Remember Universal Paperclips, that clicker game? Remember turning the human race into paperclips? Ok, so, what if you just... didn't? What would that choice tell us about game design, agency, artificial intelligence, and people?
This series of articles is an attempt to play through The Canon of videogames: your Metroids, your Marios, your Zeldas, your Pokemons, that kind of thing.
Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect.
Remember Universal Paperclips, that clicker game? Remember turning the human race into paperclips? Ok, so, what if you just... didn't? What would that choice tell us about game design, agency, artificial intelligence, and people?
In the future, we hang out. Hang out with me as I read Jon Bois's epic sci fi hypercomic 17776 for the first time and discover the power of duration art, the stress of immortality, and the fact that everything continues to basically be Homestuck.
Inside, spiritual successor to Limbo, is a game about control, but is anyone really at the reins of the game's dystopia? And can an experimental documentary from the 80s give us insight into the game's radical pessimism?
Spoilers for Inside; no familiarity with the game necessary.