#glitchhikers: the spaces between

[room-665]

Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I keep forgetting or not having the energy to do the next one of these. It's going to be two in one again, this time for Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between and Vengeful Heart, which are the two "wokest" games I've played in a while (in a good way).

Glitchhikers is the only thing that's ever given me a dialogue option to declare the concept of the hero's journey to be an act of colonialism (we make fun of Campbell on this blog, and also Jung while we're at it), and Vengeful Heart is probably the most openly revolutionary thing I've played since A Bewitching Revolution (which is also great and you should give it a try).

I played the original Glitchhikers over a decade ago when it first came out. It was only like 15 minutes to go through it once, but it was the exact right thing I needed to see at that exact point in my life, and it's still one of my most memorable experiences with a game ever thanks to that. The new remade and hugely expanded version didn't quite do it for me in the same way, but it was still interesting and had some stuff going for it.

It's very much an experimental art game experience and not something big on gameplay, and it can be a little clunky or frustrating to interact with sometimes as a result. The park section in particular was mostly just annoying for me rather than me getting much out of it.

It can also be kind of on the nose with some of the dialogue and the messages in it, and some of it left me feeling like yeah I've seen multiple posts about this on Tumblr except they expanded on the idea with a thousand more words and it led to a bunch of discussion that added a lot more to it.

When it gets stuff right I really like it though. The train segment of the game avoids those problems entirely for the most part, both because it's a fixed path that makes navigating it a lot easier and because you run into each character multiple times. That latter thing is particularly important because it lets them flesh out the conversations a bit more and spend more time with each idea or theme, which it really benefits a lot from.

I think the final airport section was probably my second favorite. It's a bit tedious wandering around the empty space, and it's kinda blunt with its message, but it did a good enough job presenting the idea that how things are framed and structured matters for how we perceive and think about them, whether it's architecture or stories or ideas. It's a very "I see what you did there" way to wrap things up, but it works.

And then Vengeful Heart is just good. It's a postapocalyptic cyberpunk dystopian VN that manages to be appreciably worse than the way things are in the real world but not by so much that it's not immediately able to be related back to real life. And while the setting and situation are pretty dire, the story itself is about disempowered people joining together to work to do something to change it. Not without struggles and loss along the way, and not with a universally happy ending where everything is magically fixed, but with hope for their actions and sacrifices leading to continued change and improvement in the future.

They absolutely nailed the PC-98 aesthetic better than I've seen anyone do it in a while, and it feels like someone could've made the artwork 30 years ago. A lot of the music is pretty good too and sets the tone well.

Its biggest strength is its characters though, which is always a good thing in a medium and genre that relies so much on them. There are strong women and PoC and queer people and disabled people and student activists and working class union members and more all working together, both learning from each other but also having conflicting ideas and motivations at times, and of course the evil billionaires and militarized cops and private security you'd expect from the genre too. I really liked how a lot of them were handled, and I kept thinking about some of them for days after I finished the story, completely unprompted.

I could see myself going back through the train section of Glitchhikers now and then to meet different characters and see what they have to say, but Vengeful Heart is the one I expect to end up fairly high on my list at the end of the year, and I'm really looking forward to whenever they finish the next thing they've been working on.

[greetingsfromdigitalworlds]

Passing stars / Canyon dives / Lone tree.

(Game: Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between)

[refractedglade]

im so fucking happy this game came out

[wigc]

'Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between' Demo Impressions: Food for Thought

Sometimes the best thing to do is to simply let your thoughts wander, as you're going from A to B. To simply wander from A to B as your thoughts go. To think from A to B - alright, it might be time to start making some actual sense. See, I just played the Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between demo, which contains a small slice of what appears to be part remake of Glitchhikers: The First Drive, and part greatly-expanded-up-on experience. But exactly what did I... experience?

Continue reading

[gamesline]

We've got a brand new Starlight Car up for patrons, where Solon and Walker talk to Silverstring Media about wrapping up Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between and debut a new song from the game!

If you'd like to listen now, it's just $3 a month at http://patreon.com/vgcc, or we'll release it for free next week!

[talkinbouttinygames]

Glitchhikers: The Beta Logs

Around late Fall in 2021, I volunteered to beta-test the Glitchhikers remake, Glitchhikers: the Spaces in Between. I should note that this wasn’t a job, I didn’t get paid, and all I was asked to do was give general feedback on the game after playing it through. Really, it’s a kind of beta-test that functioned more as a mechanism for generating hype than actual beta-testing for a paycheck, which, I admit I have some quibbles with, but hey, I signed up to do it anyway.

This fact of beta-testing means I can’t recommend the game in a normal issue, but it did give me a fair amount of thoughts about the game, so I wrote ‘em down, locked ‘em away, and am now releasing them to the wild now that the game is on the market. I should stress that once again that this is not a recommendation or a review (as if I did those, hah), and it is only my thoughts on what the game looked like still in beta. On with the show, and spoilers abound.

I’m talking to a dragon, or least what used to be a dragon. It used to be one of a legion, proud and powerful, a species with technological might in living flesh, and now, having escaped the end slated for the rest of its kind by packaging itself into data and connecting to the human internet it is utterly alone. As it tells me of the things it has lost through in having to downgrade to our much more primitive technology, it notes that one side effect is distortions, its voice stutters through that last word – and an overhead voice chimes in, telling us what the next stop is. Because the dragon and I, we are two passengers on a communal train, headed somewhere in the night.

I covered the original Glitchhikers (now termed Glitchhikers: First Drive) in my 2020 Hallowe’en Rapid-fire Recs issue, but for the uninitiated, it is a short, experimental game about the of experience driving down a near-empty highway at 12AM and talking about life, the universe, and everything with the various hitchhikers you pick up under the surreal weight of the night. Glitchhikers: the Spaces In Between expands upon that experience, both in adding more fidelity and detail to that specific night driving experience, and by having 3 other journeys that try to bring about that state of mind – The Railway, The Path, and The Terminal.

For the most part, they succeed quite handily. I likely have the least to say about The Highway, having played the original game several times over. What I can say is that they’ve put effort into overhauling the experience on multiple fronts (I replayed the original game after I finished beta-testing). The landscapes you drive by are given much more variance in terms of the natural facets you see, and there are visible changes in the elevation that you’re driving at, too. It’s also just a huge quality bump from the original, I was just shocked at how rough and low-poly First Drive was upon replaying it. Replaying First Drive also showed that the visuals weren’t the only things retooled. The first hitchhiker you meet in Spaces is the same as the one in First Drive, and you do have a slightly different conversation with her, though the essential bits from the original, such as her childhood make-believe with the stars, are still there. (Another detail I like is how the occasional other vehicles will wink in and out of existence on the road as you blink your tired eyes.) You’re still given the choice to exit into the city or keep on driving at the end, and after you complete your first journey an infinite drive mode is unlocked, which is all I ever needed, thank you.

Along with The Highway, The Railway is the only other journey available to you from the start, and it was the one I was the most excited for, because I am huge fan of trains as a transitive space to journey in. So much that a few years ago I briefly drafted up a Tabletop RPG about riding a train, viewing the sights, and having conversations with your fellow passengers. I still think that a Tabletop RPG is a great medium for such a communal activity, but until I pick up the idea again, The Railway serves as an excellent way to satisfy my cravings. Compared to the fleeting interactions that you have with the hitchhikers, with The Railway everyone is on the same train, so you can have progressing conversations with the other passengers as you take in the various sights.

In a manner that aligns with how the player is stationary inside their vehicle on The Highway, freeform movement with the WASD keys does not exist on The Railway, nor any area in the game, aside from The Terminal, which we’ll get to. Instead, there are various hotspots that the player can click on to move to in each room, and progress towards the front of the train. This movement system surprised me at first, since it’s rather unconventional, and I doubt the designers couldn’t just program in traditional WASD movement. This hotspot method is one that de-emphasizes the player’s movement around the train, and instead puts focus on the movement of the train along its tracks.

As with The Highway there’s a sort of role-playing choice, too. As you walk forward in the train cars, there’s an option to get off at whatever stop the train is at instead of continuing on your journey. Perhaps you found a place you wanted to lie low in for a while, or maybe it was your destination all along. There’s enough detail about the stops to make it a meaningful decision, as the overhead announcer (The Railway’s equivalent of The Highway’s late-night radio program) gives a description of wherever you’re headed. At one point when I was on The Railway, the overhead announced that we were approaching a town – I can’t remember the name – that was left in ruins after the practices of a powerful few drove it into the ground, and stated, simply, “We won’t be stopping there.”

The Railway is also where I once again met the Star Woman from The Highway, who appeared as the first hitchhiker in every other journey since, as a way of establishing a baseline of social interaction for your journeys – and to make it clear that you’re able to meet the same hitchhiker across journeys, if it doesn’t happen naturally. The Railway also plays with surreality as a backbone of its structure. Given how you talk with the same people multiple times, instead of forcing you to meander back and forth in the train cars to have your subsequent conversations with a passenger, in The Railway you’re always moving forward, to the front of the train, where the other passengers lie for their next conversation after you finish the preceding one. It makes movement more fluid, and it also adds a sense of forward permanent progress that mirrors your familiarity with the other passengers. Also before you move onto the next group of train cars, you enter one that’s an endless dreamscape completely separate from the movement of the train and the outside world, which works as an introspective pause between conversational rounds, and is just breathtaking and a lovely surprise the first time it happens. Alas, there is not a matching Infinite Ride mode for The Railway. A man can dream.

After completing the The Railway, I moved onto The Path, because that was the order in which they were listed to me, and I am conformist dweeb. Unlike the vehicular basis for The Highway and The Railway, The Path is a walk through a park at night, accompanied by one’s iPod playlist, which is another wonderful fantasy game space, because if I ever tried to take a walk in a park at night with my earbuds in, I fear I’d find myself in a schlocky horror movie. The playlist is alternates between soundtrack songs a mini-podcast that talks about the wonders of life, and aside from occasionally coming across other hikers scattered across the area, you’re left to your thoughts and your playlists as you wander amongst its various sights and structures.

Though perhaps wander isn’t quite the right word, as though The Path forgoes The Railway’s hotspot movement system, it isn’t quite free-roaming, either. Instead, the player can only move forward or backward along the literal walking path as if tethered to an invisible rail. This emphasizes that it is, in fact, a path – your journey is not one of uncharted exploration, it’s walking a route along a local park with some nice sights. There is also an auto-walk key if you get tired of holding down W, which I used liberally.

Even though you’re on a rail, being in a park means that you do have means of deciding where to go along its many paths, and the designers found a way to deal with the directional ambiguity in their unique movement system, too. Whenever approaching a fork, a trail of light will appear and go down whatever path you’re set to go down, giving you time to course-correct. (Aesthetically, it’s fitting that said trail looks like the imprints of headlights in long exposure photographs). Aside from that, there’s not much I can say aside for the fact that the various park decorations are wonderfully varied with a lovely use of space and height, along with some more surreal pocket dimensions. The park is also a location anchored relative to the rest of the journeys, as at a high point on the edge of the park one can look out to see The Highway and the city that lies at the end of it.

Finally, there’s The Terminal, the final journey and a bit of a black sheep, as for it, Glitchhikers finally gives into movement convention and allows for free exploration with the WASD keys inside of a (near) empty airport where all the flights have been delayed. Which – okay, alright, if you are also a conformist dweeb, then the order of the journeys has a progression of more and more player direction, which is nice, but the use of traditional movement tech when everything else has been almost stubbornly experimental, whether through necessity or design, suddenly recasts a sense of doubt about the movement tech of the preceding journeys. If they could’ve done WASD all along, why didn’t they? Which is not to say there isn’t a point to using variant movement tech (I think my previous commentary shows that there is), but that the switch back to the Same Old is somewhat jarring. (Of course, this is where the fact that this is a beta log comes in – maybe the final game will go WASD. I doubt it, but I could be wrong.)

Regardless, going off of the freeform movement in The Terminal – it’s a bit rough in a way that the other, more limited movement schemes aren’t. This isn’t a deal breaker, it’s not worse than, say, a good itch.io Jam game, only that it makes it harder to really immerse one’s self in the game space to be able to embrace the nighttime mood that is its lifeblood. This immersion hindering movement is compounded by the presence of these… grey spheres with varying rings of colour around them (I should note that a rainbow trail of your movement follows you in The Terminal, although my description makes it sound much more gaudier than it its). These spheres, compared to the casual surreality of the past journeys, are overtly… game like. They look like power-ups, and they functionally act like them, too – upon passing through one, you speed up and occasionally are catapulted into the air in a display of physics I don’t really understand, and then all of the other little spheres gets an extra ring of colour.

The Terminal’s wide expanse is about the time you spend in stasis, when you’re left waiting with nowhere to go. With The Railway and The Highway, you had a destination, and with The Path, you were wandering around the park because you liked what it had to offer, it was journey as destination in the simplest form, but with The Terminal the very first thing you hear is a news broadcast (The Terminal’s equivalent of radio program, overhead announcer, or podcast) that all flights have been delayed, indefinitely. You are then left to wander around the premises, killing time. And, admittedly, here the low-poly style of Glitchhikers flounders a bit – it’s always the weakest when trying to express manmade structures – The Terminal is a building of dull blues save the occasional news broadcast, and the architecture is rough in a way that looks unfinished and amateur instead of charming. I can see why the designers might add in the spheres as a way of adding variety to compensate for the much less compelling setting, but I have enough belief in their clarity of vision from the rest of the game that I feel like there surely could’ve been another way to go about it.

All of these factors aside, I want to stress that I do see the point in The Terminal’s divergence from the rest of the game. Aside from the fact that experimentation is good and what birthed First Drive, The Terminal is still about a slightly surreal in-between experience, just a much less aesthetic and more lonesome one. And that change from traveling with a purpose, from talking to many other traveler (in The Terminal there’s just one), does take chops. It’s just that it seems to capture the experience in a less compelling many than any of the other journeys – though perhaps my perspective is a bit biased, as earlier in the year I played the itch.io game Interminal, which tried to express that same experience to greater success. This is not a dig at Glitchhikers, which has an overarching purpose to its terminal beyond just replicating experience, and Interminal has a different aesthetic style and time of day that plays better to the location, but the comparison was not a flattering one.

As mentioned before, The Terminal has only one traveler, once again Starkid Lady, who appears at the bar after you tramp around from news broadcast to news broadcast. This makes your conversation with her denser, even employing a conversational loop wherein your dialogue choices do not move onto a new set of options unless you specifically choose it so. This allows for a more one-on-one conversation that you get anywhere else, which is a nice bookend of the solitude wandering that you engage in before it.

In addition to all of these places, there’s also the first one you see: The Stop. It functions as a physical journey select and what-hitchhikers-have-I-met menu in the form of a rest stop. At The Rest Stop, you can see the various cars that represent The Highway, Infinite Drive, and the Classic Mode unlocked after playing through each journey once which is a strict faithful remake of First Drive.  Looking around, you’ll also see the train car that takes you to The Railway, the lamp-lit, thrush-surrounded, trail leading to The Path, and the crossing sign that takes to The Terminal. On the other side is The Stop itself, where you can see which hitchhikers you’ve met and talk to the Clerk to get information about the game. It’s a lovely way of immersing the player into the game’s world.

Also, because The Stop has the most prominent use of the Glitchhikers logo, I’m going to talk about how good it is. The logo is taken from isolating the back-to-back capital Hs in the title, with a heart in between the two of them, literally marking the space in between the two parts of that compound word. But in The Stop, the logo is one of lit signs they have, and as lit signs are wont to do, parts of it are blown. Specifically, the upper stems of each H on the inner sign, transforming them into two chairs facing each other, which is just perfect.

Of course, the locations are only part of Glitchhikers, the other component being the hikers themselves. I only played each journey once in order to not spoil the final game with beta-redundancy, so I only met 10 hitchhikers (aside from Star Lady I had another repeat), but among them I had a wide variety of conversations, from a grieving woman to scientist in awe of the universe to a nihilistic alien child. And these conversations do display a shift in focus from First Drive – the specificity to issues of the real world. Whereas the conversational topics of First Drive trended broadly philosophical, like the scope of the universe, or personal to character’s lives and childhoods, The Spaces In Between drills specifically to the systems of the world: one hitchhiker who debates the ethics and ramifications of technological progress cites how A.I. can replicate racial profiling bias, and another directly calls out Capitalism for stealing away her time to exist as a person and more than a cog in a machine.

This is a bit jarring coming so directly from a video game, but at the same time, it’s necessary change. First Drive was released in 2014, but in 2021 the concept of having deep philosophical and existential conversations about the world is impossible without looking at it in the eye and naming what we see. However, at times, it felt uncomfortable to discussing these topics in the game space, even when I was selecting dialogue options I legitimately agreed with. This might be an unintentional symptom of being on social media, but admittedly, sometimes the frequent references to leftist issues felt like the game was trying to flash its political-philosophical credentials. As it is, politics, and anything dealing with the seamy, seamy issues of the world is something unbelievably complex and nuanced, which is something that games have often struggled with for as long as they have existed – and unlike just wondering about the nature of our existence in the impossibly grand scale universe, it’s much more hefty and loaded, because it deals so much more with the injustice in the world and people fighting to be recognized as human. But occasional awkwardness aside, I stand by the notion that this was the right choice – much better to awkwardly grasp at the truth than try and create an ‘apolitical’ game that ignores something integral to its concept and themes for the sake of keeping the boat steady.

Or, perhaps, maybe the occasional bristling against the anti-capitalistic themes was the mild hypocrisy? I did volunteer to perform free labor on a whim. I’m not accusing the team because I knew it was going to be unpaid, and again, the only thing ‘required’ was a general feedback form instead of the active bug-seeking work the actual beta testers I hope they have are doing. It is, as I said in the intro, more of a hype campaign. But at the same time, it’s not something I can ignore when examining the game’s leftist and anticapitalistic themes.

Aside from the specificity of subject matter (part of which also comes from having a wider swathe of hikers in general), another thing about the hitchikers is that they essentially don’t have a fourth wall. On two different occasions I’ve chosen a dialogue option with my head in the game space, only to be pinned under a metatextually aware response I didn’t see coming. The first time was on The Path, talking to the mourning woman who I had met earlier on The Railway. She asked me what I was planning to do after this, and I figured she’d meant walking in the park. I don’t remember what I answered, except it was casual, and to that she questioned my ability to throw off the weight of the night so easily, saying, “Do these journeys not linger?”

The other time was elsewhere in park, where I was talking to a group of floating crystals about the impact of human on the environment, and they asked “Are we life?” I answered yes, figuring that by we they were referring to themselves as some sort of hive mind, and referencing their digital-looking nature. They challenged me on that, stripping back the curtain and calling every hiker a set of planned responses to designated stimuli. In both moments, I answered an extradiegetic question thinking it was a intradiegetic one – but strangely, I don’t feel tricked. The ambiguity of language is always in play when you’re talking to real people, and for some reason, exposing the game as a constructed reality only emphasizes it as a sort of pocket dimension one can journey to, from time to time.

As far as my beta-testing playthrough went, Glitchhikers: the Spaces In Between was a wonderful experience that did a solid job of expanding on the core experience of the original game. It wasn’t perfect, no, there were stumbles, but even where there were cracks you could see legitimate intent in saying something outside of the aesthetic experience even when that aesthetic experience was pretty damn good, and I think that’s worth a lot. It is very much the remakequel I was hoping for.

[greetingsfromdigitalworlds]

Another year… and this time I’m not a month late.

(Games: Peak Bleak Blues and other moods - Isle of the Dead, Dèpanneur Nocturne, ZONES - Orogen Myths, NUTS, Joanie, Sacramento, Everything, Routine Feat, Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, Pebble Witch, co-open, Cloud Gardens)

[lesbianalanwake]

Not to be problematic but I do love cars and driving, so here is a non-comprehensive list of some driving games that I love -- and none of them are racing games (though I do love those), except for two Flash games that I used to play as a kid that I’m including because I have them saved.

What’s the vibe here? That’s for me to know and yet never be able to put exactly into words.

American Truck Simulator: Unironically one of the best games ever. You are a trucker. You deliver things. You can build a shipping empire. It's great. And it’s got a great sale right now on Steam! There's also Euro Truck Simulator 1 and 2 if you’d prefer to go coasting around Europe.

BeamNG.drive: THEE driving and soft-body physics sandbox game where you can fuck around and find out.

Long Haul 1983: A solo tabletop RPG system about being a long-haul truck driver trying to get home in an empty world. Unique and interesting, and my intro to solo RPGs.

Kentucky Route Zero: Point-and-click and not only a driving game, but very much focused on roads and travel as liminal, transitional spaces, as you follow a truck driver and many other characters through dying old towns and strange magical between spaces. Cannot recommend this game enough. It’s also available on consoles!

Ghost Lake: An unsettling drive through a decaying low-poly world, in one of Kitty Horrorshow’s Haunted Cities collections.

Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between: A recent expansion and re-imagining of Glitchhikers: First Drive, and a meandering and melancholy look at the liminality of driving and existence.

Drive Time Radio: A fun and funny horror game about driving and listening to the radio when things get weird and dicey.

Road Trip: A vaporwave walking sim except it’s an endless driving game in the same vein as that one Simpsons vine, and a great, chill time.

Photon Highway: A colorful game about driving to the end of the universe.

Burger & Frights: You’re biking down a dark road and encountering horrors after getting a burger, not driving, but it has the vibe.

Trails Of Ténéré: Another one where you’re biking, on a motorbike this time, and exploring the sensation of being lost in the desert. Also has the vibe.

Age of Speed 1 and 2: Flash racing games that I played obsessively as a child. I have playable Miniclip versions in .exe form here and here, and you can also find them here along with other old racing games.

On The Run: A little car chase Flash game that I used to play all the time when I was like ten. Nothing special, but very nostalgic. I also found a version on itch.io under the title FFX Runner HD, but I have a playable .exe version here.

[svenerd]

Best New Game Trailers (Week of 04-11-22)

Best New Game Trailers (Week of 04-11-22)

Best New Game Trailers (Week of 04-11-22) The Best New Game Trailers of the Week of 4/4/22! 00:00 – LEGO Super Mario – Official LEGO Peach Trailer 00:49 – Kingdom Hearts 4 and Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary – Official Announcement Trailer 08:29 – MLB the Show 22 – Official Trailer (ft. Shohei Ohtani) 08:59 – Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between – Official Launch Trailer 10:39 – Witcher 4: CD Projekt…

[redemption-gamer-t-o]

Glitchhikers The Spaces Between PC https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5VyD6oXUQWOLjBgF8nmz_xwmhvZL0own_uFk0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[operationrainfall]

  This is Part Three of a Three Part Interview.

If you missed either prior part, you can check out Part One here and Part Two here. 

Rami Ismail is the co-founder (along with Jan Willem “JW” Nijman) of Vlambeer, a Dutch indie studio that erupted onto the indie development scene in 2010. Since that time, he has not only helped create games such as Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, and (most recently) Nuclear Throne, but he won the GDC 2018 Ambassador Award for his work in supporting independent game development.

On New Year’s Day 2019, he announced on Twitter a new video game project called Meditations. He explained that every day for a year, a new game would appear in the Meditations launcher that would take just a few minutes to complete and would only be available for that day. Once that day passed, a new game by a different creator would take its place in the Meditations launcher.

I reached out to Rami just after the project went live to set up an interview with him, and he agreed to delay the interview for a few days so I could experience several of the different Meditations games available. This interview occurred on January 10, 2019 – or, in other words, after the first ten Meditations games were made available to play. During our time together, we spoke about the origins of Meditations and how he envisioned it to be, the controversy that arose about how the developers were being credited and his reactions to it, if there will be a February 29th game for when Meditations repeats over again next year, and more.

In Part Three, we talk about whether he prefers developing games or managing game development, what lessons he’s learned so far from Meditations, and what his plans are for when Meditations loops over in 2020 and runs into February 29th.

You can check out Rami Ismail at both his and Vlambeer‘s official websites. You can tweet him on Twitter, follow him on Facebook, and subscribe to him on Twitch.

You can download the Meditations launcher for Windows and OSX platforms for free on Meditations’ official website. The official Twitter hashtag for Meditations is #meditationgames.

This interview has been edited for clarity and content.

OR: You developed games in the past such as Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing, and now you’ve managed a development project called Meditations. Do you prefer developing or managing after having experienced both?

RI: Gosh, wow. I think they are very different. They’ve both been very interesting. Like, I said before, I think my life is very evenly split between making games and helping others make games. And we’re now at the point where my ability to facilitate things might exceed my ability to make games. But then, at the same time, its hard.

I’m still the six-year-old boy who just figured out that if you change letters in QBasic, this game about gorillas throwing bananas changes. I’m a programmer at heart. I love writing code and I love seeing code mess up, I love the challenge of figuring out how to write a piece of code, how to break a piece of code, how to fix a piece of code. I love the creative process of making a thing, extracting my thoughts, turning feelings into ideas, turning ideas into code, turning code into programs. All of that remains – it’s a huge part of who I am and how I look at the world. I want to see the systems behind things. I want to know how it works and why it works. Creating something of my own is sort of like the ultimate expression of that. I know exactly how this works, because I made it.

I think if I had to pick between one or the other, I would make games. I would go and make my own video games, if I had to give up one.

Not because I don’t love all the other work I do, but because I generally don’t think I could do the work I do without the excitement of knowing what it feels like to make these games. I want everybody that wants that feeling to have that feeling. That pride of having made a fully functional thing. But I can only share that because I know the excitement for that. And if I lost that, I would not be able to do anything for anybody, so yeah. I would be useless as an advocate if I didn’t have the ability to make games. So I would keep my game making.

“I would hate for you to think that Meditations is prescriptive. I would invite you to see it as something that is yours. That you choose to do this, you choose to participate in this ritual. And if you choose to do this once a week, that is fine too. If you decide to do it once a month, play one game a month, that’s fine too. If you just really want to play this one game for today, then that’s fine too.

But don’t see Meditations as a structure that is solid.”

OR: Do you have a particular Meditation game that is your favorite?

RI: I have some favorites. I actually have to admit that the January 10th one with the Ghost Dog, which I call ‘Ghost Dog’- it doesn’t actually have a title- by Cullen [Dwyer].

It was one of the first ones that was finished. Very early on in January 2018, I got that one. And in many ways, it was the reassurance that this project was going to work out. If only a tenth of games had that impact as this one, and again remember, this is way before I got most of the other games- if only a tenth of the games had this impact, this was going to be incredible. And it ended up way more.

The overwhelming majority of Meditations games, personally, did something. Had like, an effect on my day, gave me a feeling. Some of the games that didn’t have an effect on me, would have an effect on others. So I’m just very excited to see how this goes and what the community ends up thinking of a lot of things, instead of what I think of a lot of things. But, I think that today’s game, Cullen’s game, is just really a reminder that a lot of very complex feelings might be better expressed through a video game than through other ways of communicating. That games also don’t need to necessarily stand on their own. That games can have context and that they should have context. A game like today’s, with the description in front of it, is so much more of a gut punch than it would be as a game on it’s own, or as a text on its own.

And I think that that in many ways is kind of beautiful.

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The Meditations game for January 3rd was by Lisa Brown (with assets from Jandre160108 and Jonathan Shaw). The player has to click the various limbs, body, or head of the person and drag them by the faerie-like icon as there is a bubbling of indistinct conversation just off screen. As the red line connecting the person and the faerie gets weaker, the red line will break, and you’ll have to draw another line. As the person moves across the ground, the person is faced with either falling down into a deep gap, or entering into the light where the conversations are coming from and that get louder as you get closer to it.

OR: It’s a bit early to do a GDC-style postmortem, but I am going to ask this anyway: What lessons have you learned so far from doing Meditations? What surprised you about it? What unexpected challenges or surprises did you experience? Is there anything you would change, besides the credits issue, if you were to go back to the beginning of the project to do it all over again?

RI: So the main takeaway from Meditations, for me at least, is that anything of scale is always more complicated than you think. Like, I’ve done a lot of projects with ten people. And I’m like ‘well, what is three-hundred-and-fifty people besides thirty-five times that?’ But it turns out that when you double the amount of people, you kind of triple the amount of work. In many ways, logically, that is the biggest lesson. Beyond that, I think that in terms of presentation, in terms of how the project works now in terms of launch and in terms of philosophy behind it, I’m actually very happy with how it turned out and I’m very proud of how it turned out. Obviously, the most obvious thing that I would go back and tell myself is ‘Hey, communicate clearly as to expectations for how people are credited, for what is going to come out at the other end.’

The thing that surprised me, honestly, again, is the shape that the structure of the project gives it. The fact that everyday is a game that will be gone for a year is fascinating but also the space it creates mentally for you, to think about each game on its own, surprised me. I think one of the things that surprised me -and I don’t want to say in a negative way- [that] I didn’t expect, and I should have probably expected a bit better, although I don’t know if I would have changed it- is that this project is meant to be almost like a sort of meditative ritual. It’s based around the idea of rituals, It’s based around Michael Brough’s VESPER.5, which was a game where you can take one move a day. It’s based around GLITCHHIKER, which is a project that ended in 2011 with a number of incredible people – that was a game which permanently deleted itself eventually [and] entirely from the internet as well. It’s around ideas of ritual, ephemeral media, but also, at the same time, of archiving, which is why it loops. For me, it was all these things, like, if I wake up and I decide to do a ‘meditation’, I do a Meditation. If I wake up and I don’t want to do a ‘meditation’, I don’t do the Meditation. If I wake up and it fits in my day, I’ll do it. But if I wake up and it doesn’t fit in my day, then I won’t do it.

And one of the things that in hindsight should be obvious, is that there are people who want to hundred-percent Meditations. They want to play every single game in there. That’s not quite what I expected. Because it also creates a pretty serious fear of ‘missing out’ in people. In a way, for some people, Meditations ends up being kind of stressful, which is the opposite goal. I want people to like have something chill to play when they are capable of playing it.

So that was a surprise. I don’t know how I would really fix it. I don’t think I would fix it. It’s just- the scale of the year changes things for people. I think that if Meditations had been like, a three-day project and credits were at the end, I think most people wouldn’t have had a problem with that. If Meditations was three days, and you missed a game, people would not have had a problem with that. But the fact that this is on the scale of a year- an eightieth of our life for a lot of people- I think that changes way more than you can abstractly imagine.

In hindsight, all of this is super obvious. When you’re thinking of it, you’re not thinking of it on the scale of a year- while I was collecting games for the span of a year, I never thought I was working for a year. When these two years are over, when the year of production and then the year of execution [is over]- I’ve spent a fortieth of my life on this, if I turn eighty.

Of my life as it is, it is one-fifteenth of my life, because I’m thirty now. Those are incredible, staggering numbers. I think that’s another thing that is interesting about this. There just isn’t much art on the scale of a year. It’s not a common thing, especially in games. There’s nothing- I don’t think there’s anything on this scale as an art project. There’s games as a service, a lot of indie games get made over a span of years- but its not often that we have to think about the experience of time as a continuous artistic expression. And I think that was one of things that was also very clear in the discussion about credits. And in the discussion of the project so far is just- the year is a surprisingly solid number of time in people’s life. So I don’t exactly know yet what that means, because we’re on day [ten]. And I don’t know exactly what it’ll do, because we’re on day [ten]. I don’t really have any ways or insight into how the project is doing. It’s not pinging for statistics, [because] we aren’t not keeping track of player counts.

But based on my server logs, a lot of people seem to be playing this. A lot of people seem to be still interacting with it, day-in-and-day-out. The hope is that instead of shrinking over the year, it grows over the year. We [hope to] find more people that will be interested in playing a game for a year, and [that] people will stop seeing it as something that goes from January 1st to January 1st. Eventually people will start seeing it as ‘Oh, I dropped in on May 22nd, and I’m just going to play until I hit May 22nd.’ It’s not about our year, it’s about your year. And I think a lot of people see Meditations as a thing that is very defined. And I think, I hope, that throughout the year, people will see it more as a thing of their own, like they do the meditation, not [that] Meditations tells you to meditate.

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Day 4’s Meditations game was by Egor Dorichev, who developed a game in PICO-8. In this game, the player directs a red arrow across sixteen stages to navigate mazes and obstacles in order to hit the green box to move onto the next level. In the later stages, multiple arrows appear that are moved all at once, but only one has to get through to the end green box. There are also obstacle boxes that will appear only as you pass through their dash dotted outline, and solid white boxes that will disappear when you run into them. You cannot go back the way that you just went with the red arrow, but you can move diagonally.

See if/how Rami Ismail anticipated February 29 for when Meditations repeats itself in 2020, and what he has to say on Page 2 —->

OR: Last couple of questions. You mentioned that the games will be playable again next year. Next year is a leap year. Is there a game that will be set up for February 29th, 2020?

RI: I mean, that’s a very good question. Let’s just say that a few [days] before Meditations came out, I did a tweet lamenting the existence of leap years, because they are really hard to program around. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Like the rest of Meditations, I want those things to be questions, not answers.

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Adriel Wallick (with assets from distillerystudio and grunz) created the Meditations game for January 2nd (above), and Mattias Ditto Dittrich created the Meditations title for January 7th (below).

In January 2nd’s game, the player has to repeatedly click to enlarge the circle to fill out the circular frame. As the player clicks, the color changes from green to a dark brown/red. If the color completely changes, a ‘dong’ sound occurs and the orb shrinks back down and you’re unable to make it grow again. If you fill out the circle entirely, the game is completed.

For January 7th’s title, it is a bit different. As the purple circle/gray square bounces back and forth across the screen, the line in the middle grows larger each time the small object intersects with it. The mouse cursor can be pressed anywhere within the game to help direct the purple circle/grey square in a particular direction. When the line is long enough, the game automatically ends.

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OR: Finally, to those people who are seeing Meditations for the first time and are thinking about starting it up, what do you have to say to them?

RI: Make it something that is theirs.

This is – every Meditation is a small moment of thought about how somebody else’s life relates to your life. A moment of empathy for a person, a moment of consideration. It’s not something you have to do every day, it’s not something that must be a part of your day. And if you miss a game, it’s not a crime, you didn’t fail anybody. It’s not upsetting. This is your thing. I would hate for you to think that Meditations is prescriptive. I would invite you to see it as something that is yours. That you choose to do this, you choose to participate in this ritual. And if you choose to do this once a week, that is fine too. If you decide to do it once a month, play one game a month, that’s fine too. If you just really want to play this one game for today, then that’s fine too.

But don’t see Meditations as a structure that is solid.

If you decide to participate, it’s your thing. And if you decide to make this ritual a daily ritual, it’s your thing as well. If you decide to participate and you enjoy one of the games, if you enjoy what it is and you would like to thank the creator, that will be super awesome, and I think a lot of the creators have been very thankful for a lot of the responses they’ve gotten.

A lot of the creators have obviously put a lot of themselves in these games, and knowing that there are people having this conversation about this topic that is dear to them through their game would mean a lot to them. So please do reach out to those developers. Please do follow them on Twitter or whatever they linked in their credits. And go have these little conversations either with the game or the creator.

Make it your own thing.

OR: Thank you.

The Meditations game images used herein were taken by me, but you can check out the individual Meditations developers at the links included beneath each image set. You can also check out a partial list of all the developers in the project here. The Meditations logo is owned by Rami Ismail.

You can download the Meditations launcher for Windows and OSX platforms for free on Meditations’ official website.

What do you think Rami Ismail has planned (if anything) for February 29th, 2020 when Meditations repeats? What would you put in your own Meditations game?

Let us know in the comments below!

INTERVIEW: Rami Ismail Discusses Meditations (Part Three) This is Part Three of a Three Part Interview. If you missed either prior part, you can check out Part One 

[silverstringmedia]

WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF? YOUR OWN THOUGHTS??? 

...That’s fair actually, but we’ll face them together

It’s a great time to go on a journey with us. Glitchhikers is on sale for -25% right now

EVERYONE PLAY GLITCHHIKERS RIGHT THIS SECOND

[greetingsfromdigitalworlds]

Idling.

(Game: Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between)