Posts with ‘MichaelBrough’ Tag

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J

By: Guest Reviewer

On: March 31st, 2010

[This is a guest review by Stephen Lavelle. If youâ€™re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J, by Michael Brough (epilepsy warning!).

I would recommend playing the game before reading on…

There is something very beautiful about the nature of the delicate and tentative interactions that can occur when encountering an unfamiliar system for the first time. Glum Buster is probably the canonical example for me. However, in this case the experience for me is one of interaction without surety of the nature of the effect – even after the fact: “I am doing something, but I am not sure what and I am not sure what effect it is having – nonetheless, it feels meaningful”.

Michael’s description, which I think deserves inclusion, reads:

The idea behind this came from the theme “bricolage”, meaning “a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things”. I went through a bunch of unfinished prototypes I had lying around, foetal games that will never see birth, and copied chunks of code out of each of them, pasted them into one file, and stuck some arbitrary interactions between them. There is a victory condition; it doesn’t make much sense, but it is possible to reach a “you win” screen. Don’t feel compelled to aim for this though, just do whatever.

The towlr games are not far removed from KPSJ experientially – they present situations with unknown mechanics – though I think they tend to be far more targeted at understanding (though I enjoy not understanding them as much as I enjoy understanding them). Pandora’s Gearbox comes to mind as well, though I think this is crucially different from all the other games mentioned because, in spite of hiding things, it allows for physical intuition, and relies on such reasoning.

One might say that KPSJ, Glum Buster, and the towlr games rely on a certain sort of ludic knowledge and intuition of their own, though I think the nature of this familiarity is very different to mechanical knowledge.

If one departs from systems that involve logical deduction, one can end up in a situation where exploration takes the form of an exhaustive search of a set range of interactions. This happened in GB sometimes, though I didn’t find it too much of an issue there. This happens when I play towlr games, though usually none of them work and it’s more a piece-of-mind exercise while I try to formulate other possible effective interactions and test the water. This doesn’t happen for me in KPSJ – I generally found myself overwhelmed by effect.

Some of Michael’s other games can be found here.

Posted in Abstract, Freeware, Unique / Bizarre, Windows Tags: MichaelBrough, ReviewedByIncrepare | 19 Comments »