You may recall, if you’ve been following this for any length of time, that I have made a couple digital gamelike creations. Well, I’m still at it, I’ve made a few more, and I thought I’d highlight a couple that I was lucky enough to have included in Indiepocalypse 51, a curated monthly anthology of indie games!
In my last post, I bemoaned that I didn’t get weird and funny enough in Out of Tales. “Chaos Dancing” and “While True, It Is Not Sufficient” are neither of them, uh, the apex of modernist or postmodernist or my-brainist complexity, compactness, and disintegration. They are, however, weird and funny. They are also thematically important at least to the earliest, most me-bound bits of Evernost, because they’re about escapism.
This deserves some explanation. A lot of this explanation can be found in one of my earliest blog posts, and I’d summarize it as:
- The imagination is wonderfully powerful, but still not as powerful as we like to think. The further we get from everyday experience, the less detailed or reliable our thinking gets, as a general rule. This can be seen in drawings made without a living model, in the wild but often bland and silly utopias historical writers have created, and in (say) medieval efforts to reason about things (God, the structure of the solar system) that are far beyond our (most of our) direct experience.
- Everyday experience still kinda sucks. It is, in other dimensions (like “making sense,” “feeling meaningful,” or “not being evil”), nowhere near enough or good enough for us.
- Escapism, if one conceives of it as escape from everyday life, or if one believes everyday life is the best the universe has to offer, is heroic even though it is doomed.
Apart from that, they’re pretty different (though both contain and deal with infinite loops). “Chaos Dancing” started life as a chaotic (surprise!) ugly slideshow for me and me alone and turned into this. “While True, It Is Not Sufficient,” on the other hand, is kind of a dry run for a much larger experience involving Evernost’s protagonist Jennie’s immaterial wanderings and brushes with the real or “real” world.
The latter was created for a game jam, Major Jam, which had the theme “Life” and the limitation “multiple applications” — so you’ll find some cute puns as well as, uh, multiple applications of the phrase multiple applications. And, if you persist in one of the infinite loops, some horribly bad Python code from the 1800s in which the counter representing one’s mental health becomes a complex number.
These two gamethings (as well as the other two I haven’t talked about) fall well within the ambit of January in my mind, and you should expect a good bit more January material to find its way onto itch.io as the year progresses.
Of Elsewhere 