200,000 Corpses
what i want from vgames is very faint, very hard to put my finger on, it's a desire, but i'm not sure for what. and this thing i want from games seems to be hidden inside the format: it's not whatever games imagine they're about. so to see it you have to sift for it, through all the other stuff - the layers the format drapes around itself to make sure anyone who wants to see what it has to first…
When I was a kid I remember a big wall mural of a dog in a football jersey. It was connected to the world cup, but looking back on it now it seems to be a remnant of the earlier 1990 world cup rather than the 1994 one I’d have been most aware of at the time. It wasn’t an official mural, it had the feeling of something painted by a talented amateur, on a wall somewhere in Ballyfermot. I think what…
I’m trying to think of a better analogy. Say you have a car – you take off the hood, and it still works. You take away the doors, and it still works. But now somehow imagine that you remove the wheels and it still works, you take out the engine, it still works, you remove the frame, it still works… when nothing’s left, but something’s there, and importantly when it still works . In the early 2010s…
lately i've been thinking of the cover to thelonious monk's "underground". it shows a barn, a studio made up to look like a barn. monk is at a piano, dressed up like a member of the french resistance. in the background of the shot we see a flag with a swastika, a nazi official tied up (dead?) in the corner, maps tacked to the walls. a live cow, an armed woman in stylish scarf and fatigues, the…
[some posts written fitfully after the announcement that itch.io would be de-indexing and in some cases removing 18+ games, at request of credit-card companies and right-wing lobbyists Collective Shout] congratulations to all the virtual women no longer being trafficked through the itchio servers. our placement agency has found them new work at the Meta platform content moderation farms, where…
I feel a little at odds with myself around videogames these days. When I started in the late 00s it was mostly taken for granted that videogames sucked. The famous beige shooters of the time (so unlike the vibrant neon shooters of today) were the most obvious outwards sign of how the whole format seemed to have stalled, alongside licensed platformers, increasingly rote and charmless rpgs, etc. To…
A side-scrolling action game in which two main characters (he and her) arrive at the church to have a wedding while defeating a mummy man, werewolf, a thief, a mysterious thief, and a ghost who disturbs you. Mummy men, etc. take the heart on the way, touch it and defeat it, or kick and defeat the football on the street. (Wedding Bells) An action game for dwarfs with the dial of the phone in the…
am i still qualified to talk about this? i haven't really been "solo" in a while - i've worked with the musician tommy tone for over a decade now, and recently em reed and alex degen have both worked with me as part of larger projects. but i was a solo dev for a while and what i mean by that is this: that i was making games where i didn't have to talk to anyone. i specify this because the idea of…
thanks for everyone who came to the indie soapbox in glasgow this month, where i got to give a small talk alongside simon meek. i've copied the intermittently-referred-to text below. Hello, my name is Stephen and I've been in the knock-down drag-out big-money biz of making my own computer games as a hobby for the last 17 years, for reasons I can no longer recall. When I think about what drew me to…
my feeling around videogames is that interactivity is a gimmick. i don't necessarily mean that dismissively - i'm a big fan of the 3d friday the 13th, where every few minutes the movie stops abruptly so that someone can poke something into the camera, reach into the 3d plane for a lightswitch or to hand the audience a joint, etc. as flaubert sez, a feast on every page. delightful as this is, i…
that we cheat ourselves by cheating at a game, fail to "truly engage with the game systems" by robbing ourselves of consequence. if only!! but consequence can't be removed, only ever displaced. to play goldeneye with unlimited health, unlimited ammo, to vaguely go through the motions of the spy routine, screen flashing red as we're peppered with harmless bullets - this just means dealing with a…
thinking about em's new piece and the debate on poptimism that prompted it. for me one reason why the high / low art distinction is hard to imagine remaking is that high art itself was partly responsible for erasing it. the futurist assertion that a racecar is more beautiful than the victory of samothrace, the dada and surrealist arguments that art must be destroyed so everyday life could be…
all art right now consists of a bet that desire could mean more than an empty form of satisfaction - that faced with a distinction between frozen and inadequate forms of symbolic enjoyment (handing over $60 to participate in new mario game, etc) and the real thing, the latter would win out. there is no reason at all to think that this is true.
it sometimes feels like the entirety of games criticism is set up to justify doing the thing you wanted to do anyway. "i've had a fixation on making mario levels since i was 8 - here's why that's What We Need Right Now." here's why it's good, or important, or if you're on the commercial side here's why it's necessary to hit retention targets and appease the shareholders, etc. for me the question…
a lot of how we talk about videogames seems to take it for granted that you're making art for a world where no other art exists. i'm more interested in what it means to make work in the full knowledge that so many people are also making work. what's still worth doing? what can you leave undone? like it doesn't feel worthwhile for me to put intricate combo systems in a game if it's something other…
i think what finally depresses me most about videogames is a sense that the way we talk about these things grows ever more nuanced and sophisticated, while the things themselves remain the same old shit. in the wake of political failure, when nothing else seems possible, speech attains a new spirit of freedom in being able to apply any possible lens to a subject in the happy knowledge of none of…
Platform Studies **VARIOUS DOS GAMES **– Have I had it wrong about platformers this whole time? In the indie period they were _the _privileged vessel for "game design" in all its empty intentionality - ah, but what if I put the block there instead of here? Hee hee hee... ho ho ho! But all those guys have moved onto making Sokoban levels now, and with hindsight it’s easier to see why this genre…
MUSEUM MELTDOWN – Outside the museum you will see a burning dumpster. There is ammo just behind– collect it, then head in through the security doors and shoot the troopers waiting on the other side. To your left there is a medpack. To your right, a pornographic cinema containing multiple Pig Cops and a shotgun. Directly ahead of you is a big white corridor filled with Art. Proceed directly towards…
(backed up from the now-closed gameoeuvre.org group blog) BEAUTYCOPTER : It's hard to be a helicopter - on the other hand, that's how it is. The days stretch out before you like a dull ache, the ache of Beauty, like seeing a really perfect cloud formation on the way back from the Eurospar and thinking, well it's nice but what am I meant to do with that? You can stand there and try to look at the…
sprite comic essay about my favourite videogame, “donkey kong city” https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2155