Acoli

A casual game in the platform style based on simple reading of texts.

“i made this. you play this. we are enemies.” is an art game, interactive digital poem which uses game levels built on screen shots from influential community based websites/portals. The game interface drives the poetic texts, the colliding and intersecting images, sounds, words, movements, a forever changing, reader built poetic wonderland. And using messy hand drawn elements, strange texts, sounds and multimedia layering, the artwork lets users play in the worlds hovering over and beneath what we browse, to exist outside/over their controlling constraints. Your arrow keys and space bar will guide you, with the occasional mouse click begging for attention. Each day the internet is humming with a million small interventions. From the humoresque mocking of community content sites like Fark, to the net gate keepers Yahoo and Google, partisan political portals like Huffington Post or the open source/file sharing ‘priates’ of Mininova, the web is an easy tool/weapon for meddling/influencing and sharing/forcing/alluring your opinion on whomever clicks. And yet this digiscape is a deceiving and uneasy place, with continual streams of generic expression/content, cute dogs and accident clips, knocking against an incredible range of political/social beliefs hidden beneath the screen. Even short sequences of words, titled links or blinking ads can reveal the strange, wondrous and treacherous.

Game, game, game and again game is a digital poem, retro-game, an anti-design statement and a personal exploration of the artist's changing worldview lens. Much of the western world's cultural surroundings, belief systems, and design-scapes, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy. Within net/new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates, the personal as WYSIWYG buttons. This game/artwork, while forever attached to these belief/design systems, attempts to re-introduce the hand-drawn, the messy and illogical, the human and personal creation into the digital, via a retro-game style interface, Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from levels themed for faith or real estate, for chemistry or capitalism, the user triggers corrected poetry, jittering creatures and death and deathless noises. In addition each level contains short videos from the artist's childhood, representing those brief young interactions which spark out eventual beliefs. Game, game, game and again game is less a game about scoring and skill, and more an awkward and disjointed atmospheric, the self built into a jumping, rolling meander of life.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Deep Surface is the monstrous progeny of a strange romance between a reading machine and a free-diving simulator. Literature at crush depth. Hypertext gets wet. Generically, it is yet another instrument: one of those things you can play (or play with), without playing a game. There are rules here, and procedures, and (as in Real Life) a more or less invisible scoring system; so astute players may be able to invent clever and even elegant strategies. But if you're not feeling astute, you can plunge in and have a dip, immersing yourself in what signs and symptoms may present themselves as you pass by, dreaming perhaps of meaning... till robot voices wake you, and you drown.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s The Nightingale’s Playground is a digital fiction work that was created with Flash in 2010. The main character is Carl Robertson, who tries to figure out what has happened to his lost high-school friend Alex Nightingale. The piece leads the reader/player through a world experienced from Carl’s perspective. It consists of four individual parts, the first section “Consensus”, an interactive point- and click game that can be played online, downloadable “Consensus II” which transports the reader into a dark 3D flat with text snippets , the “Fieldwork book” is a browser based grungy sketchbook with puzzling notes and the last part is a PDF version of the story.

Galatea is a work of interactive fiction set in an art gallery an undetermined amount of time in the future. The player takes on the role of an unnamed art critic examining works of personality referred to in the story as “animates.” Galatea is the name of one such animate however, unlike the other exhibits at the museum (which are forays into rudimentary artificial intelligence,) Galatea was a sculpted women who simply willed herself to life. The player must interact with Galatea through text commands until they get one of several endings.

It's hard to place Galatea in a single genre. With its “animate” art gallery one could place it in Science Fiction. It relates rather easily to Issac Assimov's works about artificial intelligence, sharing a similar atmosphere and similar thoughts on what it means to be human and what it would be like to be a conscious other, Galatea is fairly speculative in this regard. On the other hand one could say the work is more a piece of Magical Realism or Gothic Fiction, since Galatea's creation is miraculous and is the only thing that's really out of place with the world. Also like many Gothic fiction pieces the human psyche is rather thoroughly examined. The name Galatea is actually a reference to Greek mythology, something that this work seems to be rather fond of. In Greek mythology Galatea was a statue that came to life after her creator fell in love with her.

The tech at work beneath the text is fairly complex. It's not simply a dialogue tree with set responses and limited choices. The game tracks tension, sympathy, mood, and general conversation flow to give players a level of interactivity in conversation that is rarely seen in any examples of modern games. On top of this there are over 400 responses to words and 25+ unique endings. Its method of interaction is very similar to old text adventure games like Zork and its ilk, the player enters commands followed by key terms and the results are narrated.

Overall the work is objectively well written. Its lore of “animates” lends itself rather interestingly to the player. One may look at the work as an example of what interaction with an “animate” from the story's world might be like. Galatea the character being very similar to the “animates’” description from the story. The many varied endings and possible responses lends itself to a very individualized experience. No two readings would be exactly alike and each repeated reading builds upon the world’s lore and the characters of Galatea, the narrator, and Galatea's creator become more fleshed out and grounded. It uses multiple references to Greek mythology which helps give the work an atmosphere of mystery and a kind of oldness to its sci-fi themes.