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Individuals band to support a leader, inevitably dissolve their ties as he loses support, hurt innocents in the political crossfire, and the cycle begins anew? Would be neat if it weren’t so depressing.
Bits and pieces of thoughts after playing this game:
The music goes in different rhythms. Chaotic. Disbands unity. There are several things going on here, but the constant ticking of a clock seems immanent. The music is looped, but not synchronized to the disbanding/gaining of new political leaders/systems, rather abruptly stops “mid-game”.
Using the phrase mid-game comes with assumptions of gaming, level structure and level existence and what constitutes a game.
It is a history of democracy, yet who is the protagonist? History hints at an epic center, a diachronic perception and understanding and viewing of things. It contends broad strokes, of democracy in Ireland AS protagonist, or what we follow, what we draw conclusions from, what we pay attention to, what lies in focus, and what the mechanics of play should adhere to/refute/tell of/reside in.
There is a discrepancy here between the epicness, and the control of a single, white dot, similar to the discrepancy between the all-encompassing democracy and feelings of non-agency, of non-participation, or indeed, of participation as asymmetrical interest, need, and fate .
Whose perspective has this game, and what perspective does the game have? Whose emotions infuse the choice of colors, music, and so on? Is it the tale of everyman frustration in representative democracy? In Ireland with it’s backstabbing specifically? Does this explain why there is no seeming agency in trying to form a coalition of oneself? Surely there is the possibility of self-efficacy in Ireland’s democratic process? Well, there is an ironic tinge to the game and its’ surroundings, such as the tag of the post where it can be downloaded where “beautiful” doesn’t ring true in the context of the game and indeed other games of increpare with anti-authoritarian themes.
The avatar is smaller than all other objects on screen, and it does not change color, remaining white against the black backdrop, in stark contrast, lone rider contrasting the changing colors of the people (?) and the scenery. Is there hope for this person? Must there be hope, must we feel pity? It reminds me of a game called shame:
http://aaronoldenburg.net/e_shorts.html
One can slip between the cracks of the forming system easily when it is done formatting, but also then is one (the avatar) a disturbance that only clutters, is not part of the designated signified politician/system, and only soon enough does the system disband and one must avoid others again or be punished by doing the level all over. Or does one get punished? What is punishment exactly, in video games in general, and how do I know if someone means to punish me?
The avatar is individual, yet forms nothing, has the same goal throughout, and has only agency in avoidance, in deterministic by-passer role in shaping history. It only shapes history in completing a challenge of avoidance, similar to the challenge we complete on screen, thus maybe avoiding something, or, perhaps, asking ourselves “what comes next?”. Is democracy finished, is it ongoing, or does it end with the end game state, the last of the set of challenges complete? Maybe not specifically this set of challenges, but the number of times one has avoided something, thus changing the end game state from victory to loss; one can only win if one does not play (at avoiding).
If there is a game element, what does it tell a tale of? Is it there, the challenge, simply because it is a game and should invest the player with something, a sense of completion, agency, challenge, (or lack thereof) or see to it that there is some sort of motivation to continue? Or is it the lonesome individual shying from contact with others attacking from all sides, coming out from nothingness, at no avail, and taking up the center stage of democracy? If one leaves the screen entirely on the right and bottom sides, there is nothing that can hit you and the democratic process becomes a movie which you can stand back from the computer and just watch (the face of the leaders becomes easier to recognize then too; the hindsight/critical distance?). One needs not even go back inside, there is no start position, only continual history. Yet why does the system disband on screen, without any sort of input, seemingly for no reason other than time itself? Election time over? Do they ever amount to anything, perform anything, change anything, other than themselves when outside the screen and nobody watches? Why is there never assailants (strictly they don’t seem to be attacking the avatar though) coming from two ways at the same time, but rather specifically either going inside, or rushing out? Is it the same parts of system that come back in another shape? Is there always the same amount of dots?
What is the call in the beginning of each stage? Call for democratic action? Why is this not constant? Are the “levels” election time? Calling is symbolic, yet it does give a sense of space, of secretaries, or of home, of ownership, also. People who have no registered dress, can they even vote? Obviously, they cannot participate in the political wars unshaven and (seemingly) drunken!
The necessity of spatio-temporal metaphor (not restricted to euclidean space) in a chosen art form, in video games for example, influences how something can be created and interpreted. Input, output, (visual) stimuli, necessary to convey and perceive. Procedural rhetoric is not clean of itself, cleansed from narrative, where rules tell of one and only one authorial understanding. Can one say something without also saying something else? Claim understanding, or straight communication? What is authorial or procedural, formal metaphor, and what is transportation (something not to be taken apart, or taken notice of), necessity (prerequisite for communication), form (cluttering the clean of message), restriction of communication, a common ground, the necessity of wording/phrasing, of ludology, of narrative. I’m guessing there is something derridian going on here, some sort of incompleteness theorem, ambiguity as not only preference but necessity for art, prerequisite for saying something, getting across, stating, amounting to be understood. One cannot choose to not have color in a visual game as an author, but one can choose to not invest it with meaning. Problem is, it invests itself with meaning. One must somehow tell the player when they are doing something that changes the game world, yet how does one make an effort out of telling them something of the game state or the mechanics without investing that statement with potential meaning that relates to ALL the other aspects of the game?
“The process that makes signs manifest as appearance and meaning is différance: the process of difference (synchronic) and deferment (diachronic). The
meaning of a word is another word, and strings of signs only gain
significance retroactively. The meaning of a sentence is a moving target. You will never be able to know exactly when the end of this sentence is until after you’ve heard it elephant. This means that coherence, in order to
be coherence, must contain some incoherence “ Tim Morton
Think about it while playing this:
http://aaronoldenburg.net/e_repent.html
How can one make a visual arm of god without also infusing it with questions of how big it is, what color it has (and relates to), how long it is, why the rest of the body is not there, etc.
Also, when there are so many obstacles, and ones movement is slower than them, panic and micro-managing seems imminent, which also contrasts with the epic sense of the title and its supposed broader strokes. I’ll leave this alone now.
I’m not familiar with Irish history, who is the person pictured?
This one’s pretty hard! The way I wound up settling on to play this was I would move to a particular point on the screen and then move back and forth on one axis only, like left-right only or up-down only.
Couple odd things I noticed:
– If you background this game, it appears to pause but the music continues playing.
– Nothing is stopping you from going off the screen. This creates an unbeatable strategy. At the beginning of the first “level”, dash off the bottom of the screen. Continue holding down until the second “level” begins. Then just let go and wait there. You are now far outside the range where any dot will ever hit you.
SSFSX, they’re Irish presidents. How can you not know your Irish presidents?
mcc, I was going to say that you can’t actually go more than one pixel outside the screen area, so you’re never totally invincible, but then I remembered that it does collision by sampling the screen buffer, so you are invincible once you get out to that one-pixel margin. I’ll fix it and go ahead and make the edges lethal.
I was still able to move off the right side of the screen and stay there forever.
I like the ending
You’re right. Typo in the code. Thanks for letting me know. Fixed now. I’m happy that you like the ending.
This game is too hard and/or I suck at games
Bits and pieces of thoughts after reading Ava’s post:
The sentences go on for a long time, often extending into compound-complex sentences, and utilize many commas or even parentheses to help emphasize points.
Using the word sentence comes with assumptions of grammar, composition, and style, and what constitutes a review.
Is “Ava Avane Dawn” a handle? Is it a name? Was it made to use alliteration intentionally? Does the
“dawn” part of the name signify some sort of new beginning?
The paragraphs are sometimes extremely short, but other times very long. Frequently, there are page breaks used to separate chunks of text that may not even be considered true paragraphs at all.
Why are there so many questions? Why is it so long? How am I supposed to be able to finish reading it, when it keeps sending me away to play other games?
“Good composition is like a suspension bridge – each line adds strength and takes none away.” Robert Henri
I just read something on “anti-cryptography” which reminded me to come back here.
“/…/ It’s the last item in this list that leads to the entropy paradox. In order to make a message easy to decode, it is necessary to make the structure of the message obvious to the recipient. Doing so requires the inclusion of redundant information that guides the recipient in parsing and decoding the message. The problem is that this undermines the primary goal of encoding the message as efficiently as possible (which requires the elimination of redundant information from the data stream).”
http://oreilly.com/news/seti_0201.html
Furthermore, I agree with Robert Henri and what joshua seems to me be implying; I simply felt stream-of-consciousnessy and didn’t want to go out of my way to organize and pressure myself. Hm, if I’d do that on a regular basis (and people would have a hard time understanding me/getting something positive out of reading my texts while seemingly “trip” on them), maybe it would be unethical, given that I take up folks time, to continue to publish my texts? Ah, damn these questions!
Stephen: Hey, don’t kill bugs! Bugs are people too!!
what a wonderful world…♫
Yeow.
Are you the Vinnie I’m thinking of?
the way i see the history of democracy in Ireland is maybe more chaotic than in any european country, because their only neighbours are the british who didn’t want to grant them independance and no other country wanted to defend this natural right, because they where far away anywhere else than UK, and noone for sure wanted to have british as ennemies, so the Irish had to accept some odd independancy conditions, where they gave one of the richest part of their country to the UK, need to still swear allegiance to the Queen of the UK and so on, and Irish independantists were seen as terrorists by medias worldwide because UK could make them look so, in the end they had to accept that. That’s what i think i learned from the movie “the wind that shakes the barley”. am i right ?
@VIVLO
The IRA were terrorists. They bombed english territory killing military personnel and citizens alike.
I like my Irish politicians like I like my games… small and easy to dodge x_x
All those years playing Cave games pay off in a big way.