“I think it’s possible to feel angry with the curator for not selecting a particularly excellent example of your oeuvre.” [...] The game asks the question of how value is determined: not so much by the creator as by how the artwork is received by a community’s power brokers and the world at large.
Art Game by Pippin Barr aims to recreate the soul-crushing and challenging experience of creating visual work for the New York art scene. I think it also speaks to the creator in all of us who has to interface with those that commission our efforts.
I’m glad creator Mike Ando was so patient with his dream of building the linking book from Myst. As an ardent fan of the game and its sequels, I was beyond excited to see this story pop up on Wired – and the teenager in me flipped his shit while watching the video. I’ll take one!
Having played my fair share of text-based adventure games as a kid, I can tell you the joy that was getting to the occasional point when a crazy-awful illustration would pop onto the screen after multiple pages of story whizzed past. And when we progressed to mostly picture based games, the illustrations were an ever-present fact of storytelling, even if they didn’t really look all that fantastic.
Part art, part game and entirely cool, the badges put together for DefCon this year also have a purpose:
“Those doing the hardware hacks will have to find someone to do the puzzle side,” Clarke says. “It will drive them to find someone from the other side of the house.”
Two years and some months later, I find myself in a very similar position to one I’ve been in before: the Mass Effect 3 collector’s edition is installing its first DLC while a new iPad (the third iteration, if that’s even possible) is on the horizon. Amazing how technology – and time – progresses when you aren’t looking.
As someone who already regularly looks up videos on the iPad for the express purpose of showing them to one of the cats – and who has installed Cat Piano – you had better believe these little games from Friskies will be installed post-haste.
Make the jump and you’ll get to the next stage. But if you fluff the event — jump too early and you’ll slam into the adjacent skyscraper, jump too late and you’ll trip over the edge and plummet to your death — it’s game over, forever.
No pressure or anything, right? Still, One Single Life does sound like a thought-provoking – and unbelievably frustrating – art project, if not a game.
I guarantee you most 15 or 16 year olds would be so much more interested in The Great Gatsby and its endless droning on about the corruption of the East Coast if they could play it as a sidescroller. And now they can!
