Gameplay Journal 6 — Eric S.

Continuing with the theme of glitches, we’ll be looking into a different game how glitching this experience can reconfigure your normal experiences of media technologies through the unfamiliar and unexpected. Looking into the readings for this week, specifically Glitch Readerror, this can be said about media, “A book, a video, a piece of software — all contain potential utterances. Each piece of media awaits its next real-time run when it is uttered into a unique, singular, never repeatable, spatio-temporal, lived context.” to me, when these expectations are altered via glitching, the unexpected can occur. Glitching can be done in a multitude of ways, utilizing corruption methods, cartridge tilting, or exploiting game bugs are a handful of ways it can be done. This entry will be focusing on cartridge tilting the game “Hey you Pikachu” for the N64.

Cartridge Tilting is not necessarily a glitch but a method to produce seemingly impossible ones through conventional means. Wiggling and tilting the cartridge while a game is still inserted into a console can produce interesting results. In this example I provided, the method produces unsettling, dream like instances that seem unnatural. Visual bugs such as sprites being jumbled or discolored are pretty common in this example. Auditory glitches occur as well, making audio clips compressed and even more loud. Some of these auditory glitches amplify that dreamscape feeling along with the sense of feeling unsettled. This is primarily done with the glitches that hold a music note for a long period of time. These set of glitches enable the user to experience this media in a new light. It overall gives a innocent and straight forward experience an unsettling, dream like aesthetic and feel.

Video footage — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHIzDwE6ti4