It's pushing! It's running! It's reaching! It's suffering! It's five ancient greek punishments for the effort of one! It's everything!
Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One is yet another new edition in the Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment series, focusing on a retelling of five (kind of) mythological punishments. In Five in One you live the excitement of all five punishments at the same time.
Timeline
? As in, all games are overlaid. The background of the lowermost level is the amalgam of all background colours (because otherwise you end up with each game's background overlaying and thus dimming/obscuring the lower-placed game, which gives the impression of a prioritisation).
? I've changed the input over to clicking because I want this to work on mobile. (In Tantalus you click on the upper or lower half to aim for the two objectives.)
? I need to think about the concept of instructions here. It would be funny to have them all overlaid in their positions as per the originals, but I suspect they could be illegible? Though if not then that's probably the way to go. I guess I need to have them there either way and we just see how it looks.
? Naturally they end up looking pretty insane and overlappy but I tested with Gina and she was able to read them eventually and understand how to play the game, so I think we're okay on that front. I enjoy the chaotic look of it quite a lot.
? And that's about a wrap at this point? Does it need a title screen? Perhaps it does... just a click-to-continue kind of thing.
? While riding on the metro, either like a boss or like a person who has no work boundaries any more.
? Still needs testing in terms of playability on a mobile device, particularly the ol' portrait mode. Might need a hair more work, we'll see. Otherwise largely compelte.
? Essentially it now just takes up as much space as possible, like an obnoxious manspreading man. But this is probably for the best on mobile. Need to check on landscape etc., but I'm optimistic?
Low technical challenge, the artifact matters, mechanical aesthetics, efficiency, abstract input
Guess I never even wrote a process journal entry for this project?
Low technical challenge
In a sense that kind of makes sense: it's not a project that involves any design thinking at all really beyond the initial idea? And the idea itself is ultimately a technical one (with aesthetic implications). All that was required was to make sure I could
- Display every game simultaneously (which required removing their backgrounds and making their sprites semi-transparent and then placing a combo-background at the back)
- Control every game simultaneously (which required moving over to click-based/touch-based input and just check the input in the same way across the games)
Both of those aren't terribly challenging technical problems to solve and they didn't take very long to do.
The result is, I think, pretty nice to look at and maybe interesting to think about.
The artifact matters
The main "thinking" line I have on this revolves around the idea of execution as opposed to thought-experiments. The 5-in-1 is a very clear idea and to some extent you can simply visualise what "it would be like" in your head and perhaps leave it at that. One argument I think I want to be able to make is that actually producing the thing itself and experiencing "the real thing" is distinct enough that it's generally a worthwhile activity (especially in cases where the production is maybe not too difficult?).
Mechanical asthetics
As such, in really playing the 5-in-1 you get things like the actual interplay of the different figures, noticing for instance that you end up seeing all four of the smaller figures (excluding Tantalus) overlapping in the centre at certain moments, which is a nice metaphor for their shared experience of repetitive punishment? Or just the interplay of their images as they move back and forth - it almost resembles some kind of machinery, with pistons moving back and forth at different rates? Similarly, the soundscape is quite pleasing with its beeps and boops and swoops - again perhaps evokes the sense of machinery.
Efficiency
The other angle on this is more philosophical, which is that idea of "efficiency" as applied to the punishments. In combining all five punishments into the same game you end up being able to go through the punishments at the same time, streamlining/parallelising the punishments. (This actually evokes ideas around processor design I suppose, and forms of information processing?) With the irony being, of course, that getting a higher throughput of punishment isn't actually something that lets you evade the core punishment itself - you're punished at 5 times the value, but because it's infinite, this isn't really anything to write home about?
Abstract input
A "final" angle here is a more game studies one, which is that idea of multiple representations tied to the same input. We can thinking "clicking" as a form of physical activity or effort, and here that effort is used to "power" multiple forms of interaction - it means pushing and filling and struggling and reaching and running all at the same time. This is a (very gentle) look at the abstraction of game controls - the meaning applied to the physical effort/input of a player can be very different and lead to different understandings of what it means. It points to the metaphor directly?
So?
Overall it's clear that this is a low-investment project that I think has a reasonably high return in terms of the possible thinking it can point to both for me and for a potential player/critic. I'm particularly taken by the machinery aesthetics idea, which I hadn't really thought of until I really tried to characterise the experience of watching all the games at once, so I like that.