Initial Covetous Exploration

March 29, 2012 By 1 Comment

For our upcoming analytic paper, i have already made the decision to do a critical study on the flash game Covetous. While this blogpost is not the most in-depth analysis, it is a creative outlet in order for me to explore the not-so-organized ideas in my mind and maybe figure out a few things to have a veritable direction in which to disseminate and succinctly argue.

Screenshot of which the entire game takes place.

At first glance, the picture above might give the impression this flash is a happy–albeit with a visceral twist–game. We see green bile as a portion of this body of a smiling person that has clearly been ebbed away maybe in a Operation board game style. As a white blob in the center can be seen as your avatar within the game. You might even be saving this man from something.

Hardly the case at all.

Newgrounds has infamously been around for quite some time after Tom Fulp embarked on creating a website dedicated to flash of which i am sure he never intended to become the ever-evolving beast it is today.

While the site began as a place more commonly known for hyper violent and over-the-top games, over time the site and its users have matured. Much like video games, flash entries have been created with the intent of making art. Indeed, Newgrounds is still a haven for ridiculous and perverse flash to be exposed to the Internet, but the site has expanded to include not only flash games but movies, user-created music, an art portal, forums, and a site of free exchange of ideas. Every now and then something more artful and thought provoking will appear, quite shockingly when compared to the majority of muck one can find on a daily basis.

The author, programmer, and overall creator of Covetous is Austin Breed. He has posted several pixelated flash and flash games that tend to err on the side of art. Covetous made its debut on July 18th, 2010. His brief and only description of Covetous is that he quickly made the work in 48 hours for “Ludum Mini-Dare 20, with the theme ‘Greed.’”

Ludum Dare is, as the sub-heading says, a “Rapid Game Creation Community” of which to share and display ideas. Clearly after playing Covetous there is more to Austin’s simple Newgrounds quick explanation. Our main insight are the tags Austin has posted the game with (thank you, Professor Whalen!): “cancer; creepy; greed; chestburster.” Austin did directly say the primary theme of Covetous is the topic of greed, but only until a few days ago did Professor Whalen point me toward the tag of “cancer.” Creepy, greed, and chestburster i understood, but cancer–wow, that changes the whole ballgame up rather quickly.

There is very much an existential vibe to this ominous game; much like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we’re immediately put into a grotesque out-of-the-blue situation having no full idea of how or why the situation starts the way it does. En media res we are put into an absolutely strange circumstance of genuine absurdity. Again, like Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, we are found in an insane position with no explanation and no justification but to simply push forward in existence.

The fact that this game is made using the most basic of digital art, the pixel, makes the work all the more creepy, as Austin puts it. Surely, had the game been drawn using a more hand-drawn style, the overall feel may have been even more disturbing.

Oh, God, why?! -- Courtesy of UrbanLyra

But something about this truly basic computerized art style gives this unsettling aura of something much more primal. Even the music is a disturbing lo-fi de-rezzed 8-bit spine grabber. Everything about Covetous just exudes and oozes gruesomeness. Considering the short length of the game and the most simple of control schemes, the game can be a stimulus-overload with sound, sights, and nasty ending despite the simplicity and the rock-the-one-level aesthetic.

The brother-to-be somehow given a second chance at life is clearly quite and angry and selfish and misunderstood. It’s even more eerie to note that this…thing is not quite human:  beginning as a single cell somehow simply born it becomes human shaped; it has a human-like intellect; it has a human-like affect and spectrum of emotions; but it is not fully human. i always refer to the movie Jacob’s Ladder or the Silent Hill series (of which was directly inspired by the movie) when discussing relatability to monsters. Silent Hill’s Masahiro Ito fully intended to make human-like aberrations that were not so much beasts as deformed parts of bodies with a human base. Somehow this sort of vibe is ingrained into Covetous and it makes you downright uncomfortable to play as this growing cancer while having a certain level of knowledge at the injustice of the circumstances.

As a cancer, things move slowly. You as a cell start small and work your way of infecting or taking in other parts as a manner in which to grow. As you grow, you notice your brother/kin/host’s smile start to fade; clearly something is amiss with pain. But you begin to take form as a pixelated fetus that goes more and more. No longer is the music the same drudgery but a sirens call showing how anxious you are to have life. The whole situation is only more complicated as the cell admits an affection for the host, but ultimately and with ferocious anger demands death of its host and in the fashion of Ridley Scott’s Alien, chestbursts to life as this bipedal monstrosity.

Chestburst is another tag there. Pop culture was really given that gift with the movie Alien, which thrives on twisted sexual imagery and distorted births and deaths. Your covetous life is the death of another with this second birth. Not so much a child as a parasitic invader whose parental relationship is disgustingly tangled. Suffice to say with Covetous there’s this underlying asexual yet incestuous goings-on setting.

The final part i have to figure out for this upcoming analysis is whether or not this work falls into the category of art. Indeed, Newgrounds did not start as a creative outlet for intellectual gratification. But as the site evolved, an actual collection of art games has been established. Reading Ian Bogost‘s articles and regular postings on Gamastura sheds some light on my direction, as well as taking into account Roger Ebert’s aphorism that video games cannot be art. There are a lot of conflicting views but it also presents to me and other players a dilemma: how do we perceive art? What is our subjective definition of art?

Such a vague notion of art and what is and is not and everything going on in Covetous, i have a lot to work with but am trying to not hang myself given all the facets of this work with which to focus. i think ultimately it will come down to defending this unsettling work as whether or not it’s art and have to describe more in-depth the allusions and ideas floating around in the game and my jarred head. Thankfully i have Professor Whalen’s guidance and direction and having done this blog has provided a little more introspective insight into where i want to go and what angles i want to focus on.

It’s all there, jumbled but there. Now to organize, formalize, and wreck shop in the literary sense. Go team.

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Life Lesson’s Learned Within Minutes

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When first playing the game Gravitation, it did not occur to me that there could have been any resemblances to real life. After the second time playing it however, I began getting curious about different aspects of the game. Many parts of the game do not make complete sense unless there were to be an explanation or a reason for them. Following my third attempt at playing Gravitation, I stopped and pondered about the different facets of the game and came to realize that there were three different life lessons tucked away in the game that stood out to me.

The first life lesson that I came to realize was in the game was what happened when you knocked the blue stars off of the ledges. When this happened, they became ice blocks at the bottom of the screen. If you then spend too much time getting the stars, and not moving the blocks away from your child at the bottom, you can eventually block yourself off from being able to interact with your child. This is a lesson in itself because if you spend too much time doing things that only help yourself, you will eventually loose touch with the people surrounding you who mean a lot to you. This shows that balancing your time is very important.

Another life lesson that I stumbled upon while playing Gravitation is the more available you make yourself to people you want to be around, the more they will want to be around you. I came across this idea because once you got close enough to your child, she would throw you the ball. Even though she was always looking at you, she would never go out of her way to interact with you unless you make yourself available. This concept goes to prove that if you don’t make yourself available to your family and friends, it becomes hard for them to maintain a relationship with you.

The final life lesson that I encountered when playing Gravitation is that even though it is good to make plans, you must follow through with them if you want anything to be accomplished. I saw this displayed in the game when I was playing and decided that it would be a good idea to knock down all of the stars possible, and then go cash them in for points at the end. However, when I went to do this, all of the ice boxes had lost the points they were worth earlier in the game. This went to prove that even though I planned ahead, I didn’t act on my plan quick enough; so I failed.

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a short story or the story of life?

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Works of literature often have a message they aim to convey about life. Whether it be where you should, could, or would go in life or how to go about doing so, they give insight into what the author thinks life is for. These message can be interpreted in innumarable ways and are rarely interpreted the exact same way by two people. In the work Cruising, by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, the choice of how to go about life is given to the reader/user.

The work is created from a photo of a teenage girl applying lipstick, meant to symbolize the whole world of being a teenager and of growing up and maturing through early life. The actual literary work lies in the text that scrolls through the middle of the screen. The text itself tells a story of a few young teenagers who passed the time during the summer riding up and down the street in their small town looking for ‘love’. There is a narrator who reads the text aloud at a reasonable pace that doesn’t necessarily match up with the speed or direction at which the text scrolls. The user controls the text by moving the mouse around the screen — moving it t the right makes the text scroll to the left so one can read it from left to right and the further right the mouse is, the faster the text scrolls and the same is true but reversed if the mouse is moved to the left. The text can be zoomed in by moving the mouse upward in the window.

How the text is navigated (video) (if it will work)

The text of course, as it tells a story, represents a passing of time. To me, this passing of time, of which the user controls and manipulates symbolizes one’s choice of how to move through their own maturation. Either you can rush through it and hurry to the end, or you can move slowly and enjoy every word and moment. Some may even chose to move backwards, starting from the finish and working their way back to the beginning. The choices about how to experience the work presented to the user represent the choices one faces in how to experience their own life, and this I find incredible. Not necessarily the message itself, though it is important, but the way in which the author conveys it. It seems as though this is just a short story about the growing up of some random girls but once one connects their maturing to their own the true representation of the work is significant.

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