Thursday, July 21, 2011

Press any key




The other day I ran into Press any key by Adam Saltsman. This game (let's call it game) is any minimalist's delight: the only thing the player does is to fill the screen with red dots, each of which appears when the player (you guessed it) presses any key on the keyboard. In addition, several messages appear above the game to spur you on your task. As I am a patient guy I got the time to play it to the point it reveals its true objective: to help us understand the true scale of large numbers, in this case a hundred thousand, because each red dot represents one of the hundred thousand civilian deaths since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I remembered then how big it always sounded to me the thirty thousand we had here in Argentina, and I wanted to see if, with the advantage that not any event on this date requests it, I could do something similar (even if we didn't have an actual war and our thirty thousand don't get to be dead yet). Something somewhat predictable turned out, something unimpressive, but I liked it. The result was
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Sunday, July 17, 2011

The body of Dean Moynihan



Just four keys: ←, ↑, →, and the spacebar. The body, Dean Moynihan's last game, is one of those dark games that if they do tell a story they make it obliquely, and slowly, as to irritate the hurried player. It is also one of those that, except for a few elements, are not that different from a short, bleak animation.
Its greatest virtues are the atmosphere it creates and some playful thing between the narration of the past and the present, using resources imported (don't know if I'm bluffing here) from cinema. I put it here just because I can, but you can also play it in the author's website, or if you want an even weirder experience, you can take a look at the original file without frame.