English feature

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES is series of four interviews with four game developers from four different continents who looked for narrative inspiration and found it in unusual places: In the folklore of their own people, region or family, and in other storytelling-corners of the world which are too often neglected by the mainstream.

Jim Rossignol used to be a games journalist before he ventured into games development with Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Now, his studio Big Robot is working on The Signal From Tölva, a single-player FPS set on an alien planet. I wrote about this promising project for Der Standard; here’s my full interview with Jim.

You have made the switch from writing about video games to creating them. How did that happen?

Gradually. In 2010 I worked on a project commissioned by Channel 4, and ended up forming a small games studio to get the game - an educational puzzler called Fallen City (sadly now defunct) - designed, produced and published. With the money left over from that, plus a Kickstarter in 2012, we raised the money for Sir, You Are Being Hunted. I didn’t work full time on that, because we needed to pay the designer, programmer and artists, and so I remained a writer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun through most of its development. Fortunately it did well enough that I was able to work full time for past two years on our new game, The Signal From Tölva. It has only being during that period that I’ve really considered myself to be a game creator, although the switch still remains sort of opaque to me, perhaps because of how slowly it has happened..

Games can be more than mere entertainment. In our column Alt+Home, intermedia artist Kent Sheely explores the ways independent developers are challenging the status quo, creating brand new experiences, and making a difference in the world.

October is an important time for the brave souls who spend the 30 days leading up to Halloween indulging in as much spine-tingling, heart-pounding horror as they can survive. Every year I like to set aside some time to play some of the spooky indie games I haven’t yet had the chance to savor, but with so many to choose from across so many various outlets, it can be a daunting task just figuring out where to look! If you’ve got a full schedule and just don’t have time to choose, not to worry; I’ve picked out a selection of my favorites, and I’ll tell you why I think they’re worth adding a few gray hairs to your head.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the final part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - the previous parts can be found here

“It’s hard to create a narrative of success when you’re the dark matter against which the stars shine, but I find that it’s important for artists to be able to articulate what is valuable about art beyond prices and the market.” -William Powhida

Continuing last week’s discussion of the The Beginner’s Guide as an attempt to trigger an apocalypse to wipe clean the slate of video games, it is useful to note that in Japanese creation circles, there is a genre of animation and comics called sekaikei (literally: “world type”). This genre places a single character, almost always male and young, as the center agent in the future apocalypse. This character’s psyche alone gets to remake the world, but only as it burns to ashes. The interior becomes the all-consuming exterior. While perhaps the capstone of this genre, Neon Genesis Evangelion is unique that that it leverages the dark logic of fandom to subvert its perfect apocalypse and decry the passivity and literalism that threatened to stifle the future of anime fandom.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the third part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one and two can be found here

“One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.“ -Catherine Opie

In last week’s installment of “Sin, Apocalypse, Cash” I discussed ways that replaying The Beginner’s Guide provides expanded choices for audiences to interact with the game, and how those supposed choices are still mired in a simplistic and antisocial framework for art. Yet, let’s approach The Beginner’s Guide again from another angle to see if there is perhaps another, less obvious, social interface that is happening.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the second part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one can be found here

“Why, impervious to both affirmation and negation, why in the world this insistent, subsistent, irrepressible, pure repetition be it of nothing, why a picture? Why this picture?” -Jacques Roubaud “Some Thing Black”

In the first portion of this essay I examined why players of The Beginner’s Guide often perceive the game to be a trap, and the ways in which the game’s internal logic leads it to formulate art as martyrdom. But what if I’m approaching the game from the wrong angle? What if I overly focused on the naive macho egotistical vision of art and the purifying flames of antisocial creative angst? There certainly seems to be a radically alternative way to approach the game in a second play-through.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the first part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide.

“What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again.” -Gabriel Orozco

When I mention that I’m working on an article about The Beginner’s Guide, first there is a pregnant pause, mouth slightly open, then a lingering awkward silence. Then the seemingly inevitable question follows, “Did you play The Stanley Parable?” eyes narrowing, moving side to side, as though scanning the horizon for the shadows of danger.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the final part of a his long-form essay on workification.

Part 4: The Garden Of Digital Delights

In past installments of Workified Games I’ve looked at ways that video games, their fans, and their creators have been inundated by workaholic tendencies. In part three, I proposed that leisure could be a new ideal that could help inspire us escape the mire of workification. But lest this sound like an outsider being preachy and this series get pegged as some sort of partisan argument, I want to acknowledge that much of what I’ve been saying has been and remains part of video game fan folk wisdom across genres and communities. After all, what Animal Crossing player hasn’t cursed out Tom Nook at some point for being a loan shark/raccoon? What WoW player hasn’t grumbled about doing endless dailies to earn reputation? What Final Fantasy 8 player didn’t grumble about the bullshit way dungeon speed equates to gold earned? What young Minecraft player hasn’t been frustrated by having to burn a huge amount of time searching ever deeper for a rare material to build their whimsical castle? What Destiny player hasn’t griped about the other people on repetitious runs being like abusive coworkers?

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is part three of four of a long-form essay on workification.

Part 3: A Celebrating Spirit

The last installment of Workified Games explored how the tendencies to fetishize work in video games overlap deeply with definitions of workaholism. I also talked about how the moral mandate to be constantly productive permeates contemporary Western society, especially the technology sector. But what then precisely is the problem with video games’ focus on work? What is lost because of this obsession with accomplishment? After all, unless you’re of the radical anarchist mindset of Bob Black’s infamous call for “full unemployment,” most people, myself included, find doing a good job at work deeply fulfilling.

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is part two of four of a long-form essay on workification.

Part 2: The Grind Has Become The Feature

In the previous installment of this series I charted how video games have become entangled and infatuated with work. It might be easy to explain these predilections simply because work is a major part of many peoples’ lives. Or inversely this work-obsession could be video games striving to provide rational rewards as an antidote for lack of control at our day jobs. Similarly, not all games break when you try to approach them with exceptional or novel ways of playing (the now-infamous solo eggplant run in Spelunky being a fantastic example ). Still it remains the case that a large majority of games are obsessed with replicating work roles, structures, and attitudes.