56Kmodern » lettrism

Typoroids

56K — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:47:35 +0000

In the semantic jungle that is modern life, it is very easy to lose your focus. Sometimes words and whole sentences drift by like asteroids, and you have to chop them down to pieces to understand what they were saying. And if you cross one border, you’ll enter the room from the other side.

Okay, this game may not apply as a theory for modern life in general, but as a nice little lettrist space shooter in the vein of (or probably rather in a very close relation to) the classical Asteroids, Typoroids – “the eternal struggle of designers vs. letters”, does pretty well. Yes, and the subtitle reveals even more – it shows how the medium “game” is still in the middle of a struggle about the privilege of interpretation.

Game designers struggle to incorporate words in their design that manage to convince readers, not only gamers. Writers try to push their craft into the game medium and sometimes think very little of the game designers.

Oh yes, you might want to play that game without sound. It has a cheesy version of the imperial march.

Ergon/Logos

56K — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:26:36 +0000

Your first decision: jump or run. You can’t do both. You can not Jump&Run. Genre convention #1 deconstructed along the way, 30 years of continuous jumping and running, gone at a single blow. Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini manages to break the strongest and most widespread stereotype about video games so easily in his current work Ergon/Logos, you barely notice it at first. But if you notice, a whole avalanche of game stereotypes are waiting to be explored by you, the one who is in control.

Ergon/Logos captures all the conventions, clichés and, quite surprisingly, even some of the game mechanics of one of the oldest genres in video game history in plain text. As the player, you control the direction of the leading character’s stream of thought. Feeling quite the daredevil today? Great, then jump over pitfalls, grab the lovely maid and do not look left or right, for all your possible failures are already lined up in font size 72 at the side of the path to glory.

But if you feel like exploring the poetry within jumping, running and failing, then please fail. You will not regret it.

I made this. You play this. We are enemies

56K — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:08:33 +0000

Jason Nelson is a poet. His poetry mutates and hides behind interactive media, almost gamelike games and installations that combine such diverse subjects as ancient witchcraft, explosive weapons, breakfast cereal and the weather. Among his efforts is a remarkably playable one named I made this. You play this. We are enemies.

While guiding a little dot through a labyrinth (clearly a reminiscence of the olden days of plain, abstract and for-gaming’s sake gaming) you are made to witness travesties of well-known websites, implemented as ghastly artefact-ridden jpgs and enjoy poetic distraction. Or distractive poetry.

Jason Nelson weaves a semantic net out of empty phrases and bloated marketing jabber that grows tighter and tighter the longer you play. You won’t be able to memorize much, but you’ll get a feeling that you just came a little closer to the core of company-enforced newspeak: By shaping it into a beautifully strange rhythm of grotesque drivel, its true form is revealed: grotesque drivel. Only without the beauty.