gamesandfilmagain

I’ve been playing another couple of beautiful games on the PS3 – the unfinished swan and Hohokum - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfinished_Swan is quite stunning dynamically – the way you create and navigate the world you exist within by ‘painting’ the seemingly blank white space with paint, water, light  and vines which you ‘grow’. The idea itself is just so beautifully clever and it also works well enabling great fluidity of engagement with the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohokum has majestic game play which is also incredibly intuitive – a feeling of knowing what to do. This combined with some funky aquatic biomorphic graphic shapes just makes you smile.

Meanwhile this is a link to the film made for the Parallel Practices project by the Crafts Council – my element of the project kicks in at 2.40 http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/parallel-practices

lifeanddeathinagame

Well watching a play in the cinema was interesting. A View from the Bridge with Mark Strong (a wonderful performance) but for me the whole point of theatre is that it operates within physical space with real living people so to have the experience mediated through film was a little unsatisfactory. This was especially exposed when considering the language of film with the framing, close up, wide shot, pan etc all seen through the film director’s eyes. The game play in Proteus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus_%28video_game%29 is just forward backward left right through a highly pixelated (think flat mind craft) but this simplicity is quite beautiful and all this happens whilst working out what the objective is – the trick is to let everything music and visuals flow over you – rethinking what a video game is for me – and again it all appears to be about life-death.

Meanwhile back to painting and a return to rebuilding the house – almost there.