#backlog diaries

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Backlog Diaries: on bees

on bees

Maddox Pratt, 2015 Web 5min

on bees is a short game poem about art, or really about a single artwork, and specifically about art as a way of introducing rigor to how one sees things. This makes writing about it feel a bit recursive. Rigorous perception is like, my whole thing. Every time I sit down to write something about a game or a TV show or what have you, I think a lot about how I'm looking at it; how others might look at it; what it means about me that I look at it the way I do.

on bees has a few lines that resonated with me a lot: "Perception is a commitment, / Perception is a responsibility, [...]" The artist in the poem makes drastic changes to her environment in an attempt to explore a certain experience of seeing. This makes a lot of sense to me; perception is an active process, one that involves a lot of choices. And the more you make those choices consciously and with intent, the more clearly you can see the world.

Well, I started calling these things diaries to give myself permission to go on self-indulgent tangents, so I'm going to go on a self-indulgent tangent. To be clear, the reason I think about perception in this way is that I never had the luxury of taking the world at face value. I've had to deal with distortions of reality my whole life, ranging from disordered emotion to paranoid delusions to hallucinations. I've grown into a certain acceptance of all this. What I see and hear and feel is all evidence, which I approach with the same open-minded skepticism that I would, say, information I found on Wikipedia.

Along the way, I got impatient with people who take perception for granted. Perception is a responsibility. You decide what you see and how you see it. If you're not doing so consciously, you're letting some part of your mind you don't understand decide for you. I respect the artistic project described in on bees because it acknowledges how active and strenuous the work of seeing clearly is. I dig this, and the Sisyphean nature of the task it describes. 

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Backlog Diaries: Nod

Nod

Rose, 2013 Web 5 minutes

I'm always on the lookout for nonstandard conversation games, so I had a good time with Nod, a one-button game of nonverbal communication. Given how limited the one verb is, the game does a good job of playing around with the different types of response it could be used for: e.g., acknowledgement, greeting, agreeing to a plan

Nod is a Ludum Dare game, so it goes in on the one thing it does and finishes up quick. But it did make me wonder how far you could stretch the premise. In Nod, nodding is always the right thing to do. One variation would be a game where nodding is sometimes effective and sometimes not. That could very quickly veer into the kind of comedy bit where someone keeps agreeing without paying attention and ends up offending someone or agreeing to something ridiculous. That bit is so cliche that I was caught by surprise when Nod didn't do it.

Another thing it got me thinking is what it would look like to integrate this kind of always-available nonverbal response into a more traditional dialogue-based conversation system. I could imagine a visual novel-like interface where nonverbal gestures could be used to indicate your character's mood or disposition. Maybe those mood signals could then influence available dialogue options before they appear?

And one more aside. While I was typing this up, my partner's mother, who's on the phone, came over and asked if she could have some of the coffee I made using nonverbal signals. Which got me thinking: multiple modes of conversation input means the possibility of parallel conversations. A game about holding a phone conversation using a dialogue tree while nonverbally communicating with someone in the room could be a fun challenge.

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Backlog Diaries: Bump Bump

Bump Bump

No1Game, 2014 Web 15min

Room escapes! My favorite underappreciated genre. I like them best when they have a blatant organizing gimmick, like Bump Bump does. It reminds me of the one escape I really liked in Zero Time Dilemma. If you only have a little space to work with, then really fuck around with that space, you know? I especially like how it incorporates items breaking as you go along. 

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Backlog Diaries: In Heaven

In Heaven

increpare, 2014 Web 1 minute  

My instinct when playing games is to continually look for alternate paths. In games as in life, I always suspect there's a "right," or at least expected way to act, and it's deeply important to me to know exactly what it is. In games, it's additionally important that I then find a way to act that isn't the expected one. I guess that's the fantasy I go for. If a game seems too straightforward, I will often either tune out, or, if possible, dig into the source code to figure out how it works. There's gotta be another way, right?

In Heaven is a straightforward game, and a sad one. Just a little poem about distance, unfolding click by click. The poem made me sad; my fruitless attempts to make the poem turn out differently made me sadder. Why do I need that so much?

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Backlog Diaries: The Unfinished Swan

The Unfinished Swan

Giant Sparrow, 2014 PS Vita, PS3, PS4 3 hours

I played The Unfinished Swan on the Vita over the course of a few evenings. I mostly played on the couch while my partner watched TV. At the time he was aggressively bingeing the entire run of House. When I try to picture The Unfinished Swan, all I can see is a column I couldn't figure out how to climb, and a House character going through a fraught one-episode romance in the background. Wasn't The Unfinished Swan about someone being sick, too? The girl in the picture was a dying or dead mom, right?

What it was really about, of course, was trying to expand a neat tech demonstration to something that people would feel was a satisfying product. This involves adding monsters, naturally, there always have to be friggin monsters. This kind of thing always bums me out a little. Swan just keeps trying different things with each chapter. New interactions! More architecture to explore! It's all visible now, sorry about that, that was not very user friendly. And a story! About a woman dying, probably!

Anyway, I played through it, and I didn't have to, so there was something that kept me going about it. It was a decent way to hang out with my partner while he was watching TV I wasn't into. And I liked watching the vines grow.

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Backlog Diaries: Five Nights at Freddy’s

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Scott Cawthorn, 2014 Windows, Android, iOS 3 hrs 

All this famous shit I've been finally getting around to lately! I am extremely easily scared by horror games, but I also crave being scared to an unreasonable degree, so I was excited when this popped up in my queue. I was kind of hyped up for it. One time I was at a friend's house doing a booze-n-Youtube evening and someone brought up a Freddy's Let's Play. I insisted on turning around and not watching while it was on - I still wanted to play it! - so I was treated to a full view of like six adults shrieking and recoiling in unison to something happening behind me. Delightful!

The game itself let me down a little. The use of the voicemail messages running in the background while you figure things out is great way to set up its particular horror-comedy tone. And I dig the pinned-down feeling. But I like my horror games best when they're just awful spaces for me to walk around and feel bad in. Dying kills the fear, as does the kind of fiddly resource management that turns out to be the bulk of Freddy's. Ultimately, this is a game about being so bad at your job that you die. I respect that thematic focus, but doing a bad job isn't scary to me. That's how I feel all the time! Maybe this is scarier to kids, for whom jobs are some horrible, half-understood thing that will happen to them in the future?

Further Reading

“Why Five Nights at Freddy’s Is So Popular”, Patricia Hernandez “Murder, Ghosts, and Revenge: The Larger Story Behind the Five Nights at Freddy's Games,” Nadia Oxford