There are different chambers to be explored. The double mouthed ventriloquist spits out completely indegestible techno-jabber. The fracture room wants to make you think about the futility to resist computer time, which is much more accurate, constant and productive than human time, with its petty diurnal and circadian rhythms. The pantheon of misinformation deals with the concept of technology and progress becoming obsolete so quickly that nothing but a wire frame of memory lasts, while technology glides into ridiculousness soon after it has been invented.

Stunt Dummies is the kind of game gamers despise and artists celebrate. It is, however, able to bridge the gap between these two pretty well. You can enjoy it as a work of art, but you must also at least acknowledge that it works as a game and follows most of the rules a game should. And it succeeds at creating a strange universe that is actually fun to explore.

For everybody who is about to try his luck at shooting mean aliens in lose/lose, a nice game of chess is really the only way not to lose. Not to lose data, actually. New York based artist Zach Gage has programmed a nice looking and “mildly challenging” (Symantec antivirus squad) space shooter in which the killing gets real. Every alien, floating around in front of your little space ship, is generated based on a random file in your documents folder. For every alien homicide, this file will get deleted. If you lose the game by having your space ship destroyed, the application will terminate and delete itself.

Gage’s concept of lose/lose explores the meaning and importance of digital possession – how can we trust we really own things that we don’t even fully understand? Have we already reached the point where we value some of our real physical possessions less then our data?

Of course the game has quickly made its way into the antivirus databases of our beautiful globe, and in the meantime has even been garnished with warnings of possible code mutations or alterations – a terrible fear of an art space shooter running wild, and you yourself as the killer of your own creation, giving your power point presentations hell, slaughtering your mp3 collection and annihilating your summer holidays.

If  anybody is to hack or make use of lose/lose, I’d like to make this very constructive suggestion: How about combining it with an antivirus program, so you can game away your time and at the same time zap spyware and trojans on your system yourself? DIY adware removal! Keep your computer clean with your own two hands, no matter what these kids come up with next!

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

The human race needs your help? Let them down! 5 seconds to save the world? Let them pass!

This is the premise of this first ever 56kompo I am going to start right here, introducing a brand new concept of digital entertainment: The Speedfail! Since the beginnings of video game recording, gamers have strived with perseverance and incredible endurance to reach the highest score in minimal time, to finish the hardest games with breathtaking ease and then to show off. But did they ever doubt if they were on the right side? Did they ever question their belief that what they did was something purposeful? No! But they should have!

Why save the princess, when she obviously enjoyed being abducted?

Why eat all the pills, when there obviously isn’t any way out of this maze?

It is up to you now to decide whether you want to keep playing a part in that twisted scheme, or whether you want to fail as hard, as quickly and as irrevocably as you can. Fail everyone, in any kind of game, no matter if it’s a shooter, a platformer, or an adventure game with one single possibility to die. Fail in a tutorial level when they least expect it. And then post it on their favourite medium, the realms of the speedrunners, the tragic kingdom of automated reactions:

Youtube!

As an inspiration on how to fail very quickly (yet without my astonishing theoretical framework built around it), maybe you’d want to consider watching this video.

Link your epic fail to my humble attempt at failing Moon Patrol as a video response. The best fails will be posted on a static page with a link to the author’s homepage and some nice words and cultural analysis sprinkled all over. All entries should be in by November 1st.