I’m trying to make as concerted an effort as I can to playing games that are coming out or have come out in 2023, at least for the rest of 2023, so as to ideally engender an understanding less of the history of problems and proposed solutions to problems which have come and gone in the medium, which was a component part of my desire to go back and play historically, and instead try to see what problems are cropping up and which are being solved in modern games. Sometimes these problems are very ‘discourse-y’ things which have think-pieces written about them quarterly - skinner box design, representational and misrepresentational games casts, monetisation villainy - and sometimes the issues are personally developed, cropped, and curated by individual writers and designers. Think something like Bennett Foddy’s monologue in Getting Over It on the idea of art and asset design coinciding with how they interact with both aesthetic and mechanical purposes, or often cross purposes:
“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”
Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:
“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”
When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.
To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.
The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.
The music is great too!
“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”
Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:
“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”
When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.
To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.
The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.
The music is great too!