“If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t have been bold enough to strip all gameplay mechanics, games like those pave the way for creative individuals to try new things. LSD Dream emulator, Myst and Journey inspired to deconstruct the controls, leaving only the chromatics and audio to play with. You have to look at TRIP because that is all there is to accomplish, but more importantly, that is all you want to do. Your sole interaction is movement in first person, there are no quests or challenges. These visuals demand your attention by force feeding you colour and Shokk emphasises this through a pared down interface. Riotous hues punctuate the senses with geometric spikes and impossible stellations, even blades of grass are composed of bar charts that sway gently in the wind. The creativity Shokk has explicated on-screen is startling and officiously stands atypical next to other games. TRIP is the projected mind of an artist named Axel Shokk, and it explodes through the screen in aesthetic delirium. But if the obstacle courses and challenges are removed, why would you need them? If we reduce interactivity to a minimum would we still label the work as a game? and there is a tendency to disdain visions that do not tick these boxes.
Quests, stories and collectibles prompt our journeying and ultimately sustain our desire to ‘win’, but what if there were no pursuits or anecdotes and what if the feat of collecting didn’t return any tangible assets? The foundations of traditional games rely on the inputs of interactivity jump, push, pull, hit etc. If you could walk through the mind of an artist would you need distractions to validate that exploration?
0 kommentar(er)
