Tagvideo games

Mutation Vectors: A Fantastic Death Abyss

David Bowie Outside

Status Update

Just finished recording an episode of Mindful Cyborgs with Arran James and Michael Pyska of the “post-nihilist” website Syntheticzero.

It was a great episode, and I can’t wait for it to be online, but it’s left me in a weirder than usual headspace.

Browsing

So what is post-nihilism? I should probably tell you to wait til the podcast is out. But in the meantime, here’s a bit from an article Arran and Michael wrote in the Occupied Times:

After nihilism, then, are embodied realisations of and exposures to vibrant ecologies of being offering an ultimately untameable wilderness which we participate in on an equal footing with all other bodies, even if we have an unequal ecological effect. In order to cope-with and cope-within the wilderness of being we must abandon the charnel-house of meaning and its theological tyrannies once and for all. As coping-beings we must leave our reifications behind in order to engage in post-nihilist praxis: an ecologistics of tracing these rhythms and activities, their multiple couplings and decouplings, and taking responsibility for our way of cohabiting in, with and alongside other bodies.

Playing

Finally getting around to playing A Dark Room, a text-based game I’ve mentioned before. It’s like Oregon Trail meets The Road. Dark stuff indeed.

Listening

I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s Outside a lot this week. It was the first Bowie album I ever heard, back when I was a teenage rivethead, but I hadn’t listened to it in a good 14 years. Back then I knew it was supposed to be a concept album, and that Bowie had worked with Brian Eno on it, but that was about it. From Wikipedia:

Bowie and Eno visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, Austria in early 1994 and interviewed and photographed its patients who were famous for their “Outsider Art.”[1] Bowie and Eno brought some of that art back with them into the studio[1] as they worked together in March 1994, coming up with a three-hour piece that was mostly dialog. Late in 1994, Q magazine asked Bowie to write a diary for 10 days (to later be published in the magazine), but Bowie, fearful his diary would be boring (“…going to a studio, coming home and going to bed”), instead wrote a diary for one of the fictional characters (Nathan Adler) from his earlier improvisation with Eno. Bowie said “Rather than 10 days, it became 15 years in his life!” This became the basis for the story of Outside.

Here’s the Adler diary.

I was never able to follow the narrative of Outside, but this page tries to unpack the songs and stitch the story together.

BTW, there were also some fantastic moments on the Outside tour, like Bowie singing “Scary Monsters,” “Reptile” and “Hurt” and others with Nine Inch Nails.

Technoccult: The Game

technoccult-screenshot

Eliot Gardepe has released a computer game called Technoccult: Covenant. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with this site, and no I haven’t been in touch with the developer. I found it on Twitter.

I downloaded it, but haven’t had time to play it much, but it appears to be an interactive fiction/adventure game in the Maniac Mansion/Ultima/DejaVu style. (Oddly enough I’ve been thinking it would be fun to work in this medium myself). Oh, and it’s got a drum ‘n bass soundtrack.

The Rise of Dark Gaming (A Dark Room, The Long Dark)

The Long Dark

Ever since Warren Ellis posted about the “extinction aesthetic” I’ve been seeing it everywhere. For example, the new game The Long Dark. From Wired‘s review:

As in Eric Kripke’s Revolution, The Long Dark imagines a world in which a “geomagnetic event” turns out the lights forever, ending humanity’s reign and repositioning nature for a comeback tour. But instead of the collapse happening while you’re traipsing through a balmy, subtropical clime replete with fruit trees, fishable waters and swinging hammocks, you’re somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. And winter isn’t coming, it’s a bone-cracking fact.

The game wraps a biometric data cube around that nihilistic narrative, monitoring, in real-time, things like thirst, hunger, body temperature, fatigue, calories consumed, injuries (sprains, broken bones) and illness. It’s also keeping tabs on environmental metrics like ambient air temperature (inside or out) relative to variables like wind and weather, the time of day, and whether you’re in shadow or sunlight. If you find better clothes, you stay a little warmer. If you find water-purification tablets, you can render polluted water potable. If you find wood, matches and a sheaf of newspapers, you can build a fire.

That sounds an awful lot like a graphical version of A Dark Room, the strange game that Ellis called the “Extinction Aesthetic equiv of Minecraft.”

From the New Yorker‘s profile of the game:

The game’s ever-expanding scope and regular demands for micro-managing resources create an enthralling parallax effect that can keep devoted players dosed, for hours, on the pleasurable sense of immersion that the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow.” The longer you play, the more complicated the game’s gathering and building tools become, with each incremental addition widening the game’s scope, while introducing unsettling hints about what it all could mean. Why do you sometimes find cloth caught in your traps? And why does the game suddenly start calling the few workers who’ve come to help you slaves?

Is this the beginning of a trend? Are there other examples I don’t know about?

ANTVR: A Virtual Reality Gadget That Anyone Can Hack

ANTVR virtual reality headset

In March 2012 I wrote:

We’ve had steampunk and dieselpunk and atompunk, so now it’s pixelpunk. We’re about to hit full circle and have retro-cyberpunk complete with VR headsets and Power Gloves.

Later that year Oculus did a Kickstarter for their virtual reality headset, which also happened to kickstart a new wave of VR kit. I just wrote about the latest one for Wired:

The designs for the ANTVR headset itself and its nifty convertible game controller are proprietary technology. But the designs and firmware for the wireless receiver–which sits between the headset, the controller, and the gaming console–are open source. That opens up a range of possibilities, such as creating custom controllers or using the ANTVR controller to control other devices.

For example, ANTVR co-founder Qin Zheng says you could write software for using ANTVR to control a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, perhaps using the headset to watch the feed from the bot’s on-board camera. You could also make your own version of the receiver specifically designed to work with a game console or device not officially supported by ANTVR. “You can use the signal straight from the USB port,” Zheng says. “We will give the developer all the documentation and libraries.”

Full Story: Wired: A Virtual Reality Gadget That Anyone Can Hack

Still no Power Gloves, though…

The Surprising, Stealth Rebirth Of The American Arcade

insert coins

From Ars Technica:

The arcade industry is dead in the United States—everyone knows it—done in by a combination of rapidly advancing home consoles and rapidly expanding suburbanization in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The only people not in on this bit of conventional wisdom are the ones who happen to be opening a surprising number of successful new arcades around the country.

Adam Pratt, who runs industry website Arcade Heroes when he isn’t managing his own arcade in West Valley City, Utah, tracked at least 12 major, dedicated, independent US arcades opening their doors in 2011, with 10 more opening so far this year. That might not be enough to rival numbers from the golden age of arcades, but it’s a notable expansion from the years before.

“I have missed plenty of locations, but despite that, there really has been an increase over the past two years or so,” Pratt told me. “News occasionally comes along of a place closing, but it is far outweighed by openings.” And almost all of these locations are thriving, based on what Pratt has been hearing.

Full Story: Ars Technica: The surprising, stealth rebirth of the American arcade

The Portland bar/arcade Ground Kontrol was ahead of the curve.

Psychotherapist/Sex Game Designer Nicolau Chaud Talks About Next Game

Nicolau Chaud is a Brazilian psychotherapist and indie computer game developer responsible for such hits as Marvel Brothel, which is actually more of a business simulator than a sex game, and Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer. Here’s Joel Goodwin’s description of the latter:

“The Dungeoneers” is a clandestine society of sociopaths who believe “pain to be the most intimate form of relationship one person can have with another”. They carry their mental disease with pride. They inflict it on their victims with impunity. A dungeoneer’s finest hour is when he or she tortures a victim to a sweet spot on the verge of madness and death called a “beautiful escape”. They also upload videos of these torture sessions for others to review, in an intentional nod to the experience of releasing games online for peers to high-five or tear down.

You are Verge, a dungeoneer of poor reputation with honed self-loathing skills. This is a game without heroes. Verge is not a likeable character.

Chaud is now using his RPG Maker skills to create a new game called Polymorphous Perversity. Not much has been revealed, but he’s given a few interviews on the game. Here’s an excerpt from Goodwin’s:

In May, Chaud’s mood was ebullient: “I had a very weird insight today: I treat my game like a girlfriend… Yeah, I know, weird. But the good thing is: it loves me back.”

But his posts were infrequent and in June he made a quick remark that this special relationship was fast becoming dysfunctional: “Making this game has been a very interesting and weird experience. Researching sexual preferences, googling for pictures, spriting 24×32 sex, reading and writing porn, getting e-mails with naked pictures from players… it’s all very weird. Fun, at first, but gets somewhat unpleasant after a while, and the feeling of numbness I’m getting towards the theme is disturbing.”

Electron Dance: Not Safe for Work

Nightmare Mode: Interview with Nicolau Chaud, Mind Behind Polymorphous Perversity

Kotaku: The Sex Game That Crossed Lines and Unnerved Its Creator

All three sites have screenshots that contain adult material (NSFW).

(links via Metafilter)

Polymorphous Perversity is currently open to its final round of testers. You can apply here.

Beautiful Old Moebius-esque Nintendo Comic

“Howard and Nester” was a comic in the magazine Nintendo Power. I read it as a kid but I’d forgotten how gorgeous the Moebius-style/”frenchmanga” style art was:

Howard and Nester

Nintendope has archived the entire series, but it’s not clear who drew these strips.

Howard and Nester Comics Archive

(via Brandon Graham)

The Neuroscience of Video Games, a Review of the Literature

Gamer

John Walker takes a look at the journal Nature‘s recent Brains On Video Games collection, which includes both possible negative and possible positive outcomes of video game play.

The bad news: much of the positive cognitive gains from video gaming are non-transferable, and gaming may increase both aggression and the symptoms of ADHD. The good news: it doesn’t sound like that should be a problem for people without existing aggressive tendencies or ADHD.

My take-away: if you like playing games, keep playing them. If you don’t, there’s probably not much benefit in starting.

Rock, Paper Shotgun: Nature’s Neuroscientific Review Of Games

See also:

Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills

Video Games and Spatial Cognition (PDF)

Video Gamers Are Better Lucid Dreamers?

Alan Moore Hints That He May Be Making a Video Game

Alan Moore

The revelation came during a Q&A at an event celebrating his fine magazine Dodgem Logic last night in London, where Moore was asked if he had considered making video games. […]

Moore revealed that he is now looking at a project created with a number of different mediums in mind. While it’s evidently not settled yet, he said there may be “possibly some surprising stuff happening in the next 12 months”

Shack News: Alan Moore hints at making video game

One shouldn’t read too much into this, he could just be referring to Jimmy’s End, which is supposed to be both a film and a television series.

(via Matt Stags)

Video Gamers Are Better Lucid Dreamers?

Alan Wake

The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.

A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

Live Science: Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests

(via Theoretick)

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