This article was originally written for the thecloudmonster.com and published on August 12th of 2014.
The Greatest Crawl of All
When a friend of mine showed me a prototype for a rogue-like he was working on, a good old fashioned rogue-like, with ASCII symbols in place of graphics, I remember being impressed by his prowess and acumen, and completely unimpressed by the format itself. His computations were complex and well out of my reach (he has since put childish things aside and gone on to master philosophy, physics, and the philosophy of physics in the academic arena), and there was…
This article was originally written for the thecloudmonster.com and published on July 9th of 2014.
Insofar as I can recall, my first console was a surprise gift from a visiting relative, an unexpected and (at the time) incomprehensible boon. Gaming was still very new to the Russian mainstream, and while I understood enough to be excited, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There were no commercials on the television. There were no video game magazines that I was aware of. Nobody I knew owned anything more advanced than a Game and Watch trinket, more mechanical marvel than digital…
Reverie, a short art game by James Hostetler, is, on the surface, about dreams and dreaming. Framed as an application for a “dream job” at the mysterious Reverie Corporation, it asks the player to traverse a digital void teeming with other people’s dreams (a constellation of fifty glittering, pulsing, magenta nodes) and process them, one by one, for inclusion in Reverie’s “dream network.”
The whys and hows of the matter are vague at best. The participant isn’t told why these dreams are being reviewed and downloaded, why some of them are corrupted, how degaussing (the process of fixing a corrupted…
This article was originally written for the thecloudmonster.com and published on August 2nd of 2014.
The Next Leap…
The mission prompt informs me that I am now Tanya, an introverted, intelligent peasant girl of fifteen, but it doesn’t really insist on it. Following the introductory sentence, the narration shifts to the third person. And that’s just as well, I figure. From my experience with the two preceding vignettes, short but potent, I know that I ought not become too attached, lest heartbreak follow. Pyrodactyl’s Unrest, with its heady mix of fictional politics and human drama and its cast worthy of a Tolstoy novel…
Aleks Samoylov
A writer, artist, and designer who does and makes all sorts of things (essays, paintings, games, poems, and so on). patreon.com/feedthealeks — thealeks.itch.io
