dead elf
i was thinking about melos' article about that mother 64 interview.
every day i resist the need to drag some indie game that despite summoning all the latent apathy present in my body isnt really the root cause of all this and is useless to get mad at.
every now and then we all dwell for a little while in the fragmented memory scape of super mario world's strange food themed vistas or something. and like, that thing miyamoto said about nostalgia fueled artists only wanting to replicate the detail and neglecting the bigger picture.
they're interesting words that somewhat ring true but maybe there's no other way to do it. the fey desire of building a nail painting type facsimile of something we regard as eternal has a lot more appeal to me vs. the angelic pragma of compressing all of video games history into a burger of timeless design from which we can distill "wholeness", the idea that we now have a clearer way to convey what the old masters wanted to. the full power of rationality laser focused on manifesting byproducts of this sacred burger elixir like "what if mario was a roguelike" "what if diablo 2 had a dodge roll" etc etc. these are things that suggest universality via design, meaning they suggest proximity to burger elixir and distance from ideas that like 3 loser nerds eating curry rice in their office building would come up with.
same goes for the assumption of "narrative" (a word i really hate) being improved by incorporating universal atoms of genre or structure. hades could have been about like robots salvaging ancient technology in a dead world or whatever but it was about tumblr art commission-ified greek deities. but it probably couldn't have been about much anything else, or about nothing. a lot of games about nothing are instead about how clever they are.
i keep mentioning oblivion because i'm fascinated about its nature as truly out of control in terms of design or artistic vision or whatever. it doesnt mean anything if you find a dead elf by the side of the road. some numbers interacted outside of your field of view and it produced a dead elf. it's the supreme victory of video games. the artistic and conceptual inclinations of its authors voluntarily subsumed, only to produce a godless world that's incapable of communicating "narrative", "design", "mood", "structure", just because it requires that elfs be able to randomly die whenever.
every time there's one of these industry veteran threads about some funky strange bug they found in their game and how they fixed it it's usually a given that they consider the bug to add something interesting to the game in contrast to the final version where it has been paved over.
you can give a gdc talk about how the lush pixel art tileset in stage 8 of your game is actually allegoric art for the main character's growth but you can also accept that you don't need to create narrative universes or whatever. you can think of your video game as a dead object that exists in our world. i have to download it from steam into my materially imperfect hard drive to play it and it will probably die anyway in like 2031 when bill gates finally dies and microsoft decides to break all the win32 apis in his memory.
this sounds like a fucking uhh instagram artist type of statement but if you play any of my games and you send me a pic of you playing it on your computer that's very nice to me, because i'm just making some software for you to run on your computer and i like that you're doing that. i just want to manifest more of these types of objects into the world probably because of some sort of inexplicable impulse i guess, plus i just think making little puzzles and machines and toys for each other is a very interesting way to communicate and interact.