium of games that, despite not being particularly new, feel incredibly fresh in the way that they are packaged and presented to us. The poetry of it, the swing and sway, sticks with you.

State of Decay

State of Decay takes a roguelike view of the world: you can fail, and when you fail, you lose a character that you have spent a lot of time with. In a traditional roguelike, the loss of your character is more common than not losing it. You develop a fragile existence that is designed to shatter at every turn until once, with a bit of luck, it doesn’t. SoD works in an opposite manner. You will succeed at building a home for your team of survivors in a world going dark. You will save friends and family and feel as if you, the player, might be able to make it if push came to shove.

Then, with a bit of unluck, you turn a corner and a loved character dies. You don’t have enough food. A fight breaks out at home. The little perfect world you’ve made unravels, and while you know you can fix it, it is not less stressful for knowing that the fixing is possible. Work, often stressful work, stands in front of you always. There is nothing there but the labor. It begins to operate on you until the very act of starting the game after a break becomes a daunting task. Affect and anxiety plague your thoughts about the game.

Rogue Legacy

Another roguelike-like, this time with the word in the title. I’ve already written about why I like this game over at the end of the year roundup for Gamecritics.

Gone Home

Gone Home has lit a thousand fires in a thousand hearts since its release in the fall of this year. I don’t have much more to say about it than other people have, but in the context of the games I’ve selected for this list, I can say that it is unique in that it privileges a single life over a multitude. Rogulikes and their kin are all about plenitude, but despite Gone Home‘s house filled with objects, it still feels singular and sparse. There is a reason that I haven’t gone back to play it even a second time — for me, it would feel impure, unclean, like I was peeking back in time and trying to maneuver through it in a way that wasn’t meant to be. [You can read what I wrote about the game when I played it first here.]

Remember Me

Remember Me was ironically forgotten as the year went on. Sometimes I see a mention here and there on twitter, but for the most part there’s a longform silence on the game. On one hand, I get it, because the game didn’t have the necessary huge wave of praise-then-backlash that seems to be the requisite ground for a critical discussion that stays around for more than a week. On the other, I can’t understand how a game with such rewarding setting, story, and innovative (although sometimes failing) gameplay can be so resolutely ignored.

The cyberpunk aesthetic was delivered and executed better than it ever has before in a videogame. The boss battles are mappable and predictable as any Mega Man level-ender, and the sheer joy I got from bobbing in and out of zones and charge paths outranked any other blockbuster game by miles. I live for the kinds of experiences Remember Me delivered.

Monster Loves You!

The life of a monster isn’t singular or multiple. You can fail at any time, or spend hours trying to craft the perfect experience that solves all human/monster conflicts for good just to watch it burn around you. There’s no predictability, not really, but there are numbers that go up and down based on what you think you should be focusing on at any given time. Monster Loves You! rests solely in the realm of choice; it is a game that only cares about choice. It carries you quickly onward toward its resolution. There are few stops, and you can choose to take any of them, but it feels wrong to attempt to powergame the system. You’re a living, growing monster. You live your life, sometimes becoming more powerful, sometimes becoming weaker. It is realistic, not in the masturbatory Call of Duty way, but in the quotidian one. [You can read what I wrote about the game earlier this year here.]

Kentucky Route Zero

I’m really sad that only two acts of this game came out this year, but what we have so far is so masterfully put together that I’m willing to wait until 2015 or so to get the whole thing. To be totally honest, I’ve not even played the second episode. Like a Terrence Malick film, KRZ demands not only your attention, but a certain kind of attention, and that hasn’t really been available for me for the past six months. Weirdly, I am just as happy with the first act of this game as I am with the full products of a lot of other games, which tells you both something about my proclivities and the shape of the world of videogames here at the end of 2013. [I wrote a bit about this game here.]

The Yawhg

Here at the end of the list for this post, I’m sort of shocked at the kinds of games that I liked this year. While there are a couple longform, more traditional narratives games have made this list, for the most part these are either short single-serving games or roguelike[like]s. Smaller, episodic, skill-based or emotionally resonant experiences have dominated my life this year, and I think The Yawhg might be the pinnacle of that kind of game.

The concept of the game is very simple — the world is going to end…what will you do before it does? — but it taps into the roguelike tropes and narrative strengths that we saw develop at the end of 2012 and throughout 2013. The Yawgh revels in your ability to play it over and over again with slightly different results, and the simplicity of the game develops into a big set of beautiful alternate universes of collapse and ruin and sometimes hope.

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The Double Meaning of Genetic Codes

Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.

Stephanie Seiler, “Scientists Discover Double Meaning in Genetic Code

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