{"id":28061,"date":"2013-11-23T16:28:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T16:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-week-in-hypertext\/"},"modified":"2013-11-23T16:28:53","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T16:28:53","slug":"the-week-in-hypertext","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-week-in-hypertext\/","title":{"rendered":"The Week In Hypertext"},"content":{"rendered":"

samcrisp<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Today I played these three things:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Mashkin Sees It Through<\/a> by thecatamites<\/strong><\/p>\n

thecatamites has been making a game every day of the month<\/a> this month. In this, his first Twine game, literary capital takes center stage.\u00a0I don\u2019t have much to say about this except that it\u2019s a\u00a0Twine game with good, Pynchonesque writing. His games almost always feature a narrator or two, and here the distinction between reader, player, and narrator blurs (at first Gaussian, then a directional lens blur, then a Photoshop swirl filter). Remember the Twine revolution? Oh yeah, looks like that\u2019s showing no signs of stopping.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0The Entertainment<\/a> by Cardboard Computer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Regrettably, I was unable to play this in its native Oculus Rift format, but perhaps it\u2019s a good thing I didn\u2019t because I might have died on the spot. Remember when I kept talking about how you choose the dog\u2019s name at the start of Kentucky Route Zero Act 1<\/em> in lieu of explaining why the game is good? Here\u2019s something which resembles a real reason: Cardboard Computer displays rich literary and theatrical influences and their motifs of intertextuality are sublime. And they Know How To Do Graphics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been lucky enough to use an Oculus Rift twice and I love the way you can see the pixels. The hypermediacy of virtual reality is far more fascinating to me than the prospect of being subsumed in immersion. If you\u2019re using new technology to make new games and you\u2019re doing things the right way, you look at the affordances of the technology and find a creative way to design a game to those affordances, rather than plastering existing designs onto it and softening the edges. (And you\u2019re probably making a first-party Nintendo game.) I think the Oculus Rift is going to do wonders for the verb of looking in first-person games, in ways 7DFPS game jammers couldn\u2019t dream of.<\/p>\n

The Entertainment<\/em>\u00a0knows\u00a0looking.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not the half of it.<\/p>\n

The Kentucky Route Zero<\/em> games have not only spun the adventure game structure (point-and-click movement between stages and dialogue trees) into something cool (relinquishing preciousness and glibness),\u00a0they\u2019ve now done the same for the adventure game\u2019s self-awareness. And now\u00a0The Entertainment<\/em> marries the hypermediacy of the Oculus Rift and its early-VR aesthetic, with the theatrical and hypertextual hypermediacy of the games in the Lula Chamberlain mythos (if you don\u2019t know what this is, play Limits and Demonstrations<\/a><\/em> again).<\/p>\n

This game dropped the same day John Carmack announced his leave from id Software<\/a> to work full time on the Oculus Rift. John Carmack seemed to be the only public figure who knew what was up with computer graphics. Don\u2019t fall into the trap of associating him as an icon of the game industry\u2019s technological drive for photorealism.\u00a0He was one of the good guys. Now he\u2019s at Oculus. And The Entertainment<\/em> is as much the future of video games as the Oculus Rift is. And the future is fucking cool<\/em>.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Writing<\/a> by Tully Hansen<\/strong><\/p>\n

A fierce literalisation of neurotic,\u00a0tangential, stream-of-consciousness and the hesitant self-editing process into mutable prose. Long enough that the novelty wears off, which turns out to be a good thing.\u00a0This is a very Tully thing to write. I have failed to take it as a cautionary tale of editing esoteric flourishes and in-jokes out of my writing. But at least I no longer consider drawing attention to them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

samcrisp: Today I played these three things: 1.\u00a0Mashkin Sees It Through by thecatamites thecatamites has been making a game every day of the month this month. In this, his first Twine game, literary capital takes center stage.\u00a0I don\u2019t have much to say about this except that it\u2019s a\u00a0Twine game with good, Pynchonesque writing. His games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1538],"class_list":["post-28061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-humane-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-7iB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}