Joshua Trevett

I'm a writer who likes videogames and culture.

[jtrevett]

New video essay - this one’s about Destiny 2′s out-of-map glitches, particularly the ones on Nessus. Some words about the mystical feeling, the surreal beauty, and the parallel videogame you find in the glitchy netherworld. Also, pretty footage!

[seldow]

In honor of this painting being lost forever in the abyss of Brooklyn, I’m posting it again. I miss this weirdo. Bye.

[jtrevett]

Talking about the favorite videogame music, which is also very often the Trucks music!

[jtrevett]

Here is a series on YouTube in which friend and I slowly learn how to be great generals

[jtrevett]

New Challenger Approaches

Joshua Trevett gets good, but slowly.

I’ve been getting into GUILTY GEAR Xrd lately, along with a small group of my friends. It’s been a long time since I’ve made a serious attempt to get okay at a fighting game, and this “anime fighter” subgenre is intimidatingly fast-paced compared to Virtua Fighter, my lifetime favorite. I’m pretty bad. At age 26 (point nine!) I’m still fairly young, but this game gives me a direct view to the inevitable wearing down of my reflexes, which is unnerving. How could I possibly keep up a flow of good decisions when the matches race along faster than I can process them?

Some thoughts about playing games you’re not very good at, and how that can be its own kind of reward.

[jtrevett]

Some tips + tricks

[jtrevett]

Stopping and Sitting

I’ve always loved sitting down in videogames, going back to when I was a kid playing MMORPGs. Those are the games where it’s strange if you can’t sit. My high school friends and I would often hang out in Vana’diel, the world of Final Fantasy XI, and while I enjoyed a lot about being in the game – the setting, the characters, the music – I didn’t really care much for the game proper, the demands of a grindy RPG. My (wonderful, kind) parents must have paid two years’ worth of subscription fees to let me play it, but I never graduated even into the middling levels. Instead, I developed an idiosyncratic way of engaging with that world: I would make tiny profits by showing newbies the safest routes between the major cities, I would shoot the breeze with my guildmates, and I would sit.

Sitting is a natural fit for the largest scale multiplayer games because of the nature of those environments. They’re filled with genuine life, real people roaming hither and yon in pursuit of their various purposes. Such a social space would feel uncanny if everybody were always standing and always busy with something; to take the time to sit, alone or with others, in the city or in the bush, is to relish the special power of the MMO. You not only get to enjoy watching the living scenery, you become scenery yourself, an ambient element that helps to sell the setting as a believable place.

I wrote a thing for Haywire! A topic close to my heart

[jtrevett]

We did a playthrough of Inside! Here’s that as a playlist.

It left me with some stuff to say, so this is a video of me saying that stuff. Careful: spoilers.

[jtrevett]

New trucks! My favorite in a while.

I’ve been wanting to do one on the subject of algorithm-derived art for some time, and the glitch deity gave us a perfect excuse by spontaneously transforming our old Vaporwave episode (of all the videos on YouTube!) into a fascinating jumble of broken MPEG compression. The computer went ahead and made art without anybody asking it to, and we were lucky enough to document it before it vanished. We only had a single day with it before the video turned back to normal. It was flabbergasting to me that this happened in the first place - that we were lucky enough to notice it in time to capture it feels like a genuine miracle. 

One really special thing about it was that it rendered differently depending on the machine viewing it, which in a sense turns every iteration into a generative collaboration between YouTube’s servers and individual PCs. The only YouTube video I’ve ever known to work that way! Here’s a bunch of links to some of the visuals this produced, and some extra thoughts.

Here’s what it looked like on my computer - a tremendous number of variations on a theme, cycled through at a regular pace. I was able to grab the complete 40 minutes, and it’s my new favorite thing. It’s like a modernist painter with an obsession for colorful vertical lines lived briefly inside my computer, determined to become prolific during a 40-minute lifespan.

My brother also recorded the entire thing, and I’m glad he did because it’s so different from my computer’s interpretation. It’s bracing and jittery but it also undergoes a gradual transformation and charts several distinct territories by the end. Entrancing!

Several of you were cool enough to submit images of what you saw to Isaac’s blog. Here’s those:

waterwarp snapped a series of images that show the creeping glitch slowly encroach upon the last uncorrupted frame. The 3x3 grid of screenshots makes for a pretty good collage effect! He sees a face in the middle one that I don’t, proving that computers aren’t the only beings with subjectivity.

maverick-ornithography might have a similar codec configuration as waterwarp’s, because she saw a similar downward march. She got some gifs that nicely show the creepy jittery movement, and I especially love the geometric pattern that showed up in the final stages.

Wotching got a partial video which could be showing the same effect as the two above. The video’s helpful for how it demonstrates the glacial pace at which the glitch begins takes over the screen.

sucrosesaboteur’s video sounded like it operated similarly to my brother’s, but the gif he submitted is the only one to show what happened when he re-glitched the glitch by seeking through the video and switching tabs and stuff, causing the colors to break. Mine was very stable no matter how I treated it - interesting that these variations not only looked distinct from one another, but had distinct behaviors.

To me, this is the most compelling frontier facing the art world at the moment. If we treat media objects like these not as random errors or academically interesting signs of what “genuine” computer creativity might eventually look like, but instead as already-worthy art objects in their own right, then a ton of interesting stuff happens. Questions are raised about the nature of creativity and authorship, the line between autonomy and deterministic physical processes, and alien phenomenologies. Not that I think computers are alive, or anything - it’s just that this stuff expands the horizon of what we can conceive computer life could be like, and how we might relate with it.

Also, and this is the really important thing: it’s just really darn cool to look at. Talk to your computer! Love your computer! Once in a while, it’ll reciprocate.

[jtrevett]

We expected not to like this game, but actually, we like it

[some-triangles]

Enjoy this documentary about the noises my apartment has in the summer, which is superimposed upon a documentary about the game “Metroid”, creating a vibe that is at once tenuous and invigorating, like an egg cream

[jtrevett]

This is gonna be our soundscape for the next little bit while we fix our microphone and I secure an air conditioner, plz enjoy it for its lo-fi charms instead of hating it for being well below the average standards of YouTube production

[jtrevett]

Mr. J. T. Revett

That’s right

[some-triangles]

Little somethin somethin different this week

The rhythm of this game lulls us into talking about how to be in the world, it’s pretty good

[jtrevett]

Check out our let’sssss playyyyy

[doshmanziari]

What to say about Dark Souls 3?

Truth be told, I usually like to wait a few months before trying to discuss a videogame, especially one as large as Dark Souls 3, at length, so this’ll be something of a minor look at my experience with the game.

My biggest takeaway from Dark Souls 3 right now is wondering why it needed to be made; and, accepting that it has been made, what its value as a followup and supposed conclusion is. It’s easy to argue for the unnecessariness of any media if you have a reductionist view of human experience. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m asking what this installment contributes to Dark Souls, as a fiction, that wasn’t just better left alone with the first game.

The trickiness with asking these questions is that it makes it sound as if Dark Souls 3 is a bad game. Barring an unlistenable soundtrack, a handful of bosses that are either outright horrid or have tired designs, and some references to prior games that are nothing but base fanservice, Dark Souls 3 is a fairly good videogame. But its existence feels especially questionable after Bloodborne, with its revamped offensive-based mechanics and unfamiliar cosmos (there is also a lot to be said about how it is representative of a huge increase in detail and fidelity). Dark Souls 3 can’t even fully commit to the end of its world, which is really the only thing its narrative had going for it, as when you decide to let the bonfires go unlinked, the Firekeeper’s words allude to a rekindling.

I had for a long time felt that the Castlevania series could have sustained itself even during its highly reiterative phase of titles helmed by producer Koji Igarashi if only the design had at least been as good as Symphony of the Night, but now that I’m thinking about Dark Souls 3 I’m not so sure. I’ve glanced through several reviews of the game and it seems like others are starting to feel the fatigue of diminished returns. I don’t expect, however, that this will mean, should there be another Dark-Souls-alike, that reviewers will let their fatigue be reflected in their scoring (to say nothing about how wrongheaded numerical bottom-lines are anyway). After all, nearly every reviewer felt compelled to give the aforementioned Castlevania games high scores as if because their stuffed, obsessive-compulsive designs were intrinsically owed a silver or gold star.

If you’ve played Dark Souls 3, what do you think?

Edit: Geez. This has already gotten one response by a troll, who I’ve blocked. Please don’t respond if you’re going to approach this in bad faith. Thanks!

[jtrevett]

For me, the takeaway from Dark Souls 3 is that we shouldn't listen to Prince Lothric. He's the voice that says that it’s time to let it die - that diminishing returns mean the thing is as good as over already, and we should "let it all fade into nothing." He might have a point, but these games have never given much stock to nihilism.

Lothric’s philosophy reminds of King Allant’s from way back in Demon’s Souls - “Don’t you understand? No one wishes to go on.” The final bridge to Lothric’s chamber looks an awful lot like the very first bridge we crossed into Allant’s palace. We could view that as a shallow callback, but I prefer to see it as a bit of visual poetry, an acknowledgement that we’ve reached a point where we have to look back and take stock of the series as a whole - once this was a beginning, now it’s an ending. We’ve spent much more time in these dying worlds now, and Allant’s words might start to ring a little truer.

Dark Souls 3 threatens to become one of those self-hating videogame sequels like we got used to seeing in the Metal Gear series, all about its own existence as a corpse reanimated for the benefit of a demanding public. Lothric, seemingly a kingdom built by Gwynevere on the site of Firelink Shrine, is kind of like the Dark Souls factory Miyazaki has spoken about not wanting From Software to turn into. Its purpose was to find a way to link the fire repeatedly and sustainably, to turn that sublime hero’s journey into a reproducible commodity. That seems to have gone about as well as you’d expect. If linking the fire ever enabled a return to more prosperous times, it doesn’t anymore. If there’s a sign of salvation in this game it’s offered to those who worship the dark, when they float rapturously up to the darksign sun in the form of grotesquely elegant butterflies.

And yeah, it is starting to fray at the edges a bit, or else why would we need to tell this particular story? The imitation Siegmeyer and the off-brand Gogh who witlessly parrots a couple of lines from the giant blacksmith could be argued to help establish the game’s self-reflexive angle, but they do so pretty gracelessly, and it’s not even that much fun to hear their familiar voices. The Namless King is just about the coolest story I could have come up with for Gwyn’s Firstborn, but telling that story still collapses that delicious mystery under the disappointing weight of certainty.

So it’s interesting that in the face of all this, we have a villain, a son of Gwynevere, whose stated goal is to pretend that the quest doesn’t exist, who would rather see all this tiresome repetition dwindle away. The game no doubt shows us that he’s got reasons to see things the way he does, but he’s still unmistakably a villain - a kid not listening to his mother the benevolent goddess, a monarch locking himself away from the suffering of his people, and also the figure whose fault it is that this entire process has been so violent - he revives his brother to fight us just like we’ve died so many times over the course of making our way to him.

And yet, the only ending the game casts in a positive light is the one where we let the flames fade. What’s the difference between that outcome and what Lothric wanted? I say it’s that we undergo the process with grace. Lothric would have let the flames fade gradually and painfully, the player character and firekeeper instead invest the act with ritual and the comfort of companionship. This is the game saying that once Dark Souls became a series of games it was going to need a proper ending, but it also gets right to the thematic heart of that series - it’s about how to die well, not with resignation but with intention. 

(The line about the embers in the darkness is problematic, but I prefer to see it as a signal that there’s room for some unknowable far-flung future, rather than that the next flame will inevitably be handled the same way as the first.)

And we do justice to a few lingering problems on the way there. Gwynevere was the first game’s icon of a deceitfully Campbiellian goddess, and here she finally gets to be more than a gendered symbol, but instead an offscreen character like Bloodborne’s Yharnam, whose emotional arc away from her father and toward the comfort of the dark is portrayed indirectly by the entire game world. Likewise there are the hollows, who we see forming communities, resting at makeshift bonfires, studying sorcery in Oolacile ruins, generally trying to find salvation wherever they can find it. It helps the other games tremendously to know that they wouldn’t have simply stood guard in the Undead Burg forever.

In terms of its storytelling, Dark Souls 1 is perfectly sound on its own and didn’t need any sequels. But it was a sequel, and hell if I don’t still want more ruined cities to explore and beautiful monsters to slash up. Games just have this way of sustaining themselves. It’s not always for the best, but I think we’re well served by Dark Souls 3. It ain’t flawless, but I’ll take a flawed conclusion over none at all - if nothing else, it turns the ending into a communal moment, and I say that’s pretty important.

[jtrevett]

Escaping the puzzle prison

From Portal to The Talos Principle, today's puzzle games seem to delight in literal prisons for the player to escape.

Puzzle games have felt a bit self-loathing lately, haven't they? When there's any amount of story, there's a good chance it'll frame the puzzles as a loathsome task: forced labor, a dull job, a prison, a purgatory. Why has this trope become so familiar?

I think Portal started it. Portal is not the first videogame, let alone the first work of fiction, to tell a story about characters held captive in a world of artifice by an evil computer, but it did bring something new to the table in the specific way it deployed puzzles to help tell that story. Puzzles in story-driven games are traditionally presented as abstractions of practical problems, things like blocked pathways or locked doors. In contrast, Portal’s villain GLaDOS presents our player character Chell with literal puzzles, abstract and meaningless, casting her as a proverbial rat in a maze in the interest of some absurd scientific inquiry. In a very real way, the Aperture labs comprise a prison made of puzzles. To escape the labyrinth, Chell must master not only its layout, but its logic.

It's an appropriate analogy for how it can feel to engage with puzzles. With other kinds of challenges, there's always a feeling of motion even when you're utterly stuck: the boss keeps finding new and spectacular ways to kill you, or you watch as your empire crumbles gradually into dust. Those are reciprocal relationships in a way that being stuck on a puzzle isn't. You're locked in a room with it, trying to get it to move, but it barely acknowledges your presence. Letting puzzles be a part of the setting rather than a conceit of the game's rules doesn't cause them to feel less arbitrary, but it does prevent that arbitrariness from damaging the story.

Returning to one of my favorite subjects: puzzle games. Read the rest at ZAM!

[jtrevett]

Five out of Ten is a new kind of magazine that celebrates, reflects upon and enriches gaming culture. Maybe you’ve played videogames your whole life, or maybe you’re just curious about the medium- either way, there’s something here for you to enjoy.

Hey! You can read two new pieces that I wrote in this thing. They are these:

Cover Me, I’m Reloading! - Guns are a quick way to turn a setting into a scene, but what happens when games take them seriously?

You Are Destiny - The myths of Bungie’s latest game are influenced by the fan-created legends of its predecessors.

It’ll cost you a few bucks, but you’ll actually be putting money in my pocket this time, plus also into the pockets of the other cool people who wrote for and worked on this. Doesn’t that sound like a cool thing to do?

[jtrevett]

Haywire Recruitment Drive

Riley says goodbye, and Josh says hello.

And, yeah! I’ve wound up with a pretty neat post at this place. We’re looking for writers and editors, maybe check it out and see if you’d like to get involved? No money, but barely any work. No experience required, either! Spread the word, pals?