The Graveyard: a new art game
(Visited 4964 times) Game talk
Apr 022008
Second in my spate of backlogged posts here, I wanted to call attention to The Graveyard.
The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.
Buying the full version of The Graveyard adds only one feature, the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.
4 Responses to “The Graveyard: a new art game”
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Definitely “enjoyable” (in the way that looking at a painting is), but I wouldn’t call it a game.
One could do a whole series of these things focused on the various emotional scenarios. Is there a label for this kind of thing?
$5 for the full version. For such a short vignette, it’s too much (maybe if there were a dozen scenarios in it).
From a more technical perspective, it’s a shame that one must install (and then uninstall) to view this.
Try http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/rol/TheRiverofLife.wrl
An explorable painting is how it was described, but my own description is of a virtual reality musical album.
The one certainty of the web is that for any new thing, there will be a few hundred people claiming they invented it. It is a ghetto medium that way.
But the fun of one of these is that over time, one can keep developing it and inscribing deeper or broader levels of expressiveness. The trick is the media or platform has to be stable enough to last and that is seldome true of game or iron-based low-level programming systems. It is true of language-based standard systems. Devs don’t get that because they live too close to the metal. Artists get that when they watch yet another start up based on proprietary or open source code crumble and the months of even years of work on a piece evaporate without remorse or recourse.
It’s an interesting concept. I wonder how one feels if she dies? Does this inspire deeper thoughts and, well, the “meaning of life” kind of self delving?
That’s one way to take the painting and add more experiece, Amar. With ROL, I had plans to do more with the cyclic walk Kamala makes through the temples. If the watcher knows a bit of Hindu philosophy and culture, there is one object that can be moved. If dragged to the right place, it does a certain act and that act frees her from the cycle. Then another cycle would begin. Each cycle requires a certain act. It isn’t meant to be a challenging game experience in the sense of faster reflexes and stacking up points for a level, but to cause her to evolve and while doing so, see what she sees and feel that in the images, music and poetry going by. It works more like a live music gig where each song contributes to the set and each set contributes to the finish.
She won’t die. She is already a ghost. The question for the watchers, are, are they alive at the end of the cycle of cycles? Row row row the boat…
Finishing that will take the rest of my life certainly. That’s the one thing the market underestimates: the effort particularly if it is only one artist. Building a room full of widgets and building a cyclic virtual painting are two very different levels of effort.