This is bloody excellent. And I love the little note on the side:
We’re aware this video won’t mean an awful lot if you’ve never heard of The Daily Mail, but on the plus side, you’ve never heard of The Daily Mail.
So true.
Writer, filmmaker, game designer
Monthly Archive for March, 2010
I don’t know why people assume that a post like “my ego eclipses the sun” was written in anger. It genuinely wasn’t. I think posting unpleasant comments on other people’s sites is a waste of time, and the behaviour of a jerk. What other purpose can possibly be served other than to call attention to yourself or insult someone else? None. And you gain nothing from it other than attention.
I don’t operate this website to glorify myself. It’s here so I can share my thoughts and my work with those who are interested. I do crave feedback, like any artist, and I think fair criticism is perfectly fine (if sometimes depressing; let’s face it, no-one wants to hear negative things about their work, even when it’s necessary).
But I will react with sarcasm and swearing when people go out of their way to be unpleasant. I don’t think that’s a matter of ego. I don’t react this way to disagreement, only to unpleasantness, and to people who don’t read before they write. (I am here referring to multiple individuals, not just one person.) Constructive criticism is OK; everything else will either be deleted or used as a springboard for comedy, philosophy or anything else it inspires.
Behave on this website as you would in real life; don’t use the anonymity of the web to be a jerk. Be nice. I am a friendly person, and I will gladly engage in friendly debate. If you have nothing meaningful to say, say nothing instead.
That’s my last post on this matter, and in the future I will link to it by way of explanation.
Now I have work to do.
Comment: I think your global statements about me after reading 3 lines of text says a lot more about you than me. Your ego eclipses the very sun, for one. Though I am sorry I hurt your feelings so much that I evoked such a powerful reaction.
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but sometimes I simply cannot help it. Plus the bit about my ego eclipsing the sun made me laugh. (As did the delicious irony of this coming from a person who doesn’t even remotely know me.)
It is, of course, impossible to judge people you’ve never met. We all make mistakes, and first impressions are sometimes terribly wrong. It’s easy to get off on the wrong foot, even with people you end up liking a great deal.
However – a person that goes to someone else’s blog, reads a post about their fragile emotional state or their personal beliefs, and posts something like “Are you fucking serious?” is quite simply a jerk. That’s all there is to it, buddy. You can try making it about my ego. You can try claiming I overreacted. But the point is that you are someone who has nothing better to do than to post a comment like that on someone else’s blog. What are you trying to achieve by doing so? What exactly is the point of expressing your shock and disbelief at my way of looking at the world? What does anyone have to gain from your comment?
Nothing.
The only reason you make comments like that is because your ego eclipses the sun, because you actually think that your opinion, which is nothing more than a disguised attack (why else the language? why not honestly talk to me about what you think is my overreaction?), is actually important enough that I and other readers have to see it. We need to hear your dismissal of what I think, we need to see how superior you are.
This is what you choose to put your energy into. Going to some fairly unknown writer’s blog and putting up comments about how you think their emotions and thoughts are pathetic (without signing your name, of course). What are you doing there? You’re not a fan of the work, since the work contains the same ideas by which the writer lives. You’re not intellectually questioning the writer’s ideas to get him to challenge himself. No, you’re just there because it gives you an audience. On a bigger site you’d just get shouted down for the troll you are, but here people might actually read your complaints.
You’re not the guy with the clever sarcasm questioning the status quo and the assumptions of others. You’re not the outsider who has seen through the bullshit. You’re not the person saying what no-one else wants to say.
You’re just a jerk.
And you see, I’m not angry. I’m laughing right now. Sometimes I find it sad that there are people like you, who have nothing better to spend their time on, but reading your comment really made me laugh. Hell, I was tired after a long day of walking and bureaucratic nonsense, and your comment really cheered me up.
But there are limits to this kind of thing. I have a lot of projects to work on, and I don’t really have the time for sad individuals like you. But here’s some advice: get a life.
Seriously. What are you doing here? Why are you reading this blog? Why do you waste time writing aggressive and unpleasant comments that you could spend creating art or hanging out with your friends? You think my ego eclipses the sun, but all I do is maintain this website and share the art that I make. You’re the one who goes to other people’s websites to share his bitterness. Think about that.
You could be drawing.
You could be painting.
You could be composing.
You could be writing.
You could be dancing.
You could be acting.
You could be using your limited time on this planet to do something that will benefit you and the world. Leaving unpleasant comments on my blog is not such a thing. Stop coming here. Stop leaving comments I’m only going to delete anyway. It benefits no-one. Do something with your time. Learn how to use language to express doubt without being aggressive. Learn when it is appropriate to be sarcastic and when not. Every moment you spend being a jerk is a moment wasted.
Stop wasting your energy on someone you don’t know, whose work you cannot possibly like, and find something or someone that makes you happy.
Redder, the new Auntie Pixelante game, is an exercise in storytelling through visuals and gameplay.
A nameless astronaut is travelling through space, when he/she/it has to crashland the ship on a red planet. Apparently the ship is out of crystals, and new ones need to be gathered on the planet.
But collecting these gems has unforseen consequences, in a way that I’ve always wanted to do in a game myself. (Damn.)
Redder is a very simple game. You can walk. You can jump. There are red and green blocks that can be turned on and off. And there are things that kill you if you touch them.
That’s it. That’s all Anna Anthropy uses to construct the story of Redder. The result is a remarkably clean and effective game that’s really quite absorbing and memorable. The level design is thought through to a remarkable degree – the whole gameworld is like a complex interlocking puzzle, but still allows free exploration and multiple approaches. The difficulty is also just right; save points are frequent, and failure usually has more to do with not thinking than with jumping challenges.
But I said “story”, and I meant precisely that. There’s not a word of dialogue in the game, but true storytelling doesn’t require cutscenes and NPCs that explain the plot. Cutscenes and NPCs, like everything else, are tools. I don’t subscribe to the idea that gameplay is the only legit form of storytelling in games, but using only gameplay is certainly legit. And here it works really well: every time you enter a new area, you wonder what it is, who built it, and what you’re going to find there. The graphics and the music, both excellent, help build an atmosphere of mystery and menace. And as the game progresses, more questions about what you’re doing and what it means start to pop up.
The game never really answers any of these questions, because it can’t – it doesn’t use words, after all. It just shows you images and lets you play through environments, and lets you draw your own conclusions. Besides, in this game, it’s the journey that really matters.
I found myself quite frustrated by some people’s reactions to Redder. For some, it wasn’t their cup of tea, and that’s OK; but others seemed to go out of their way to be stupid about it. It seems to be getting increasingly hard for people to play a game without comparing it to other games, and they only understand a game in terms of other games – “oh, clearly you based this game on Attack of the Seminude Mars Vixens II: Braless Invaders for the Atari” or “this game is exactly like Red Planet Monkey for the SNES but it doesn’t have the shit-throwing mechanic so it so sucks”. Instead of letting the creator of the game take them on a journey, they immediately look for specific features. If these aren’t there, it’s a bad game. And sometimes they just decide what features the game has from playing it for about ten seconds.
And what is it with always demanding “innovation” from every game? What makes a game good is thought-through specificity, not the newness of its features. Redder would not have been improved by a chicken-strangling minigame, or a punk goth taxidermist protagonist who spends cutscenes decorating his mustache with streaks of vanilla. That would be something new, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate or good. The Lord of the Rings will still be a great novel in a thousand years, whereas most “experimental postmodern novels that challenge the grand narrative of the existence of narratives by cleverly juxtaposing meta passages with the fragmented story of the incestuous relationship between an upper middle-class professor/author and his imaginary bodyguard, Clive” will have been forgotten.
Anyway. Redder uses a simple but flexible vocabulary to create a truly interesting experience, and I liked it a great deal.
(Note: the game is challenging in its geography, so it can get tiring after a while. I played it in three portions, and that worked really well. Since the game remembers your progress, no-one is forcing you to play it in one go. So if you need a break, take one, and don’t complain about the game.)
And now for a change of subject.
I’ve written an article about the situation in Greece for Enemies of Reason. It’s called, with breathtaking originality, The Greek Situation. It doesn’t cover everything, because that would be impossible, but I hope it will make some people think differently about what they’re being told by the media, and will cause them to investigate the matter on their own. Please read it.
You can also get more information about Greece from my short documentary about the 2008 Greek riots, called The Greek Riots: Some Basic Facts.
Enemies of Reason is one of the few blogs I read every day, so I’m very happy about this.
Progress has been… sporadic. I find that being alone makes it much harder to concentrate. I did manage to create an interesting new obstacle for Phenomenon 32, though, so I guess I should be happy about that. Wasted a lot of time watching Inside the Actors Studio on YouTube.
I was amused by how a few people seemed to react quite negatively to the idea that I really, really love my wife. They seem to find this almost offensive, as if I was peddling some kind of absurd notion like homeopathy, and not the most ancient and profound human experience of all. But then, to the fashionably cynical, the very notion that there might be profound human experiences is offensive, because it shatters their flat little world.
I am grateful for my friends, who are not superficial cynics and do understand how I feel. I’ve been miserable, but I would’ve been a lot more miserable without their support. (You know who you are. Especially you.)
Soppy emo shit? Only if you don’t have a life. Get one of those – they’re good.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, Verena won’t be home from Friday until Monday morning. No, nothing serious. Just beyond our control. A surprise, if you will.
Now you may think, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Surely this won’t turn into one of those tiresome personal blogs, where people whine about how none of their friends like them? And no, it won’t. But to those who come here for the entertainment of reading my disjointed thoughts on this world of ours, or those who come here looking for progress updates about their favourite pretentious game designer… well, this is a warning.
In the last three years or so, Verena and I have spent every single day together. Not every moment of every day, granted, there is the occasional exception for shopping and the like, but the majority of every day. And here’s the thing: we haven’t grown bored of each other for a minute. We’ve had fights, we’ve had bad days, but it was never due to being in each other’s presence. We function, as anyone who actually personally knows us, as a single unit. This is symbiosis in all the meanings of the word. (Sometimes to the point where it’s eerie. The amount of times we have the same thought, expressed in the same language, at the same time, is quite amazing.)
So, you may say, three days. Storm in a fucking teacup, mate. Other people don’t see their partners for months. Hell, a friend of ours is in China; her boyfriend doesn’t have nervous breakdown every five minutes, even though he really loves her.
And that’s fine, that’s all fine. But it’s not the truth about who I am, and what this relationship is. I’m not going to tell you that it’s better than other people’s relationships, because that would be preposterous. OK, so it’s better than the relationships a lot of people have, but so is a loaf of bread with a donkey on top. But I’m not going to claim it’s better than other people’s love, because I can never know that, and neither can anyone else, because love is vast and yet specific, common to everyone and yet absolutely singular. And if you think that’s cliché emo shit, you’re a sad moron with no experience of the real world.
I am by nature an empiricist. I am interested in the things I can prove, in the things I can understand. I think Reason is the only thing that’s keeping us from the abyss, and the only thing that can give us insight into the beauty of the universe. But to define Reason as the opposite of emotion, the opposite of art, is ludicrous. Reason is the process of discovering, by thought and experiment, the objective nature of reality. And through personal experience, and the legacy of thousands of years of human history, I can tell you that love is real and matters more than anything else. We humans know this, we have billions of test results on the matter.
This is the most important insight of all: love is real. It’s more than biology, more than chemistry, more than anything else in the world. And all the clever cynics, and all the nihilistic fools, are wrong. Ridiculously, pathetically wrong. Their pronouncements can be taken no more seriously than those of flat-earthers or climate change deniers. They are sad lunatics denying the proven truth.
Our time in this world is limited. I am painfully aware of that; sometimes too much so, perhaps. So to have to spend three days without my wife is not a small deal. Call me childish. Call me overly attached. But I’ll just pity you, because if you say that, you have not experienced what I have experienced, and your view of the universe is still woefully limited.
So we come to the warning. If I seem strange in the next few days – if I update too much, or not at all, or write silly, self-pitying things – then please forgive the confused ravings of a mind split in two and divided from its better half. I will be working as hard as possible, but given that I’ve spend the last day and a half having a nervous breakdown every half-hour, the results may be a little strange.
And if anyone ever tells you that love is an illusion, or a biological trick, or nothing but sex disguised… you can tell them that I told you to tell them to go fuck themselves.
Good night.
I’ve been making some changes to Phenomenon 32 – beyond the bugfixes, that is. And I’m quite happy with the results so far.
Saving and loading has been altered radically. There is now only one game state – you don’t save/load at all. You just continue playing. This means that when you decide to spend resources on something, you can’t undo the decision. The save is always on the main game map, so you can’t get stuck in a level or anything, and the game autosaves at the beginning of each area and takes you back there if you blow yourself up. I know some people will complain about this system, but I feel that it functions much better.
The game will be a bit easier than it was before. I hope the emphasis will be more on exploration, and not on grinding. Revisiting the same areas is often necessary, of course, but not just to pick up the same five pieces of Quatrium-B over and over. It’s tricky to get the balance 100% right – I also don’t want the game to be too easy – and I may make some more changes in later versions. We’ll see.
Another big change is in how the ship controls. Previously there was just too much inertia, which made it very hard not to run into things. This has been changed completely; the ship now stops instantly when you stop pressing the key. It’s also a tiny bit slower, which should also help.
I’m also taking the opportunity to add a couple more areas and creatures to the game world.
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