I’ll have more news and updates soon. If you’re bored, why don’t you follow Bob the Spider on twitter? Apparently he’s posting all sorts of wise things. If you don’t know who Bob the Spider is, you need to play some Lands of Dream games. Like this one, or this one.

Alphaland took second place in the Interactive Art or Experimental category, and that too makes me very happy. This is another game that “experts” said would not appeal to anyone, and yet here we are. It doesn’t matter whether it won first place or not, it matters that people liked it, that that journey meant something to them.

Maybe we shouldn’t listen to experts so much.

I couldn’t have made Alphaland without Terry Cavanagh’s support, and I couldn’t have made it through 2011 without all of you. Here’s hoping 2012 will be twice and productive and half as frustrating.

It’s gentle, beautiful and elegant as it takes your hand and soothes you through its journey of lyrical and playful words.
- Indie Games Magazine

Arcadia’s a narrative delight.
- IndieGames.com

It’s a rather delightful thing, this game – perfect for the season despite being set in the summer months, full of whimsy and beauty and light and, interestingly, entirely text-based.
- DIYGamer

I have to admit I was impressed with its rich setting, its subtly subversive ideas, its whimsical creatures and the sheer quality and quantity of its words.
- Gnome’s Lair

Yep, I’m very pleased. It’s a game that is surprisingly close to my heart, and making it was perhaps the purest joy I’ve gotten from game design in a while. Maybe ever. Twine is a wonderful tool, clean and simple and to the point; I hope it gets developed further, especially in making it easier to customize how games look. It really is absolutely lovely.

Arcadia: A Pastoral Tale is my newest game. It was created with Twine, which means that it’s a very simple text-based game.

When playing, please keep in mind that this game is not a race. It is a stroll, an afternoon walk. There’s no challenge, no puzzles, no wrong choices. There’s just the path that you take and the things that you see.

Sinjil Aegidius is the greatest and most renowned of the fourteen desert shamans. He has walked the holy path for many years, from the lush island of Iwana where he was born to the shifting sands where his visions led him. Few know the true details of his life story, as he is wont to tell the story differently each time, adding increasingly silly details while keeping a straight face. Many come to him to learn, but few are ever accepted as his pupils. “Too many of them are interested in magic,” he has been known to say, “and too few in wisdom.”

There is no question that Sinjil possesses great magical powers. The vision that set him upon his path was of the Blue Crow, the most mysterious of spirit guides, and during his initiation he danced with the spirits of the desert wind in the secret places where the sands remember the sea. He knows how to walk between dreamworlds, how to ask a favour of a cat, how to find the lost stories of one’s childhood; he knows how to sing to the stars and be heard, and how to bargain with the shadow of a stone, and how to prepare for one’s death – but he does not know how to stop foolishness and hate.

He learned what he calls his greatest lesson in a faraway land torn by centuries of war and conquest. He had travelled there to learn the ways of the ancient cults of that land, to see the ancient relics and monuments with his own eyes. Yet his revelation did not come in a holy place or a temple, but in a small village that had never been of any great importance to anyone. It was there that he saw the madness of murder perpetrated upon the weak and helpless by those enamoured with their own destiny and superiority. It was there that he saw the destruction wrought in the name of half-remembered histories and greed, lives and lands stolen without pity or remorse.

He saw death in the streets, but none of his magical powers could stop it. No matter how much he danced or chanted, death would come to the villagers. Neither his magic gourd nor his spirit stick could oppose the forces bearing down upon them; and even if they could, he would not know where to begin. It was on that day that he understood that magic was nothing without wisdom. He did not dance or chant in that village; but he grieved.

A heaviness has been in his soul since that day. He does not dance as quickly anymore, nor does he chant as often, but he has not stopped laughing. He listens to the wind-spirits, and to the stories of pain that they carry. He walks in the dreamworlds. He teaches. He learns. He prepares.

—

This entry in the Oneiropolis Compendium was made possible by D. T. Brummer, from Melbourne, a place in Australia which is both factual and interesting.

You too can support the Compendium by keeping its creators from starving.

Updates later today. For now, a song about music.

I’ve mentioned before that my computer is having a bit of a problem with 3D graphics. They run fine most of the time, but then there are bizarre crashes that ultimately stop the whole program from functioning, and even alt-tabbing out takes skill and preparation. I’m guessing it’s a hardware problem, since I’ve done just about anything you can possibly do to the drivers, but what it affects is how textures are displayed. Basically everything gets swapped around in increasingly crazy ways, skin turning to stars, faces appearing on walls, lights turning to text. Sometimes the results are disturbing, sometimes oddly beautiful. Here’s Mass Effect 2 – a game I’m greatly enjoying, by the way – with the view of space replaced by a green eye and a mysterious red circle. I guess Mordin Solus must have been putting something in the water again.

However, I do have to make some comments about all this. Yes, SOPA/PIPA is a disaster, a significant free speech issue, and could affect the technological development of humanity. I’m all for protesting it. However – what’s more important, a website being taken down or people being tortured to death by your own government? What about the President of the United States claiming the authority to have any individual worldwide killed without any form of due process? What about indefinite detention without trial? Yes, it’s nasty that they can take down your site. But they have already given themselves the authority to break down your door, kidnap you from your home, fly you to another country, put you in a dark prison and torture you until you are dead, with no oversight, no chance of legal representation, and without any evidence being required. This has already happened to a significant number of people, almost all of whom have no connection to the mostly-invented bogeyman that is al-Qaeda. There are prisons (plural – it’s a lot more than just Guantanamo) right now where these things are happening, where innocent people are locked up, physically and psychologically damaged by torturers working – directly or indirectly – for our governments.

Furthermore: where do you think this legislation came from? Do you think it’s just a misunderstanding, something that happened because the politicians in charge don’t understand the internet? Of course not. This is yet another step in the long process of capital (you know, the 1%) asserting political power over our lives. It has to be fought, yes, but that fight is utterly meaningless if we don’t also fight the larger system behind these specific instances of internet censorship, which is also the same system behind the open wars in the Middle East, the secret wars in South America, the corporate crimes in Africa, the economic genocide in Europe, and many other global problems.

SOPA/PIPA may be defeated, but if that happens it will mostly be because large internet-based corporations opposed it. Do you really think any political party cares in the slightest about what you think? Obama has proven pretty conclusively that apart from PR, the Democrats and the Republicans are puppets for the same interests. And the same is true of the major parties in every other country, too – just look at the so-called Social Democrats in Greece. It’s unavoidable. We live in a system based on profit, and those who make the most profit have the most power, which they can use to increase their profits, giving them more power, and so on, until everything is in the hands of a tiny amount of people.

Do you think this is just random socialist ranting? Well, think again. All of this – wars, assassinations, censorship – will continue to happen. They will continue to get worse, in fact, as the system collapses and the elites find themselves forced to go to bigger and bigger extremes to hold on to their positions. So please fight SOPA/PIPA, but don’t stop there, because they’ll come back – and because things much worse than either are already here.

Our cooking show now has an IndieGoGo campaign. We’d be very grateful if you could spread the word, or even contribute. The first episode we produced went over really well, but we need a tiny bit of funding to be able to afford a website and repair some things in our kitchen; if that works out, you can look forward to regular episodes of the Starving Artists Kitchen Show. Yes indeed! So let the world know about this campaign.