October Round Up Part 1: ArtCadia at Nuit Blanche WPG.
October 1st marked the 2nd annual Nuit Blanche Celebrations in Winnipeg this year, and I was fortunate enough to be asked by the good folks at the Winnipeg Art Gallery to curate another game themed exhibit for this year’s Nuit Blanche. Last year, I programmed the Gr8 Bits show for the WAG’s Skylight gallery, which was a collection of interactive pieces by Winnipeg Artists that used game technology in their works. This year I was given Eckhardt Hall, which is the main hall on the first floor of the gallery, the first place you come into upon entering the WAG. This year’s exhibit was much larger than the work I did with the WAG last year, and was a little bit different, so we gave it the name “ArtCadia”.
ArtCadia was a collection of ArtGames, IndieGames, ROMhacks, homebrew, hardware hacks and classic games (all the while chiptune musicians and DJs provided and 8 bit sound track for the evening. It ran from 9pm until about 4:30 am. The crowd(s) in attendence where a wide range of visitors; beginning with parents and children, then moving into a more late night “party” crowd. But no matter what the demographic differences were, I would like to think that the exhibit was a resounding success, with visitors playing all the pieces on display, or dancing the night away to the chipmusic.
Now let’s talk about the pieces in the exhibit:
The folks at Hemisphere Games supplied me with a copy of their fantastic game OSMOS. It’s a sort of puzzle game, where you control a cell or “mote”, that propells itself by ejecting parts of it’s own cellular matter. The main goal of the game is to absorb the other “motes” around you, enabling you to grow, so that you can absorb larger and larger motes (you cannot absorb motes that are larger than you, so the main strategy of the game is to grow large enough over time to absorb everything). The game is absolutely beautiful and was displayed on a 42 inch plasma tv to show off the visual artistry of the game. Headphones provided visitors the opportunity to listen to the ambient electronic music score that accompanies the game, giving them the full OSMOS experience.
From Montreal came Rain+Bow, a unique “bullet-hell” shooting game by Devine Lu Linvega and Renaud Bedard. This game was created as part of the 2011 TO Jam in Toronto. The game is a pop amalgam of various elements of Asian pop culture, from cute 2 dimensional cats that fling relentless onslaughts of bullets at you, to the J-Pop inspired soundtrack. Bullet-hell shooters are very popular in Japan and are known as being some of the most difficult games to ever grace an arcade. Rain+Bow is no different: the game itself is only 90 seconds long from start to finish, but most players don’t make it beyond the 30 second mark. Over the course of the evening it was great to see both the delight and absolute frustration that this game created in players.
Murder Command was an augmented reality/ kinect hacked art game by Matt Gillies, who works for PoMo Inc in Winnipeg. Matt wanted to address the continual “moral outrage” over violence in video games by addressing it directly. He took the classic video game Missle Command and put a new twist on it. Here, instead of having to defend pixelated cities from ICBMs, the player had to defend people. Using the kinect, the game would track people in the gallery space and the missles would move towards them. If you failed to destroy the missle in time, the person would be “killed” and vanish from the screen, they would then be added to your casualty score in the game. Games often use the narrative of “Saving the World”, as a means of justifying the actions of a player character, here Matt brings the idea of saving the world back down to the ground level, where each person you don’t save, you see vanish before your eyes, creating “real” consequences in the game play.
They Bleed Pixels is the latest game by Toronto Indie Developer Spooky Squid Games. It’s a unique side scrolling game that is surreal and macabre. In it you control a young girl who is transformed by a magic book. You then have to navigate all manner of deadly mazes in order to collect more pieces of the book. One of the unique aspects of this game is its checkpoint system. Not simply arbitrary points in the game, it’s directly related to your performance in finding new and creative ways of killing the monsters that inhabit the game, kill enough of them in spectacular ways and you can create a checkpoint on your own. This game is absolutely incredible, and incredibly difficult. And it’s coming soon to Xbox Live Indie Arcade!
This is Distance 2.0 and it’s creator, Winnipeg Artist Murray Toews. Distance 2.0 is an “awkward dating simulator”, in that the game asks you to respond to awkward questions, generally with awkward answers, that ends up creating distance and awkward moments between the player and the game. This game is sort of the antithesis to Japanese dating simulator games such as Love Plus.
I invited the Winnipeg HackerSpace Skullspace to come and set up a table with various projects that they have been working on, for ArtCadia they brought their NESchuck and SNESchuck controller hacks to the exhibit (as well as the Lego Mindstorms robot, which danced to the music all night long). Both the NESchuck and SNESchuk mods take the nunchuk peripheral controller from the Nintendo Wii and modify them to be playable controllers for the older nintendo systems. Essentially the games can be fully controlled with the one handed controller, which has an analog stick for movement and 2 buttons on the front. While learning to use the NES/SNESchucks can prove to be difficult, these controllers have some interesting applications including enabling handicapped gamers who may have lost the use of one of their hands, to play video games one handedly.
A main staple at almost every event I’ve thrown in Winnipeg is the Winnitron 1000. Created by a group of indie game developers in Winnipeg called the Bit Collective, the Winnitron is an arcade cabinet that’s free to play that’s populated with indie games from around the world. The creation of the Winnitron also spawned a network of indie arcade cabinets and there is a Winnitron in various countries around the world including The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and several in North America. And as you can see, this lad is very happy about that.
Arranged on plynths in one part of Eckhardt hall were various games that I had brought from my own personal collection, including this machine, the Vectrex. Manufactured by Mattel in the early to mid 1980s, the Vectrex is unique in several ways; it was the only game machine that was ever released with it’s own monitor, and the reason for that is that it is also the only vector based home console ever manufactured. It’s unique also because of its black and white monitor; colour is added to the game by placing a translucent coloured plastic overlay (a unique overlay came with each game released). For the exhibit I chose to display the vectrex with the classic game Berserk, because the original Berserk arcade cabinets were black and white, with blue overlays attached to the screesn before they were released to arcades.
While you can see what looks like a Smurf hut in this image, it is not a Smurf’s game that I was demoed here. Well, it kind of was. This game is what is known as a ROMhack. The game (Pocket Monsters Go! Go! aka the Pikachu Nightmare) is a hacked game called the Smurf’s Nightmare for the Gameboy colour. It exists as a pirate game cartridge that was sold out of Hong Kong in the late 1990s. Essentially the game replaces the Smurf “hero” with PIkachu , although all other smurf references remain. It’s an excellent example of the odd works created out of game piracy and hacked games from china. This is but one in a rather large collection that I possess. I wanted to show visitors elements of gaming culture that they may not have encountered before, so I figured this would be a good fit. To my surprise there were several visitors who had heard of the game, but were very excited to get to actually play it.
This is GBamatron, and example of a “homebrew” game made for the GameBoy (seen here being played on a SNES using a gameboy flash cart and a SuperGameboy cartridge). Homebrew games are games made by fans for a variety of video game systems. I chose GBamatron, for it’s homage to an earlier game called Llamatron, which was made originally for the Atari ST home computer. Llamatron is itself an homage to an earlier arcade game, Robotron. I wanted to illustrate the permutations through of this game through the fans that created it, thus bringing fan and participartory cultures into the exhibit.
Also featured (though not pictured) was another Homebrew game from Morphcat games in Germany called Super Bat Puncher. SBP was a sidescrolling co-op game for the NES, in which you must, well, punch bats. You play as either Capt. Roast or his canary companion Sir Loin. It’s a super fun game, and the demo is available for download at the link.
And finally in addition to all of those pieces at the show were the chiptune artists and DJs who provided the soundtrack and kept the dancefloor moving well into the night. Special thanks to ZEF (who travelled from Saskatoon for the show), Bit Cadet, Hexidecimate, d0p3f1sh and DJ wasteLANd. The entire event was a complete success, people seemed to respond very well to it, thanks to the artists, the people who came and to the WAG for asking me to program this.
And a special thanks to this guy, who dressed for the occassion:
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