'I want to make games for people who read Gravity's Rainbow'

[John Bailey]

"Its ambitions are intellectual and philosophical – it strives to be,
and succeeds as, a work of serious thought..."

I played a few hours yesterday and at first thought it was a whole
heap of hype for a fairly standard puzzle game, but it's a) really
freakin' beautiful and b) induces a very tranquil state of
contemplation and slow thinking. Critics are saying it's pretty
solipsistic and in this way it's the opposite of GR - it refers to
nothing outside the parameters of the game itself, whereas GR alludes
to everything in the world - but I'm getting the feeling that smart
players will start to theorise about what the game might *really*
signify.

Braid was similar - I liked it but only years later appreciate its
overall importance. That was a work that seems almost explicitly
inspired by Gravity's Rainbow, featuring a plot that confuses a lost
love for a nuclear device.

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 6:19 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's just mean.
>
> J
>
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Off to Steam as soon as I read it - thanks!
>>
>> Long ago, teaching at Dalton School in NYC, I put together an experimental
>> course on "literature of childhood": books and stories for, about, and by
>> children, Including of course Alice in Wonderland & TTLG.
>>
>> The school encouraged multimodal projects, and three of the students did an
>> "Alice" board game with very good, painstaking artwork. It was just like
>> Monopoly, with locations from the books instead of Atlantic City streets,
>> and "bread" (buttered tea-party style) instead of money. So far, so
>> moderately imaginative. What made it Carrollian was that landing on two of
>> the squares -- or using any of several "get out of jail free"-style chance
>> cards -- swapped players: you (Twedledum) took over the Queen of Hearts'
>> token and its position, her bread and properties, and she got yours. All
>> game tactics, of course, went madly meta, and half the class played it
>> obsessively for hours on end to determine if the game could be gamed to
>> restore any notion of "winning."
>>
>> I told the creators that I was awarding an A, a C, and an F, and they could
>> roll the dice for them.
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 11:56 AM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/27/jonathan-blow-designer-video-games-braid-the-witness
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l