twine succeeded precisely because of its violence–because it was suited to guerilla warfare–a weapon for underdogs
replicating, breeding, virulent–cheap pipebombs and tin can landmines
PORPENTINE
goregasm
Filed under culture …
Free Indie Games: Curating the DIY Revolution
a talk i did with terry cavanagh about cool games, queer creators, diy, curation, and fuck capitalism
the most important architecture of the next x years will be designed by those who were locked outside/inside the buildings
(architecture both physical and virtual)
we who were forced to contemplate these spaces much, much longer than anyone else was, and the permanent effect it had on our psyches
from this principle we derive our unstoppable designs
Free Indie Games: Curating the DIY Revolution
so me and terry cavanagh (who is a wonderful person) did a talk at GDC about some of our favorite lesser known games of 2012, about curation, about making games for humans
we consciously avoided amazing but well-covered games (Dys4ia and Unmanned for example)
we had a powerpoint but we threw it out and made videos instead, some recorded in fraps, others handheld footage with terry’s phonecam.
coverage by Edge with some key quotes
list of games we talked about on screen:
Lim by merritt kopas
Republia Times by Lucas Pope
Game Title and Game Title: Lost Levels by Michael Brough
Goblet Grotto by thecatamites and j chastain
Live Forever by hubol
A Very Pink Game by sheepherds
Coletânea Esses Games Violentos by Pedro Paiva’s 11-Year-Old Students
Tape Dream by Lilith Megiddo
Asphyx by Droqen
Imscared by Ivan Zanotti
At the Bonfire by finny
mentioned as examples of good exoludic games:
Oh My Gorgons! by Alan Hazelden and Sarah Marshall
Blues for Mittavinda by Jack King-Spooner
mentioned as examples of good personal Twine games:
Rat Chaos by j chastain
Kim’s Story by Kim Moss
Nineteen by Elizabeth Sampat
i also referenced marras’ post on games and disability
quotes read during talk:
…Lim is about feeling erased and attacked. That said, I’ve been wary of presenting a one-sided, tragic view of trans experience in my games. I really feel that being trans is amazing, and we get enough tragedy in mainstream stories about trans people. There’s a lot of violence and negative experiences that go along with being a trans person, but it can also be beautiful and powerful.
So what I’ve tried to get across in my games is that being an other can be painful and horrible, but we’re rarely alone — there are others like us, and if we can find each other, we can appreciate and celebrate the unlikely fact of our existence together, in the face of a world that says that we shouldn’t be. – merritt kopas
We view apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. – Apple
I was in a strange old building, seemed like a warehouse-turned-fleamarket. It seemed really big even though I only remember a few rooms.
Most of it was spent in a room with a few supposed B-movie stars that had trashed the space. We were watching a few VHS movies in enromous boxes. I got them from the market area of the building, which took up most of the rooms I visited. Some of which were really cheap and had obscured psychadelic-feeling art. One was $800 and I felt like I remembered the movie, like it was something I had wanted for a long time. It was in a large black box apart from the rest, with neon brush-marks. I couldn’t afford it though.
One of the B-movie stars was a head with his skeleton hanging out and a few organs. I was probably thinking of a leyak? I don’t remember much about the movie but it was focused on rainbow goop, kind of like Street Trash I guess. Each room had a large window, but they were closed so I could only see because there were dim-lit lights some places. – lilith megiddo
i mostly engaged with them in the same brutally stupid way i did with everything else. watching a movie when you’re 8 years old, when you kind of don’t care about a lot of the stuff like dramatic subplots and musical numbers but you accept them anyway as possibly appealing to a kind of phantasm audience that you don’t belong to but which presumably exists, and which has needs and tastes far more defined than yours. – thecatamites
We have a problem, which is not admitting the degree to which we rely on games for anesthesia. They’re disposable alternate lives that slowly devour our real ones. “Gamers” are junkies, games are their junk, and there’s a kind of game criticism that’s primary function is enabling them to deny that. When we don’t ask more from games, it’s because we don’t want them to get better. We’re afraid of the world and we’d rather explore the boundaries of these fake, facile ones. We hate ourselves and we hate our bodies and we’d rather inhabit fake selves, fake bodies.
If we gain anything from playing games nonstop for the last XX years, it’ll be through thinking about them now, finding what’s good in them, and dragging the good out of the life-devouring structures in which it is entombed. – j chastain
There's always a GDC talk that prompts me to reevaluate what my role in this industry is. That was @terrycavanagh and @aliendovecote today.
The fact that anyone said “capitalist death machine” during a GDC talk makes me so happy. @aliendovecote
Yeah, @aliendovecote and @terrycavanagh's talk was basically incredible. Lots to think about. Lots to change about the way I write.
2013/03/25 14:46:59 via web
.@aliendovecote is presenting Lim to the audience of white cisdudes. Fuck. Yes.#GDC13
The idea of using handheld camera footage to show off these very personal games is brilliant. Bravo, @aliendovecote.#GDC
oh no I'm crying in this panel because it made me so happy haha
"I guess we need a takeaway message, right? 'Destroy everything. Just destroy it.'" -@aliendovecote#GDC
Take-away message = "Destroy everything"#igs Cheers from audience.
2013/03/25 14:40:45 via web
P U R G E B A L L
Purgeball is a sport, a religion, a furnace, a space elevator, a way of life and death–we recruit from schools, slums, wombs, the unconceived. Our genetic projections trace through populations and lift up the greatest seeds. One out of a thousand survives and they become part of the dream.
P U R G E B A L L
City street: one day until Qualifying Game 1
She’s playing with the grass in the linear park while the billboard shines voices over the wall, sovereign as a cloud.
I say something and she comes over and we walk the curving path to the exit. She’s talking excitedly about how she hasn’t seen grass up close before and I’m reminded of my own poverty as a youth and I feel sick and I blame her for this feeling. I remember the naive, gangly kid with the thin wrists wondering how people avoided cutting themselves on all that sharp grass, because through the television I’d always perceived it as a kind of green crystal.
When I got my algorithmic sponsorship the first thing I did with my new freedom was go to a park. The grass was soft and cool and my fingertips dug into the roots like I was clutching someone’s hair. But it was greener and brighter on screen. The grass in my hands was weak and grey and stayed crushed where my palms pressed into it.
I look at her by the light of the street, straining to hear her through hot gusts of street chat and auto-bus groan. I look at the billboard with the shimmering odalisque, cool and immanent.
I want to fuck the woman in that advertisement. I make a phone call. I want ten-foot tall lips and a smoky beach of mascara. Not this porous creature clinging to my arm.
Basal Court: Qualifying Game 1
The ball reaches the center of the Basal Court. We lost eight. They lost five. Brief fear. Suppress. Subside. We got one of their best. Lanning. He held the ball too long after it started flashing. Thought he could make the pass to his team across the chasm of the bisected court. Now his body is part of the arena.
I raise my arms to the crowd. Grin as I slide backwards.
Something slams me into the wall. I go spinning off that momentum before they can pin me and duck low to catch them with my gaze and see if I want to run or kill.
I remember her from last year. I broke her arm in three places. I remember something like trying to see if I could pull a human being’s fingers off. Ended up degloving her.
She spits out her mouth guard and her eyes are deep-rimmed and vein-fried and she has blood foaming across the shining bow of her teeth.
She slams her fist so deep into my belly it feels like she’s grinding the shit in my intestines for me. I’m looking around for my team. I hear the ball bounce across the court, too far across the court. Thin watery fluid burns from my nose and mouth as my knees hit the ground and
the scrape-clip of skates close to my eardrums
then black.
SCENE: A MASSIVE TRASH HEAP OF T’S UNDERNEATH A CONVEYOR BELT CARRYING STAINLESS STEEL LGB
WHERES THE FUCKIN T
DID T GET TIRED TODAY AND COULD NOT GET UP
DID T MISS THE ALARM
DID T GET AMBUSHED BY COWBOYS ON THE WAY
I feel acutely the “intelligence” people attach to different pitches and inflections of voice
deeper and sarcastic is “intelligent”, sincere and higher pitched is “brain damaged” or “naive”
it’s pretty problematic how you’re hiding at the center of the earth, weeping, limbless, blind, castrated, disemboweled, lobotomized,
i just feel like the act of you lying broken on the road, dead, face eaten by birds, is a personal attack on me