Vex Appeal is a weblog and collection of projects by Guy Parsons, a game designer, online community and digital strategy dude in London, England. Read more about the saucy butcher boy here.
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previously on vexappeal:
Nulympics HATDUCK IS HERE A thing that happened Facebook Theme Choon Alice Is Lost Behind the final curtain Benford's Law on Twitter Left briefly unattended... Everything is an alternate reality (apart from rea... Hack Day Now With Added Extra Parsons
Game aesthetics and combination
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Richard Cobbett's site is awesome and full of great articles. I discovered it by stumbling across his 50 Weirdest Moments in Gaming list, containing such gems as:
...the Caesar III manual, which on page 210 described the Medium Statue you can buy for your city as "Administration; Prosperity rating up to 75%.what the hell is this shit". And you thought it was only you that got confused.I was particularly inspired by the World Wide Weird article, which though excellent use of example aptly illustrates that the real world is quite bizzare enough without having to indulge in dragons, wizards, space stations and other clichès.So, quite a nice idea that, utilising those And Finally... style news stories and bizzare 30 minute science documentaries to actually come up with games that are a bit novel and innovative.
But I'm also struck how much stuff there is to tie into games on a more abstract level. I want a Cubist game where perspectives twist and darkly turn, a Gabba game where play is at 300 baddies-per-minute and drum machines take over the world. A Mondrian puzzle game, and a game to play out over the Long Now. I want a game on the theme "at the end of time, one man will be alone with God." I want a game of Where's Wally looking through the scope of a sniper rifle. A game whose overview document is Ruyard Kipling's If.
This is the thing. I'm all in favour of sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper and creating something startlingly, breathtakingly original. But that's the hardest thing to do of all. Creativity, in an easy and relaxed form, can come about through combination, juxtaposition, the alchemy of ideas. Slowing something down, or speeding it up. Make it mobile, or static, or communual, or manic, or meditative, or definitive or interactive. The iterations are endless and beautiful. Or at least some of them must be, so essentially, it's a tree search problem perfect for the hive mind.
All art is four colours. It's how you mix them.
- Richard said...
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Hiya Guy.
Thanks - glad you enjoyed the articles! World Wide Weird was one of those ones that took aeons to get into print - about a year from the original idea - but fun to write. There's quite a few others which do some reality mashing - it's a really easy, but surprisingly rarely done way of adding extra oomph to a piece, or simply offering up new ways to look at things.
(As a practicing skeptic, I'm particularly fond of New Age Tech Support, which tried to work out if pseudoscience could be of any more use on computers, which actually do rely on things like energy flow, than it is in real life. Although the ultimate answer, of course, was no.)
Oh, and here's (kindof) your Where's Wally game: http://www.kongregate.com/games/nerdook/gundown-1-2 ;-)
Ooh, and now I think of it, there was another one too, done as part of the Indie Game Jam, which was along a similar idea - a two player shooter in a world full of pedestrians, where each player only has one bullet. And sonar.
http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj0/index.html - 5:04 PM