Jack King-Spooner Land: October 2014

Friday 31 October 2014

Sluggish Morss doesn't sell 60K copies in a month

Sluggish Morss: ɯnʇıuıɟuı p∀ has shifted 103 copies in ten months, developer Jack King-Spooner has announced.

Not bad for a few minute game with no combat made by a small man - even it is a team led by Will You Ever Return: In da Hood director Jack King-Spooner.

seriously

A website recently criticised a game for overt sexual references. I think this is fair and a particular concern due to the age rating of the game being 16+. Ratings institutes have a difficult task with games and I believe they do a good job (perhaps stricter enforcement of the age ratings could be administered and perhaps a 21+ age rating could be added). Many took umbrage with the criticism over the overt sexual references, particularly because there was a certain lenience when considering violence. I think this is indicative of how representations of violence, although fantasised and often wholly unrepeatable, are dismissed. "Shoot him in the face", "headshot", "kill spree". However ubiquitous, are these not horrible things to have enter your thoughts? Not really, not compared with the other stuff that goes through your head. Maybe that they have become so flippant is an issue.

Na Emigracji review

bob gets lost

I get a lot of my ideas in a semi-somnambulant state. The past few nights have been fruitful. Last night the ideas started with "slow play"; to try to play music slowly, then to slow down recordings, then to make a slow scene. The scene above is a space in which to walk, the view is from a distance and so the player moves slowly. Such passive gameplay allows focus to lie elsewhere.

The night before last I was stuck with how to show disability.

Tuesday 21 October 2014

Labels and questions

What is art?
What is a game?
What is entertainment?
What is porn?
Is all entertainment porn?
Are games entertainment?
Is art entertainment?
Are games art?
Can porn be art?
Is porn shit?
What is shit?
Are games shit?
Is entertainment shit?
Are shit games art?
Is shit art entertainment?
Is porn shit entertainment?
Are art games shit entertainment?
Are porn games shit art?
If you use the word "artsy" are you a malignant tumor?
Can entertainment be malignant art?

lest

What a tragic adventure this is. One that none of us signed up for.

Friday 17 October 2014

are games good art? No

well games are art, what else can they be

4:31 PM
I think so too

4:32 PM
but I think they are predominantly entertainment

4:32 PM
yeah. does that bother you?

4:32 PM

The trick to bad poetry

If you are going to make mediocre poetry at least make it factual.

capitalist

The following are tweets concerning The Westminster Media Forum event:
"The 1st gen of students from games courses emerge next year with £60K debts we have no idea if they're appropriate for industry"

"More than 7000 people in the UK studying games design, development and production. But are we producing the right skills? "

"If you don't think big, you're never going to get big. Listen. Learn. "

"Games devs are not special & unique snowflakes. They're businesses. The sooner they realise this. The sooner they find investors"

"Shocked that the whole of Steam (estimate: $1.5-$2bn in revenue) is about the same size as Puzzles & Dragons ($1.7bn in 2013)"

Can you see how capitalism poisons everything? The pursuit of knowledge is now worthless if it doesn't provide skill-sets that can be applied to make money. Might not seem like a problem at first but look at everything you cherish; music, art, nature, the well-being of those around you, the area in which you live. I've got news for you, the skills that maintain these things are not financially worth pursuing. Lawyers working against discrimination get paid considerably less than corporate defense attorneys. The people who give company, hand massages and an ear to the 5 million lonely, older people in the UK who say their main companion is their TV set do so voluntarily. Musicians, writers, artists and graphic designers, those who colour our grey existence, work for "experience" and "exposure". Imagine if this was applied to any other profession, a cleaner working to enhance their portfolio.

We need a steady state capitalism that doesn't allow continuous growth. Our resources are limited.

Money & Happiness

Avoid monetary gain temptation. So what if the mobile game made more than Steam? The only relation money has to happiness is that the result of having no money is negative. It is not a spectrum. The outcome of being filthy-fucking-rich isn't (necessarily) positive, more is the chance that a wealthy person is morally bankrupt or of the mind that it was something other than luck that allowed them to be well off, pride. A person who wins the lotto and a person who loses their legs will return to their prior state of happiness within a year. (If you understand that freewill is an illusion, pride and pity dissipate). The Beatles were only happy that they became rich young because they realised early in life that money doesn't make you happy.

It isn't binary

It isn't binary: business or delicate flower.Take umbrage with the idea that developers ought to be businesses. If that were the case then there would be no Lake of Roaches. All dangerous ideas would be erased unless they had marketing value (see: the dishonest use of racism in Bioshock Infinite, the implied then removed I Spit On Your Grave aspect of Tomb Raider). Never say it enough: pandering to an audience removes all social function. The incredible work that is disseminated for free. Do you want endless derivation or plurality?

Review of previous pieces:

Language

Language: a matter of taste, Shakespeare made verb forms of nouns, noun forms of adjectives etc more than any other writer (polluted, pollute, pollution). The problem with the popular patterns mentioned is that there are better ways to use the language (see use of "super" as adverb). Examples of language being flexible that I have enjoyed: the prefix-less "evitable", the coinage "wismical", the abbreviation "hope'ly".

Crisis

Heidegger: an overall retreat from an authentic way of life/ being. 20th century skating and skitting on the top, relatively unchanging culture. What might be wrong: a technologised way of living and a reduction of what is an objective way of living, molded by the earth.

Compound crisis: a shallowness. If we were grown ups we would see the problems we ought to see coming. People would rather be watching... can't blame people. Historic rape cases, tax fraud appeal more than Ebola killing over half of those infected because we can feel morally outraged with the former. Eternally pubescent, domesticated by media.

Reactions

The reaction to ironic culture might be the metaphorical "turning the TV off". Not taking part. By simply being we add to culture. The epiphany of looking at the people on the street and seeing that everyone is wearing exactly what the should be wearing. How the world is.

Anti-intellectual is like being anti-mountain gorilla.

the dividing thing between what is ok and what is not ok isn't a definable thing. There can't be rules. It's the spirit in which a thing is made. (see the creative joy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre - tree of watches, skull with horn pushed through eye socket, arbitrary generator - compared with set-piece based horror).

Dark Souls and libidinal urges

Dark souls is not an anti-libidinal game, it is a sex denial game. The ladies with spider-like bottom halves are not as previously stated but in fact very sexy. That they have no human sexual organs brings about the idea of denial.

Final Thought

Infantilisation feeds culture/ media, culture/ media feeds infantilisation. It is a circle dance. The music is provided by capitalism.