perception

The Jagged Edge of Perception

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

In real life, the edges of perception are where everything starts to kick in. Across that threshold is where our minds and our emotions run away with themselves, struggling to fill in the missing details and so make sense of the world. This is the realm of the uncanny, where objects materialize out of blind spots and scare the wits out of us, where spirits and monsters threaten to live, where optical illusions and magic tricks make us question what we know of the world. It’s these moments that suggest to us that there’s more to life than we’ve been led to understand. How we respond to that notion depends partially on our own personalities, and partially on the context.

Likewise, even in the closed system of a videogame there is only so much that a designer can draw, and only so many variables that a designer can define. Even in the simplest games it’s tough to account for everything and simple for the player to find a thread to pick away at — say, a seam in the geometry or a weird bit of physics. And then the more possibilities that you suggest, the more that the mind will begin to drift and wonder what else is out there, what else is possible.

Technical limitations also play a role, in that they draw a certain line over which the world cannot possibly exist. When the game presses up against those limitations, as in a late-era console game — your Streets of Rage III, your Silent Hill — you get a certain crackly pressure. Subconsciously you can feel the game straining to make its case, due to the mismatch of the game’s idea of reality and the reality imposed on the game by the hardware.

The NES is a fun object lesson, as from the moment it hit US shores it was outdated, its games bending the rules all over the place just to exist. On its own the NES isn’t all that much stronger than, say, a Colecovision. Every new feature that came along — horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling, cutscenes — meant more custom memory chips. By the early ’90s the average NES cartridge was practically a console in itself; the NES itself acted more as a copy-editor, checking to make sure the input made sense then passing it along to the TV screen. So for most of its life, just about every game for the system has an unnerving glitchiness just under the skin, threatening to break loose and disrupt its carefully argued reality. Sometimes, as in Metroid, those glitches become as much a part of the game as the intended rules, suggesting untold depths that perhaps nobody has ever explored before.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cavanagh and Lavelle’s Snowdrift

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Terry Cavanagh of Don’t Look Back and VVVVVV and Stephen Lavelle of Whale of Noise have collaborated on a morbid little exploration of the link between psychological space and display limitations.

Snowdrift is filled with simple, flat-shaded rendering. You walk with WASD or arrow keys, and aim with the mouse. There’s a haze over everything — either from the snow and fog or, later, from the darkness — and unless you spend your time memorizing scant landmarks you’re never quite sure what’s over the next hill. Given that it’s cold out there, and the world seems more or less endless, that could be a problem. Sure, you can explore as far as you like. But how do you find your way back?

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read

Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.