You wake up in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. You have no memory of how you got there and nothing with you but the images in your mind.
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Instructions
Use WASD keys to move
Use trackpad to look around
Hold down space to run
Press R at any time to restart
Working Title: Fragments
Description:
Fragments places the player inside of a vast, dreamlike desert. By tuning into spacial clues such as distant sounds or lights in the sky, the player discovers a series of impossible shapes which congeal into sentimental objects when you approach them. [TBC]
Research Statement:
Fragments aims to experiment with external representation of interior space. Drawing some inspiration from the workings of hallucinogens, thoughts and memories are represented through a visual aesthetic, spatialization, and game mechanic. How can a game explore the experience of regret or the act of letting go beyond simple cinematic storytelling?
Screenshots:
Game references:
Memory of a Broken Dimension (visuals)
Her Story (storytelling)
Trauma (storytelling)
Limbo (mood arc/representation of interior space)
Kentucky Route Zero (end of act 1)
Slave of God? (visuals)
Non-Game references:
Michel Gondry: Eternal Sunshine / The Science of Sleep
Radiolab: Memory
Radiolab: You Are Here
Effects of psilocybin on perceiving thoughts and emotions
Stephen LaBerge: Lucid Dreaming
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Imagine being in a world where nothing makes sense unless you are still. Our game would take this concept and literally force the player to stand still in order to accurately render the landscape and puzzles. While we are still working on a world design, this key component will be the main obstacle.
Other components may include basic spacial puzzle solving to move on. For example a viewer will need to search for a key in a room to open a door, but with the stillness component, they will have to memorize the layout of the room in order to move through it.
Reading these articles and presentations, I was reminded of the concept of “lock-in” as discussed by Jaron Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier describes “lock-in” as the idea that the flaws and biases of the inventor become encoded in the invention, and that once a piece of technology reaches critical mass of standardization/involvement in people’s everyday life, we’re essentially stuck with those biases. Furthermore, not only are we stuck with them, but they redefine reality. Growing up, for instance, in a media landscape of music that was almost exclusively produced using tools using the now-standard language of MIDI, a whole generation’s idea of what music can be now excludes by default all of the tones that can’t be played on a keyboard, since that was the only instrument MIDI was originally meant for. Like the subjects of Blakemore and Cooper’s experiments who never learned to perceive horizontal lines, perhaps humans who are only ever exposed to a limited definition of what’s possible in a medium lose the ability to perceive alternative possibilities.
It is with that in mind that I read things such as Tale of Tales’ Over Games presentation and feel a deep frustration with the tone that the current discourse around games has taken. So much effort is having to be taken in order not to step on fragile egos and unleash backlash from the mainstream gaming community; It’s like someone is trying to invent the violin, and gangs of keyboard players are attacking them on Twitter and sending swat teams to their house. While marginalized developers are having to delicately craft arguments explaining that they’re not trying to take anyone’s FPS away while they simply carve out space for themselves in a community, society at large falls further and further away from being able to remember that other definitions of “game” are possible. I have spoken to people whose opinions I otherwise trust about games like Dear Esther or Proteus and heard it said too many times that the games were “not successful.” It’s one thing for a game to not be of your personal taste, but when I hear the claim that something is not “successful,” I can’t help but wonder what dumbed-down ideas about what a game can be have already become too locked-in to our culture to reverse.
New rules, by John Choi, Christian Murphy, Dan Sakamoto, Kristina Wagner:
In an environment where 3 players try to cure their diseases:
3 Patients start with 5 diseases + 3 diseases in the pool (center of the table)
Each turn patients take a decision in Rock Paper Scissors style. Patients can choose Treatment (with possible side-effects) (fist) or Sneeze (open hand).
There are 4 possible outcomes:
Outcome 1 – one patient chooses Treatment: this player takes 1 disease from each other player.
Outcome 2 – two players choose Treatment: these players both give 1 disease to the third player.
Outcome 3 – three players choose Treatment: all players put 1 disease in the pool
Outcome 4 – three players choose Sneeze: the player with most diseases proposes once, without discussion nor barter, how to divide the pool. If at least one player agrees the decision becomes effective. Otherwise, nobody takes anything.
The game ends when the first player is out of diseases. This player is the winner.
The first thing anyone with any knowledge of video games will notice about playing Number None, Inc’s Braid is that the mechanics of the game are a reference to Super Mario Brothers, from the simple fact of being a side-scrolling platformer, to the goomba-like enemies which one can only defeat by jumping on them. But the reference to Super Mario is not just a mechanical one; it turns out to be an important tool through which narrative meaning is conveyed. The first on-the-nose hint of this comes when player reaches the end of stage one and encounters the familiar scene: a friendly character emerges to deliver that classic bad news that the princess is in a different castle.
Cutting to the game’s end, it turns out that the player character is a scientist working on the Manhattan project, and the “princess” in the story is actually the player’s goal of completing the atomic bomb. This would be an impactful revelation on its own, but where things get really interesting is in the existence of an alternative ending. In the regular ending, you realize that due to your own warped perspective, the princess you thought you were rescuing has actually been running from your pursuit the entire time, revealing you to be the bad guy. But there’s a second ending, and because it is harder to reach, anyone used to the convention of alternate endings in games is likely to perceive this as the “true” or “best” ending. But in the alternative ending, the moment you reach the princess the bomb detonates. The good ending is also the bad ending.
This method of conveying a moral message by confronting the player with the idea that they were complicit in evil just by playing the game is not uncharted territory. It’s also a tricky device to really make work, since above any challenge to the player’s morality within the game is the fact that the developer built and marketed the game in the first place. What makes the alternate ending in Braid so meaningful however is the fact that the way to reach it—a perfectly timed jump onto a moving set piece—happens so quickly and without precedent that it almost feels like a mistake on the developer’s part. To be attempting this trick in the first place feels like trying to break the game, the aim of which—reaching a platform that seems like the game wasn’t designed for you to reach—is reminiscent of the same trick in Mario which leads to the warp zones.
What’s present in the nuance of this alternate ending is that first you must find out you’re the bad guy, and then you have to still be so determined to reach your original goal, so unfazed by the realization of the full implications of your mission that you’re willing to try to break the game to reach it. By referencing Mario, which itself references a common trope of rescuing a princes, Braid creates an occasion to reflect on a multitude of games the player has played in the past and consider a deeper reality for the characters than what was originally perceived, or even beyond what the developer may have intended. Braid opens the question: what exactly was Mario’s relation to Princess Peach, or Link’s relation to Princess Zelda beneath the surface of what the developers presented?
http://www.dansakamoto.com/egd/twine/
A semi-guided meditation on trauma and perspective, adapted from a poem by Daniel Darwin. Includes sound.
