David Jaffe shoots from the hip, and that hip looks a lot like my heart. Last year, I was a bit confused as to why so many people were wanking off, splooging over, and generally orgasming on the face of the XBLA title Limbo. Frankly, I thought it was a piece of boring minimalist bullshit. Disagree? Well, good for you. Maybe you can still appreciate the hot fire that Jaffe is spitting regarding the media and their love for shitty artsy-fartsy games.
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I picked up and played through the XBLA game Limbo yesterday. I had heard so much god damn fawning about it, watched a video about it and deemed it dope, and had tons of expectations. I paid way too much, stared at the download bar, and booted the son of a bitch up.
I was bored within moments.
Aesthetically, the game was everything you want in some indie game to fawn over. Dark and brooding? Word. Lack of UI which is totally innovated (except not really)? Word. Simplistic visuals? Word. It was a paint by numbers indie game. And everyone seemed to love it. But me.
What the fuck was going on?
It was during my aggravation at having to push around blocks and listening to the (not really) beautiful swirling ambient music that I had a moment of clarity. A thunderous strike of denouement. I play games like a fucking buzzsaw. Perhaps Limbo is generic and boring (I think it is), but more than likely it couldn’t have been further from my preferred type of game. As a caffeinated mess, I twitch whilst holding the controller. I run into everything. I want to smash through walls and rip people apart.
I said, “Perhaps this isn’t your type of game!”
My final project for my summer course is finished. It’s been attached to an email. It’s been fired, an electronic missive, scattering across the digi-webs towards my professor’s inbox. And as soon it is received, it shall begin crushing the university’s bandwidth, daring to be downloaded. Enormous. Blathering. Finished.
A week’s worth of work. Thousands of words, a couple dozen pages. Diet Mountain Dew cans consumed into the infinity-range. Spent veins, spent cells, smiles abound.
Hey, it’s like, summer or something?
I’ll be bored and ready for class in two weeks.
Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.
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Watching / Inception
I saw Inception at midnight on Thursday. It has staunchly refused to leave my brain since that moment. Call it intellectual laziness, but I prefer to side-step the usual “Quantity X was Quality Y” comment. I don’t know how good Inception is, but I know that I fucking love it.
I told Pepsibones that I have begun trying to figure out how much I like something by how much it stays within the skullparts of my mushbox. I can’t get Inception out of there, and god dammit, I don’t really want to, either. It brings me happiness. Just when I think it has left me, it returns with cookies and lemonade, and says to me, “Beautiful day, innit?”
And I just smile.
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The purpose of my project was to design a “dream” sequence of literature that I would teach. So I went right to my Love Nest. I began pilfering around for concepts of the American Dream, looking for the texts that I enjoyed that dissected capitalism, materialism, erroneous concepts of social status. The sort of stuff that has stuck, like a splinter in my mind. I came up with a class that taught The Great Gatsby and then segued into Fight Club by way of an episode of Mad Men. It seemed terribly fun.
The depressing part is that it exists only in a word document, and in my mind. After building such a dream sequence, I realized that the chances of me ever teaching it are relatively slim, and that night I ate a second cookie to mask my feelings.
Sometimes I cry through food.
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