Quarantine has been a strange, mostly stationary journey for me. In the time since it started, I’ve primarily found myself sitting in one of a handful of rooms, passing the hours by mindlessly browsing the internet. The end result of any of these projects, or videos, or browsing is always the same, the passage of time without much significantly changing.
It costs something to be a part of games spaces.
It is 2 AM, and I am in a dark bedroom, in a home that is not mine. The walls are unfamiliar, as is the PlayStation controller in my hand. And for the first time in my life, I am experiencing a videogame.
The crew meets in the cafeteria, tense stares across a large table, one space in the circle conspicuously open.
There’s just an ongoing soft breeze, gentle drizzle, and a moment of quiet. Then, you may leave, either to another island, or back to the passage of time.
The glow on my arm, a gentle green, shows that despite my pax’s erratic movement in the back, I am calm here in the front. Though these feelings may not last the ride.
Written for Haywire Magazine. Weather in The Zone of Exclusion doesn’t behave the same way it does everywhere else. Sometimes a furious energy storm sweeps through the sky, shaking the […]
Games are a great many things, and for both mundane and complex reasons, they are difficult to write about.
There is a gulf between understanding what a videogame is meant to evoke in its players, and intuiting what a player experience is like. The former is something that can be read in nearly any Wikipedia article; the latter is difficult to experience without having first-hand play time and knowledge in games.
An empty, vacant soundscape resolves to the sound of rushing air. The camera starts on a tight angle along the side of an old military plane. It follows the line of an airplane’s body, as though flying in its slipstream. As the camera draws back, the view quickly dips down through the empty space where the tail of the plane would be. We discover that the old shell of this military bomber is sunken into the dirt. Unpaved road slides into view, which the camera follows until a bright red sports car rips across the frame.