Includes interview snippets from developer dweedes, Melbourne-based rapper Realname, and Jake Clover, fleet-footed icon of experimental freeware.

I ask Clover about his tendency to withhold information from the player. "The sense of mystery is important to me because I want to create the sense of a bigger world through a project that's quite small. I want my games to feel like looking through a window to a small part of a different world," he writes. "Another idea is that I want the world to feel alien and unfamiliar, almost as if it was made for a non-existent audience, as if the game exists for reasons other than just to be played by someone."

Secondly, as part of my column for Rough Cut, ‘Night At the Gates of Hell’ Games Horror’s Maestros. I look at the game's links to Italian horror, its ragged, snarling aesthetic, squirming POV identifications, among other things.

The names Fulci and Mattei may be relatively exotic in the context of video games, but for bedroom developers like King and Hoare, the mining of cinephilic horror territory has been a successful modus operandi. In recent years, a fertile crop of short DIY horror efforts emulating VHS, CRT (cathode ray tube displays), and blocky, early-3D PlayStation games has carved out an online niche. This is thanks to the seminal, streamer-friendly works of Benedetto Cocuzza (a.k.a. Puppet Combo), under whose micro-label Torture Star Video Night At the Gates of Hell was published. With quickly made efforts inspired by slasher and exploitation works, such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inflected Power Drill Massacre (2015), Cocuzza provided a model that bears the fruits of a lesson well-learned: that in horror, jaggedness and raggedness can be turned to significant advantage.

At the menu of Chamber’s early access build, a gunslinger hero — the player character — sits in a wooden coffin stacked atop a heap of another two dozen. Bodies are strewn about like litter. A murder-spree of this magnitude would be quite the notorious event in real life — in videogame land? Fairly standard.

The Wild West here smacks of straight camp: the “heh!” “ho!” jump noises; a cowboy strumming his guitar with a revolver; the UI detail of a goateed mouth chewing tobacco with macho vigour. I can catch bullets by pinching them out of the air; become invincible by making a tumbling dodge forward that the camera follows as though attached to a rolling barrel. “We had some girls here before, but they all died out,” an old-timer informs me, sitting proudly in front of a honky-tonk in the open desert air.

Chambers’ open world is not Red Dead Redemption’s earnest tribute to the Western genre, with characters whose personal codes can be understood in relation to their environment. Rather, it’s an ultra-gamey, fifth-hand pastiche of a pastiche, inhabited by zany shooting-gallery cutouts that run along their tracks according to their own hermetic logic. Leaning into systems over narrative — reputation, trading, bounties — its emergent flavour is disorienting and messy. When its automatons speak, they stutter repeated staccato syllables, as though signs and meanings were themselves in the process of breaking apart.

An exemplar of this kind of aesthetic that comes to mind is Wide Open Spaces, a live experimental sample-based album recording that came of a collaboration between People Like Us, Wobbly and Matmos captured at the San Fransisco Art Institute in 2002. Armed with five samplers, four laptops, three CD players and a pedal steel guitar, the group concocted an arch plunderphonic collage of Country and Western kitsch out of archival material, a bizarre mangle of “Yipee-i-o” cattle calls, Nashville schmaltz and entertainment show chatter.

In Wide Open Spaces, as in Chambers, familiar tropes of the Old West are treated with absurdist cheek. At the album’s opening, the serene dawning of pedal steel tones is ruptured with gasps, coughs, throaty gargles and half-aborted yodels; “Hi there!” a wrangler repeats as he greets us to his ranch, samplers skipping and stuttering like broken down animatronics. On “Clawing Your Eyes out Down to Your Throat”, cartoony groans and gunshot ricochets are incorporated into a squelchy acid house beat. “Chicken Legs”, its most ridiculous track, features inane Irish diddling, a tirade in Mexican Spanish and flatulence.

But Wide Open Spaces’s fragmentation of the mythic West goes even further than its jokes, reaching unsettling notes of subverted sentimentality. “Shenandaoah” lulls the ear as a young crooner yearns for a distant land in velvety tones, but its settler’s dream is strange, uneasy one. An eerie bowed saw rendition of “Edelweiss” superimposes the Missouri scene onto the Austrian alps, as a villain barks: “Now put the rope around your neck!” Pervading it all — the white man’s mythical call to Manifest Destiny, brought home at the album’s close with the sampling of a hymn-like ballad, “Oh the place that I worship is the wide open spaces / built by the hand of the Lord.” The album’s cover image, then, is fitting: a film strip sequence of a cowboy’s feet, suspended in the air, as if being lifted up from earth into heaven.

It's this untethering of the silly corners of the settler imagination, caricatured in the interest of surreal comedy, that Chambers and Wide Open Spaces both share. As Chambers’ developers flesh out the game, will it approach anything like the record's tonal complexity, with its power to disturb us, even as we ride along, laughing?

Originally published on Issue 86 of Unwinnable Expoits.

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No game I've played has spoken dialogue quite as natural as that of Despelote's. Characters ramble and interrupt one another, speaking in a relaxed, tossed-off way familiar from life but rarely heard in a video game world. The setting is Quito, Ecuador, and you play as an eight-year-old boy—an alter ego of the game's designer, Julián Codero—freely exploring a neighbourhood full of overlapping chatter and activity. Rowdy school friends blurt out excitable nonsense, kicking a ball as they cut class; simultaneously, the teacher bellyaches at length to a street vendor selling cevichochos nearby. In a park scene, we wander amongst a mingling soundscape that includes animal noises, music played from CD players, amorous picnickers, an elderly man nattering to pigeons, and a performing guitarist. The country is on the verge of qualifying for the 2002 World Cup, and soccer mania is in the air.

Much of the dialogue gains its vitality by being broken out of the enclosed diving bell of the recording booth. The game's cast—largely made up of Ecuadorian friends and family—were encouraged to improvise and bounce off each other, contributing not just their voices but their own memories and personalities. The boy's cinephile parents, for example—played by Cordero's mother and father—make filmchat discussing the releases of the day, just as they might have at the time. Important here is the careful work of sound designer Ian Berman—credited on films such as The Sweet East and Ecuadorian short Ñaños—who recorded the game's dynamic vocal takes along with its extensive environmental sounds.

Despelote's effects (though simpler) might be compared to those New Hollywood director Robert Altman pioneered in the 1970s; where, in films like M.A.S.H., California Split and Nashville, the viewer's attention is diverted away from the central action towards peripheral characters, emphasising fragments over linear clarity and involving the viewer as an active listener.

Particular interest is taken in recreating experiences distinctive of childhood: the held hand of an adult; the fragmented eavesdropping on a world that feels large and barely understood; and a soccer-fueled dream—one of those ecstatic dreams of omnipotence, like those of flying, which disappear with age. The cliché of 'childhood innocence' is avoided: the player might misbehave and feel the guilt of being chided by a carer. We experience, too, the glue-like stickiness of a video game played at the expense of all else—achieved through a simple soccer game played within the diegesis of Despelote's world. (It was created on spec by producer Gabe Cuzzillo, also credited for level design and terapia—therapy.) Narrating, Cordero admits that he doesn't remember the period that well (he was in fact four at the time, not eight.) Near the game's end, a provocative coup de jeux vidéo effect ruptures the world's fabric, a transition that replaces its art with a raw 3D scan taken from the same Quito neighbourhood. As we walk around this altered environment, Cordero comments on the making of the game; things now look smeared and corrupted, like a vague, melty recollection.

Despelote, then, draws together two seemingly contradictory currents felt in the last decade of game design's vanguard: the painstaking recreation of quotidian space found in works such as Gone Home and My Summer Car; along with the questioning, mirrored mise en abyme of the likes of Cibele and The Beginner's Guide. In May last year, Codero and Berman spoke to me via video call, further peeling back the layers of their unique process.

I really loved Despelote's approach to its conversations and being in the world. Often in games, I'm compulsively trying to click through the dialogue options to get some sort of benefit or progress from them. But here, it's more relaxed because everything's happening in real time—you just sort of catch what you catch, like in life.

Julian Cordero: Yeah. The thing is, we've been making this game for a long time, and at the beginning I had this whole idea that there would be no dialogue. There would be no conversations. There would be no language because kicking a ball would be this universal language. For a long time, I was like, "If we put any other language in the game, it's going to undermine that idea."

But then I realised that the game wasn't really about that. Our producer [Gabe Cuzzillio] really pushed me to incorporate voices because it would be much easier to communicate. We were trying to communicate more complicated ideas about the location and the place, and what it was like to be in Ecuador during that time.

At first we tried a lot of different approaches. We were doing interviews and putting them in the game, more documentary style. I don't think that worked, but it did give us a lot of ideas for what thematically we wanted the game to be about. Then I remember doing a conversation over Zoom with friends I grew up with in Ecuador. They just improvised it, and it was a nice chat, like a chill vibe, and we put that in. It felt like that was exactly what being a kid is like—you're running around and then you're sort of absorbing these conversations, but you're not really fully engaged. You don't really understand where they start and end and what they're talking about, but you're getting glimpses that inform your worldview somehow.

So we liked it and then decided okay, we're going to fill the park with these conversations, the idea being that no conversation is crucial to the plot.

Ian Bergman: Yeah, it reflects the experience of being a kid in a nice way, where you're not necessarily the driver of the plot. So it wasn't super essential to have the sort of conversations that are driving the plot forward. It's like you're picking up a vibe of being in a place. We're trying to capture the real people who live there to give it the right character.

JC: A big part of it was that all the conversations would be improvised. Because that way it felt like we could have this shared history of the place. Everybody would remember what it was like in that time—but also, I don't know, it just felt more natural that we were working with people that have never acted before.

That kind of naturalistic quality—I don't think it's very common in games. Usually everything is so handcrafted, constructed, and artificial. We really liked the idea of recording the conversation and then having to change the game a little to fit the conversation, rather than changing the conversations to fit the game.

What were some of the things that were changed in response to the improvisations?

IB: Before we added the conversations, the art style, and the gameplay were pretty much the same as it is now. After we decided to have talking, we had to scope out a story and we redesigned the level at least two or three times. A good example is changing around the level design to make things the right size. At different points we were struggling with too many people in the same place, or too big of a place and not enough people to fill it.

JC: Yeah, we were moving stuff around constantly.

There's this couple that's having a picnic in the park—maybe you saw them—they get into fights. Those were just two of my friends. I really enjoyed just hearing them fight because they were in a relationship where they fought, so it was just listening to them having real fights in their life. So we created more scenarios like that, different dates. They're always bickering a little and we love that. We love that vibe. So that then influenced us and we incorporated it into the world.

How would you set up these kinds of scenarios with the actors?

JC: So basically we told them, "Okay, you're having a picnic in the park. It's your anniversary, and there's going to be a kid who comes and breaks your picnic." We just tell them, "It's 2001. The national team is close to qualifying to the World Cup. Don't mention anything new." We didn't give them many more instructions. That worked pretty well. I think the less instructions we gave the better kind of performance we got from people, because it allowed them to be more loose.

There are some bits that are quite funny, like the teacher arguing with the guy selling the food. He's saying, "I'm not an angry person!" but he sounds really angry.

JC: Yeah. As I said, I had been against putting dialogue in the game originally—but then we had so much fun doing that stuff. That also influenced the rest of how we're making the game. Looking forward, it's how I want to continue making games: trying to incorporate a lot of real world and improvised elements.

The process of making a game is so rational and so logical, because you have programming. Incorporating these more improvised, raw elements really, really felt good. It was just fun, going out and recording my friends. Even when they're just having a conversation over food or beer, we would recreate those environments in real life. We never recorded in the studio. I guess this is where having Ian helped—

IB: —I would yell to everyone, "Don't slam your bottle on the table!"

JC: I think that was really important to capture this vibe. I was always like, "I'd rather it not sound great, but feel more natural compared to if we tried to record it in a studio with perfect sound." I think Ian saw that there was a challenge, which was great.

IB: Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of recording. I'm still editing it. We spent about a month recording every day. It was my first time in South America, much less Ecuador, so I was super psyched to be there. But also, we're doing at least one recording trip most days... I feel like yesterday I got to the point where I'm like, "Okay, I'm done editing everything."

There's some great lines from the kids—"You're the cousin of Nicholas Tesla". It just sounds like kid's nonsense.

IB: Yeah, a lot of that was totally improvised. They're really funny. I don't think we could come up with that.

JC: I don't know why they said that, the Nicholas Tesla thing? (Laughs)

They're looking over at Quito and they're like, "You can see New York from here!"

JC: That was a great thing—they didn't even know that Ian and I lived in New York. We found the kids through [Maya Villacreces], who acted as a producer. She usually worked in film sets and film production, so she set it up like a film shoot.

IB: So she kept us on schedule and everything.

JC: Exactly. She was in charge of finding missing characters, some of them were the kids. We wanted to find a group of eight year olds—all friends, who like soccer and had this vibe. I didn't know any eight year olds.

IB: They were actually the second set of kids we had. We had already scoped out a lot of the behaviours from an earlier group. We brought a soccer ball and told them to kick it around. I had lapel mics on their shirts and we just recorded them. A lot of it came from that as well.

JC: Yeah, we were just playing around with the kids. They were running around and playing with the mics, and it was a little bit chaotic. But it was kind of what we needed. At times I did have a lot of things I needed them to say like, "Come here." You know, all those things. But we did want to create these scenarios, and have them just play around like they're just having conversations. With that one I told them, "Okay, imagine you can see Quito from this big view." They're like, "Oh, you can see New York!" That was perfect. Fantastic.

IB: Yeah. Kids are so game to just make stuff up like that. More than the adults.

What other performances from the actors did you find interesting?

JC: Well, another thing is the parents—they're my parents. They're divorced now actually. So I was asking them to recreate a time when they were married, and that was a weird thing. Which I feel very lucky about. They're on good terms. They're friends.

I was going to ask about the discussions in the game that your parents have about film.

JC: Yeah, my parents are filmmakers. They made a movie in the ’90s that was somewhat successful, Ratas ratones rateros. They also had a video rental shop, and were bringing in all these weird movies, not the usual Hollywood stuff. A community formed around it, some of whom my parents are still friends with.

How did you recreate the physical environment?

We had a lot of models and were using a lot of 3D scans that I had just made with my phone. Then our artist [Sebastián Valbuena] cleaned them up. So we were using those and placing them in the world. I think there is a parallel between the conversations and how we were building the world. Using models taken from these real world elements, I felt they already had so much personality embedded into them. So we were putting those into the world and then doing the same kind of thing for the voices.

With this naturalism that you're going for—I wonder if you think film has influenced your sensibility?

JC: I always grew up watching a lot of movies. That's been my way of relating to my parents in a lot of ways. When I was a kid, I thought I would also make movies. But I ended up being more interested in making games because, I don't know, it feels like you can do more with less. You don't need a big budget or a big film crew and all of that. That just feels like a headache. We can just make a game.

IB: It's occurred to me that I also accidentally come from a film background—actually via this project—because some of the mics I bought for this project four years ago ended up qualifying me for recording films. I spent a couple of years recording films in New York as my main income stream, so I learned how to record movies that are in theaters and stuff. Then after learning on the job doing that, it circled back around to this project. So by the time we were doing the main recording session, I already had a fully movie-ready kit and the experience of how to wire people.

JC: I had some friends in New York from Ecuador who were making a short film [Ñaños], and they asked me to help them. I was like, "I can help you as a production assistant, running whatever errands you want, but I don't actually know any of the technical skills." But they were looking for a sound recordist, and I knew that Ian—who was working on Despelote already—wanted to get into film, so I asked him. That was the first time that we recorded together.

By the way, that short was basically no budget. We were just shooting everywhere, running around in the subway in New York—

IB: —during the pandemic.

JC: Yeah. Like very, very chaotic. That kind of style, to me, is a really cool way of making stuff. I feel like maybe that had some influence in how we then went and recorded the game.

IB: Yeah, I've never thought about it like that, but it makes sense. There's a lot of energy you get from being on a set. I mean, Despelote is obviously a lot chiller than the 14 to 16-hour days on a real film set. We're going to behave more normally because we're not burning thousands of dollars every time that we hit record on the film stock—they had to be very crazy.

Working on Despelote, I realised that every type of recording is voice, basically. In a game, [one person] can kind of do everything, where on a film set you have all of these specialised roles to make things really efficient, with all of these experts in their very specific areas: a gaffer versus a grip versus a lighting technician—you know, all these things. The way we're making this game, it can be quite fun, because it's like, "Today I'm going to do lighting, tomorrow I'm going to do behaviours, and the day after that I'm going to work on the map a little bit."

JC: Yeah. I think what's super cool—what I am really interested in—is that there are a lot of ways of capturing the world nowadays. Just weird ways, for example 3D scans, or micing people up in weird ways, whatever. Whatever makes sense for what we're trying to say. And I feel like video games are the perfect fit to hold all of those. That to me, is really exciting. ◼️

"How do you design a game that explores the future?" In the context of videogames, few questions are as banal as this. It's one, however, to which indie curio Time Bandit – Part 1: Appendages of the Machine provides an interesting response.

The basics. You work a shitty job for a shitty boss, pushing blocks to complete boring Sokoban-like puzzles. The setting: a dystopian vision of "the future" as a rampant neoliberal hellscape — to a large degree, of course, also our present.

So far, so familiar.

The catch is that every move the player makes takes ages — half an hour to push a single block — with the computer's internal clock and calendar used to simulate the real passage of time a la Animal Crossing. In the game's most exciting moment, a cigarette-smoking, Marxplaining scuba diver named Longtail Duck turns up and asks you to meet him tomorrow in the city square — literally meaning that you have to schedule a time IRL the next day and commit to what you promise. Stressful!

A key thing that makes Time Bandit stand out from the pack of capitalism games is its unusually bookish engagement with the topic. Its developer, Joel Jordan, is a library-card-carrying Marxist, and has the uncommon distinction (at least outside of interactive fiction and visual novels) of having made a videogame whose primary influence can really be said to have been a book, rather than another game. The book in question is Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's manifesto Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a Work Without Work — which, even more unusually, is a work of political nonfiction.

Williams and Srnicek's critique is an imaginative 'science fiction' of sorts, calling for an ambitious, broad-base reclaiming of modernity by the left. This basic shape, along with ideas from Marx's Das Kapital, informs Jordan's design from the ground up. The player is recruited into a project much like the one Williams and Srnicek put forward: the unleashing of the productive forces of new automation technologies, with an aim to "steal" back time for workers, advancing an emancipatory tomorrow. The game's tutorial, taking place on an office computer in a high-rise, makes clear that we are reflecting not just on work, but ourselves as gamers too. Its ludic tensions present a fork to the player, asking them if they want to take a sweaty, grindy route, or take it easier.

There is an elephant in the room reading Inventing the Future a decade on: its Silicon-Valley-friendly assumption about the labor-saving powers of these automation technologies — particularly sensitive in our current, anxious present — which, viewed through the lens of economics, now appears exaggerated; through the lens of ideology, possibly detrimental. The problem is of a kind unique to a nonfiction adaptation. “What happens when the source’s arguments start to feel shaky?”

How far Jordan takes on this assumption is unclear. At the end of Part 1 — the first of four planned installments — it is yet to be seen whether Longtail's singularity-like revolutionary vision will come to pass. As Williams and Srnicek note, fixed paths and destinations have often been a sticking point for modernist visions — and I'd suggest that this is also true of videogame narratives. Can Jordan overcome the challenge?

For now, we futurists have a fascinating whatsit to study and enjoy. Politics has no script, and neither does game-making; the problems Time Bandits sets are its own, and this is a commendation in itself. At times, it feels like what the best experimental games feel like: science fiction of game design.

Originally published on Issue 81 of Unwinnable Expoits.

The first article looks at the world of video game acting, discussing Oblivion’s janky NPCs, the idiosyncies of non-actor performances, System Shock, Hitman, Facade, Out for Delivery, and sundry other topics. Very grateful to editors Indigo and Tiia for the feedback and curiosity about the subject!

Apologies to Nadine Nortier, star of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, for the super-sacrilegious thumbnail which pairs her with a cursed close-up of an Oblivion NPC named “Maglir”.

One theme in the essay is the non-actor, which I mention in this passage praising the unpolished performances of System Shock’s famous audio logs:

This nerdy, inexperienced cast lend an unrehearsed vulnerability to the characters; as with Nortier in Mouchette , the awkwardness is a boon. With mixed levels of charisma, the characters convey the passive-aggressive bickering of the ship’s workers—even before the horrors broke out, it seems this place was a low-key hell. The resulting style is one that feels appropriate to the subject matter: ordinary people caught in desperate situations.

The last game I played is a pico8 puzzle game, Woodworm. A short simple-yet-tricky puzzle game which sees you chewing up bits of wood to create shapes.

Presentation-wise, these simple hand animations really make it:

Til next time.

—Austin