Because gamification (a design strategy that uses motivation-oriented game components to promote consumption, labor, and education) and convergence culture (the flow of content across multiple media platforms) are already core components of contemporary capitalism, Speculation’s ARG format offers a platform for thinking within and through our contemporary information economy. From cryptographic puzzles and online simulations to live performances and geocached dead drops, Speculation incorporates a wide range of media to imagine a transmedia world based on the culture of Wall Street investment banks and the context of the 2008 global economic collapse. This essay explores ARGs in relation to digital media and finance capital through the case study of Speculation, a game that we directed and cocreated with students at the University of Chicago and Duke University throughout 2012. Hence the worlds created by Amanita Design seem to be the answer to the dominant hyper-realistic aesthetics of mainstream games.Īlongside computer games and video games, a more experimental ludic form emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century: alternate reality games (ARGs). The new reality, however radically anti-realistic, does not try to pretend to be something else than itself. Every time they set a spatially complex structure in the two-dimensional environment of the game, it manages, despite its fantastic nature, to maintain its full integrity. The creators base their technique on a deconstruction of one reality, and at the same time they build entirely new worlds. Such refined structure of virtual assemblage seems to escape the concept of simulacrum. The structure of these game cluster spaces is built not only from material artefacts of human culture but also from the elements of nature. These examples are particularly interesting as the artistic technique in this case goes beyond the aesthetic aspects (visual art and music) and the narration, and actively informs the gameplay. This paper will show how the collage technique actively influences the structure of Amanita Designs’ games, such as Samorost series, Botanicula, Machinarium.
0 kommentar(er)
