Showing posts with label increpare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label increpare. Show all posts

Monday, March 6, 2017

The melancholy of screen space in "Universal History of Light" by Stephen Lavelle


WARNING: This post somewhat "spoils" the 2014 game Universal History of Light.

Stephen "increpare" Lavelle's "Universal History of Light" is a highly symbolic "adventure" game released back in February 2014. Reviews at the time hinged on describing it as an "insane dog simulator" game, which doesn't really capture what the game does, so this is me trying to offer a more robust interpretation and understanding.

Universal History of Light begins with a short lecture about the dangers of using laser pointers with dogs. Because a small red laser dot is incorporeal and intangible, a dog can never actually "catch" it -- and they will never understand their inability to catch their "prey", which will supposedly haunt them and cause psychological damage for the rest of their lives.

You then play as the lecturer at the front of the lecture hall, and you point your laser pointer at a student's assistance dog / seeing-eye dog, thus inflicting catastrophic hallucinations upon the dog. The dog now enters the brilliant burst pictured above; what awaits the dog in a new dimension of pure light and knowledge?

Turns out, it is a world of monochrome trauma. In the distance, we see countless planes, searchlights, and anti-aircraft flak illuminate the night sky. As the dog, we are basically wandering the outskirts of London during the Blitz.

Friday, March 15, 2013

simian.interface, and filler puzzles as phenomenology.


simian.interface, by Vested Interest, is a game that never tells you the controls or how to play or what your goals are, but you'll immediately intuit all of those things just by interacting with it. In this sense, it's very toy-like: you're just playing with this thing, tossing it and turning it over in your hands. No instructions, hardly any rules.

Nominally, it's also a "puzzle game", but it really doesn't fit into the popular sense of a puzzle game. There's this concept of "filler puzzles" among puzzle games, where puzzles that don't demand any new skill or understanding from the player are not as valuable as more novel puzzles. You can be assured that in a Stephen Lavelle puzzle game, for example, every single puzzle has been consciously constructed and filtered and curated over the course of dozens of playtests. Same thing in Jelly No Puzzle: there's always a bit of additional new lateral thinking that trips you up.

In this sense, simian.interface is an awful puzzle game because it is made almost entirely of filler puzzles -- you're just doing the same thing over and over, and the shapes change a little bit. Most levels take about 15 seconds to complete.

... Except it's a puzzle game where the formal novelty of the puzzles doesn't matter?

Sunday, July 10, 2011

How Tutorials Should Be Done

Why make sloppy pop-up text "tutorials" that give away all the mechanics / dynamics (I'm looking at you, BioShock) when you can have extremely elegant level design teach the skills and let players work things out for themselves?

Portal 2 did it. Almost every Stephen Lavelle game does it. Most recently, Impasse (via IndieGames.com) does it too.

Remember, less talk and more rock.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Welcome to the Indie FPS.

Indie platformers spawned sub-genres like the sudden-death one button jumpers, masocore and explore-'em-ups among countless others. The indie RTS spawned tower defense. Most of these indie efforts have non-photorealistic visuals that focus on distilling their commercialized parents' core mechanics into a delicious syrup: run and jump, build stuff that kills other stuff to survive, etc.

Continuing that proposed template, what sub-genre is the indie FPS working on?

Today in 2011, mainstream commercial efforts still focus on arcade man-shooting with photorealistic graphics in military contexts. They are descendents of one vision of first person gaming, the lineage of Wolfenstein 3D (1992).

But back in 1994, video games were confronted with a very different vision of what first person games could be....

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Mother Robot

One of these days I'm going to get-in on Ludum Dare / KOTM / all these "make a crappy game and make it quickly" competitions. In the meantime? I'm going to learn from the masters who make fantastic (and complete and polished) games in, like, 48 hours? Geez.

Go play Increpare's Mother Robot right now.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Exhibition: "Vida Interior" at Intermediae

Handle With Care (or should I say, "Cuidado, Frágil"?) is part of a super-way-cool-gee-whiz "alt games" exhibition (if we start calling ourselves "alt games" instead, will that bypass all the pointless debate about our label? Probably not...) called "Vida Interior" (Inner Life) at Intermediae in Madrid, Spain, alongside cool indie game devs like Dan Pinchbeck, Stephen Lavelle, the people behind Windosill and Osmos... Hurray! We're important and relevant, see? We're in a museum!

So if you happen to be in the area, go there and see it. I think there's gonna be a DJ and free booze too; or is my Spanish really that rusty? Anyway, sounds like a good time to me.

There's also some cool interviews with all the artists in the exhibition program (PDF), so check that out. (Though I'm a little disappointed by how content-less Stephen Lavelle's answers were, but I guess a lady's got to have her secrets.)

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Don't Get Me Wrong, I Love Increpare

... but sometimes I'm really just disturbed and at a loss as to what to say about his stuff -- "The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights" starts out promising.

The novel use of ASCII characters in this way (I especially like the "counter" and "TV") is cool, and the distortion effects are pretty nifty and sell a really cohesive, unsettling aesthetic. There's a "day" and a "time" counter but none of it seems particularly important. Your choices don't seem to make any difference. Player agency is incredibly vague, if it exists at all. Par for Increpare.

But then comes the last part which seems shocking and weird for the sake of being shocking and weird. It seems to undermine this incredibly interesting world / narrative he's built up, as if it's from an entirely separate game. The art style is different, the controls are mouse-driven instead of keyboard-driven, the mechanic is openly vulgar instead of subtly vulgar -- I mean, yes, maybe this jarring difference is meant to mirror the real-life phenomenon of night terrors, but I can't help but wonder if he could've done more than that. It seems more like a "one note" kind of thing and less of an exploration of an idea.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Why Games Aren't Art (a design perspective)


It's a dead horse, I know.

Wait, don't leave! Okay, video games have cultural legitimacy and an artistic component, sure -- but here's what's up: video games (especially big budget AAA commercial games) are also engineered products that go through usability testing, quality assurance, prototyping, pre-production, etc.

So I wonder: did Picasso have focus testing done for the 18-34 male demographic for Guernica?