I’ve archived the older one (in Spanish) for posterity.

More surprising is that Sheets, the game I entered in TIGSource’s latest, the Adult/Educational Competition, also got me in tenth place. This is so surprising due to my making the game in a rush to get something in at all, and it being mostly just a ‘choose your own adventure’ interactive story. More so, because there were a few very good games that didn’t even make it into the top ten, such as Gregory Weir’s Silent Conversation. All I can say is that I got lucky, this time.

He showed some of his short films/videos, or fragments of them. One of those was Little flags, which will give you an idea of what he does. The truth is, I went to this talk not knowing anything about this man, other than him being a filmmaker, and his link to music. For, you see, he seems to often work with musicians, or simply make sound a vital part of his work. The day before that talk, I was seeing Avi Mograbi’s Z32 while one of Jem’s works was being screened elsewhere, called Ciudad de México por azar, with simultaneous live music by the aforementioned musicians, plus DJ Rupture and Andy Moor. I didn’t know this event was taking place, or I would have been there, especially after seeing Chain the evening after the talk, which was already a day too late anyway. Chain is a feature-length, sharp, documentary-like view on the culture of consumerism. After the screening of that movie, he was there to answer questions and talk a bit about it.

He’s here in Chile because of Sanfic, the Santiago International Film Festival, which has been my chance to see some new films, and also hear the directors talk about them, which is quite an interesting experience. The final time I saw Jem was after a showing of a few of his shorts, including Lost book found, most likely the highlight among the bunch. In this short, he tells his story of what it was like being a push cart vendor in the city, and his discovery of a notebook that was filled with a strictly categorized, but seemingly nonsensical, list of numbers, places, things, situations related to the city. I asked him whether the story was real, to which he said it partially was. He refused to say if the book ever existed.

I’ve had lots of fun reading the varied essays on games, some of which I would not have read otherwise, as they are about aspects that don’t particularly call for my attention. For instance, I’m not very inclined to reading on game systems, even though it’s pretty much the core of what constitutes a game, so it’s been very useful. The practical work has been stimulating; since I graduated from university, I’d missed that feeling of rushing things to get them in time for class, which ultimately helps to keep me active and on my toes. The course may not be the equivalent of an in-class course, but given the price of admission, it’s been fantastic.

I’ll be sharing the most noteworthy of my ‘homeplays’ in more posts to come. They’ll certainly be improved over the rather rushed state they’re at right now before I post them, though.

The previous design has been archived.

i apparently had kept songs from my all past lives. and apparently i have been mostly female in my past lives.

ok um i dreamt music stuff

so i was like “finally, i can record an album with female vocals”

i was listening to music and i wanted to play it

<somari> What kind of music stuff? Mostly female?

i think it was something lofi made

no

“nobody will need to know i’m singing with my past selves”

something played on a keyboard, and i wanted to play it on my keyboard because it sounded so cool, kind of melancholy

then i woke up and couldn’t remember the tune
which sucked

i don’t know anything else outside of what i recited

The little horrors are in extended module (XM) format, which should play fine in Winamp if you have a not-too-old version, and probably in other audio players as well. The first in the list below is my latest ‘oeuvre’, and you could consider it my contribution to this year’s Halloween. The others (chronologically ordered, with the oldest last) are unintentionally terrifying. Boo.

• Funebre
• Speedy
• Second song ever
• Shit song

I’ve been an avid videogamer for the best part of my life, so I can account for many hours spent in front of a screen, with a controller in my hands. One day, around two years ago, probably while playing this brilliantly elegant game called Polarium,¹ I realized that I was having more fun creating levels, and making sure that they were both solvable and aesthetically attractive, rather than just playing the game proper. I found that the visual patterns created by the simple colored shapes in puzzle games like Tetris, Puyo Puyo and Puzzle Bobble could, and sometimes would, form beautiful patterns. This is, of course, where my training in design comes in; I realized that a game could be made where the objective, the very goal, was not to match shapes or make chains, but to create an interesting visual composition.

I had very little experience programming, though, so I never took it upon myself to make that game. Time passed, and one day there was a special event, hosted by a friend, called the Super Game Bakedown, that simply consisted of creating a game for the duration of a single month, in the spirit of the NaNoWriMo. I knew I couldn’t achieve such a feat, but I joined anyway, and made it my goal to finish a design document for this dream game of mine. I even added a secondary characteristic to the game, which was an idea that had intrigued me for a while: The game would not use words (or numbers) whatsoever. In the end, I didn’t even finish the design document, but I did get a clearer idea of what I wanted to, and could, achieve.

Then it was March, current year; the time when I had to find a topic for my final project. I knew that it wasn’t exactly a conventional idea for my school, especially since I wouldn’t be tackling popular issues of society or our environment, but it was still my chance to devote a year to a whim I was very interested in pursuing, so I did manage to contextualize my videogame project and make it something bigger than just a personal endeavor. I took what I had been pondering over for some time in my continued disillusionment in the what is the state of the industry and the art of videogame-making, and put it to good use. Sure, since I was a kid I played because it was fun, and that is what most people do; but as I grew up, I still loved games, but wanted more from them than primal gratification. It is the bane of an art that has not outgrown its origins as technologic entertainment, whose fundamental form of refinement has been in the chips and displays, and not on the themes, the messages, the teachings.

Society cannot seem to grasp that play is not separate from life. Johan Huizinga, the author of a book entitled Homo Ludens (from ‘ludus’: game), did, though. He realized that play permeates culture in all spheres; the only problem I see is that we don’t acknowledge it. So we live lives where there is work hours and break hours, school days and holidays, duty and fun. There should be more game to everything else in this world—and there should be more everything else to games. Games should have fun only as their byproduct, because by being engaging and interactive they’re an ideal vehicle for learning, communication, understanding, insight, experimenting, training and, well, everything. Much like good food, which is nutritious and tasty, we could be receiving so much more while we enjoy our time with games. Isn’t that the way things should be?

The videogame I am in the process of making does not attempt to bring the ultimate solution to all of our society’s problems, no. What I do want to achieve with it, though, is to push ever so slightly the limits of what a videogame can and should be, by contributing my unique experience and knowledge in the field of graphic design, and hopefully passing a bit of it over to the player. By creating a unique kind of game that does not stick to the current paradigm, I hope that I will inspire people to break more barriers and stretch the possibilities further.

In a later post I will describe with greater detail what my project consists of, and how it has progressed so far.

This mystery is a trivial one, like most others that have puzzled me over the years. The enigma is: why do we see ourselves horizontally flipped in the mirror, and never vertically? It doesn’t matter where I’m looking from, the freckle on the left side of my face will always be on the right, but my head will never be where my feet are. I had always deduced that it was a matter of perception, but I was never able to solve the riddle in its entirety.

Now I believe I have found the reason. You may already have been ‘enlightened’, but if you have not, please read on. The key is: gravity. We are beings that not only cannot imagine living without gravity, but even our bodies have been shaped to match this fact, as we are symmetrical on an axis perpendicular to the ground. What this reveals is that we find left and right to be interchangeable, but never up and down; we cannot conceive the possibility of the sky being under our feet, but we very often take a right turn when we should have taken a left.

The next key, then, are expectations. If you ask someone to turn a chair around, will you expect them to put it upside down, with its legs up in the air? Of course not: they will turn it around a vertical axis, because gravity has conditioned us to it, so it’s the most logical response. They won’t even think of doing anything other than the latter, unless they’re being playful.

You might already see where I’m going with all this. Take a look at the following picture:

The leftmost picture is what you’ve always seen when you look in the mirror; nothing new. The second is what you’d expect to see, with the image in the mirror ‘corrected’. And on the third hinges my argument. If you look carefully, the second and third reflections are the same image, rotated 180º of one another; the third was simply the result of ‘flipping’ the image (as you would a paper sheet) vertically instead of horizontally. In fact, I could flip the image around any odd axis, and the result would be the same, only crooked to a different angle. What does this boil down to, then?

We choose to see the image in our mirror as having been ‘flipped’ horizontally, when in reality it could have been any direction, simply because we are conditioned to our expectations: that the feet must be against the ground. The correct image, in our mind, is the horizontal ‘unflip’, because flipping vertically would result in an image that is opposed to gravity; thus, we eliminate any other possible unflip. So, next time you’re in front of the mirror, looking at your face, stop and think that what you see is an inverted image, and left and right, up and down, or even north and south make no difference: it’s just backwards.