The Pretentious Gamer

Just some quick notes on this great modern point-and-click adventure game. The narrative is characterized by simple, nonverbal communication – it is a quiet, contemplative game that lacks much in the way of exposition. The most of that happens to take place in the main character’s head, through his memories and feelings expressing universal, archetypal stories.

Gameplay feels a bit limiting at times, with limited control of character movement and action – but puzzles work out to be quite rewarding.

The real star of the show is the art; contrast between sharp, rich textures and pencil sketches, minimal animation that is full of personality, and true originality in bringing this strange world to life. See for yourself…

Kudos to the developers.

…Though perhaps not for usability.

via Kotaku.

This mod, by the G3 community, is old news, but I finally gave Planescape a whirl in it.

This is in 1920×1200.

Images speak louder than words here, I’d say.

The lack of a text and menu UI mod to match a resolution this high was somewhat unfortunate but didn’t hinder the experience so much. Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, next…

The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.

A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.

The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.

However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.

Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.

This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.

This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?

I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.