Blips: Drifting Off

Source: Proteus (Review)
Author: Gregg B.
Site: Tap Repeatedly

I can't pass up a good Proteus review, which is why I'm pleased to share this recent take from Gregg B for Tap Repeatedly. One thing he picked up on that slipped past me was the wide range of control configurations that Proteus allows, and how this makes the game feel more comfortable. I ended up not caring much for Dear Esther and was vindicated to hear from someone else that they too grew tired of depressing the UP arrow key (and little else) for the entirety of that game. Proteus is lumped into a similar walkabout genre with Dear Esther, but in contrast, it in no way feels laborious. Where Dear Ester was a path littered with trip wires that trigger obtuse voiceovers, Proteus is a living, breathing place that invites genuine exploration.

I've continued to play Proteus when I need a good come down. Some people drink tea, others listen to music, but I've found that Proteus is actually the perfect fit for this, and it seems like Gregg B is in agreement. He calls the game "tranquil and blissfully calming" and admits to wandering off to sleep not long after playing the game. I'm in no way saying that Proteus is boring, quite the opposite, but it has a different effect on me than most games. In fact, I don't have any other games that really provide the same effect, and this is likely because most games aren't built for relaxation. Even the gorgeous serenity of Journey is wrapped up in bouts of dramatic tension. There's something truly unique and, dare I say, beautiful to Proteus, and that something is everything that it is.

Blips: Actions into Words

Source: Verbs
Author: Mitch Krpata
Site: Insult Swordfighting

What do you do in a video game? No, like what do you do? When trying to come up with a basic description of a game, it's helpful to frame it as a series of verbs. For a game like Space Invaders, there aren't very many: aim shoot, dodge. Things get more complicated in games that begin to add contextual modifiers to those verbs, which you can think of as adverbs. In the Street Fighter series you can kick your opponent, but there are different buttons for different kinds of kicks, further modified by whether your character is in the air, standing, or crouching. Mechanically speaking though, you're still just kicking.

These verbs are commonly referred to in game design as "mechanics," but I appreciated Mitch Krpata's use of the word "verbs" to describe them because it gets at a more plain-spoken understanding of what options a particular game provides. In his piece, Krpata laments the lack of evolution in the verbs of the Grand Theft Auto series over the years, and the limited verbs of Bioshock Infinite in comparison to Dishonored. Having mechanical variety can offer more agency to the player, allowing them to approach situations in ways they see fit.

While I definitely see where Krpata is coming from, part of me sees this as a matter of personal preference. Krpata himself says that there's nothing inherently wrong with a game like Bioshock Infinite focusing on shooting instead of anything else, it just frames the protagonist's role in the game world under limited terms. Games with few verbs tend to focus on perfecting mechanical execution of those actions over time, but can also be implemented in gameplay that isn't "skill-based." In Proteus, your verbs are walk, look, and sit. There's no way to "get better" at these things, but simply doing them is pleasurable and entertaining. Proteus doesn't need to be a sandbox of mechanics to be interesting because the island you explore is what's interesting, not so much your "character."

Games use verbs to place you in an empathetic mindset with the protagonist. I haven't played Bioshock Infinite, but I suspect the issue might be that the game's world and narrative express a depth that is hamstrung by your limited mechanics. In Proteus, this isn't a problem because the low mechanical focus puts the emphasis on the island instead, which does all sorts of things that would go unnoticed if you were busy playing around with a list of verbs. I hope this illustrates that mechanical diversity should be taken on a case-by-case basis, and that the verbs that make one game great, could very easily ruin another one.

Blips: Musical Landscape

Source: Listening to Proteus
Author: Daniel Golding
Site: Meanjin

I've written about Proteus at length on this blog, Kill Screen, and re/Action, and yet, as Daniel Golding proves in a recent piece for Meanjin, there's still more to say about the game. While there are plenty of interesting insights in Golding's piece, his comparison of Proteus to the work of composer John Luther Adams is the most striking. Adams lives and works in Alaska and has created a piece that is a kind of generative music system titled The Place Where You Go To Listen. I'd encourage you to check out the article for the fascinating full context, but essentially this piece is a musical installation that responds to live meteorological and seismological data by emitting accompanying tones and rumbles. Even the aurora borealis has it's own particular sound range, making every visitors' experience with the work different than those who came before.

While Adams' installation presents the "sounds of the earth," Proteus, as Golding points out, puts some of that compositional responsibility in the hands of the player. While we can assume raindrops in Proteus make the same jingly bell noises whether you're around to hear them or not, other sounds require action on the part of the player to bring them out –action like walking past a line of gravestones or chasing frogs and squirrels. You get to play a conductor of sorts in Proteus, except you walk around an island instead of waving a baton. Both Proteus and Adams' Place emphasize an ephemeral, performative quality to their musical compositions, but employ different methods of listener involvement.

Blips: Look At Me

Source: Twilight Crossfade
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: re/Action

I just wanted to take a minute to share my first ever post for re/Action! I got to write about DJing, Proteus, Miasmata, and photography. So, it's got pretty much all of my top interests rolled up into one piece about transitions. Check it out, and be sure to look around at other essays on re/Action, which is fast becoming a hotbed of talented writers and subjects that aren't your typical video game feature fare. They're launching a crowd-funding initiative next month, so be on the lookout. Lastly, if you're wondering which songs I used in my DJ mix examples, they're Moby's "Disco Lies (The Dusty Kid's Fears Remix)" and Daft Punk's "Phoenix."

Blips: Free Rhythm Games

Source: Everyone Chases the Frogs: The Changing Sound of Video Game Music
Author: Jeff Siegel
Site: Red Bull Music Academy

The "music game" genre is currently comprised mostly of mechanics based on precise execution and/or recitation of existing tracks or performances. On one hand you have literal instumentation games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band where the original recordings are king, and on the other you have dance games like Dance Central and Dance Dance Revolution where the choreography rules the land. Both of these branches of music games are structured for testing, not play. You might cite console-based music creating tools like Beaterator or MTV Music Generator as genuine music production tools, but the unsharable nature of your finished tracks, clunky UI, and rise of free professional production software alternatives makes them all but irrelevent.

Thankfully, some very inspired game music composers have stepped up to blur the line between "music games" as we know them, and other types of games. In his piece for Red Bull Music Academy, Jeff Siegel speaks with both Ryan Roth and David Kanaga, whose work on Starseed Pilgrim, Proteus, and Dyad have staked new territory for music-centric gameplay. The interactivity of these games does not exist on a separate layer from the music. Your actions in the game actually make the music, but it occurs in an even more organic fashion than stylistic progenitor Rez.

I think back to this Kotaku piece on video game music as optional to the experience, and have to wonder if games produced with integrated compositions would shift opinions on the matter. I certainly can't imagine playing these games without sound, and in fact find this new emerging sub-genre to be one of the most exciting developments currently growing in the game industry.

Ever-Present: Proteus (Mac) Review

Your eyes open.

You're standing on water, but can't look at yourself to see how it's possible. Moving forward in a smooth, hovering fashion, an island appears in the distance. Music manifests out of the air and from the living plants and creatures on the island. You hear the sound of cascading flutes and sliding, almost theremin-like, synthesizer tones interjected with arrhythmic bells and chimes. You proceed further into the island. The trees are lush with pink flowers. Frogs, squirrels, rabbits, and crabs are just some of the active wildlife you encounter; each goes about its business, only scurrying away when you get close. It feels like springtime and the island is so teeming with life, it's singing.

Eventually, the sun disappears beneath the horizon and night falls. Shooting stars paint the deep blue sky with streaks of light. In the distance you notice a swarm of twinkling sprites hanging low like a fog. Egging flickers beckon you nearer, showing the way. You come upon the glimmering mass above a circle of gravestones. You cross their perimeter and the lights begin to swirl into a spinning hoop near the ground. The music flurries with excitement like a Four Tet track coming to a head. You look up to witness day and night cycles speed past in mere moments, like the view from the surface of a globe as someone bats it with their fingertips at full force. The sun and the moon take turns flinging from east to west. You enter the cyclone and everything turns white.

When you come to, you notice a new, drier color palette and bizarre flying creatures whose chirps sound like wood block strums. The whole island has transitioned to another phase. Spring has given way to summer.

This is likely how the beginning of your first run through Proteus will go down. The game does not pedantically tell you what you need to do, but it does imply direction through visual and audible cues. Most importantly, it invites you to play with locative music systems in a retro-fantastical environment. There is a minimalist narrative and a definitive end to Proteus, but due to its brief duration, you'll want to play it multiple times. Like a live stage performance, many elements of Proteus' island will reappear on successive playthroughs, but always in a slightly tweaked arrangement.

Proteus is a game that values the present above all else. The island is procedurally generated when you click to start play, and will render uniquely for every new beginning. With any real world location there is an implicit history and an undetermined future, but Proteus' island is your ephemeral playground –born into existence at your whim, and gone forever when you're finished. Even if the island had a life beyond your play time, your presence has no empirical effect on it. There's no evidence that you actually touch the island; you begin Proteus in the ocean and end it in the sky.

Your life in Proteus is ultimately transient, drifting through the seasons until reaching the game's inevitable finale in an hour or less. You can avoid the sparkling portals and remain in spring for as long as you want, but the transports will remain, persistently summoning you to march onward with their tantalizing chimes and magic potential. At some point you'll run out of things to do and succumb to progression.

There's no turning back from the decision to shift time forward. Once the season has changed, it's impossible to reverse it. However, since Proteus can have such a brisk run-time, there's no pressure to see everything in one go. Each successive playthough is likely to reveal something new about the island that you didn't come across before. You're part of the island's live act, and it's a venue that prides itself on improv.

The locative sound and music design in Proteus is a hybrid of live performance and musique concrète that pushes you to compose music instead of merely listening to it. To play Proteus is to be a kind of live found-sound DJ. Everything and everywhere on the island is musical. Muted horns bleat from hilltops at all times, awaiting your open ear, and dull bass rumbles emanate from gravestones as you pass each individually. The possibilities for music composition in Proteus are meant to mimic what it's like to listen to the world around you, like a virtual John Cage experiment.

Speaking again to Proteus' impermanent tendencies, there is no way to record music mixes in-game. If you want to listen to the sounds of Proteus, you have to get in there and actively trigger them again. This is not such a bad thing since, pleasant as Proteus is to listen to, the music works best as an accompaniment to the pixelated island. Removed from the computer screen, your score would still sound like a component of a larger work. When you play Proteus, you generate (or curate) sounds as part of the whole experience; it's not a stand-alone music production tool.

You may not be able to record your musical performances in Proteus, but you can actually save your progress using the game's Postcard system. To generate a Postcard you can press F9 to snap a screenshot containing code-embedded pixels that the game can use to rebuild the island depicted in the image. At first this may seem to disrupt Proteus' transient motif, but consider that these save states are called Postcards for a reason. Postcards, in Proteus or otherwise, are meant for sharing. Traditionally when you buy a postcard, you write about where you are and what you've been doing recently on the back and mail it off to a friend or loved one. You'll probably never see that postcard again, but will potentially always remember the events that you wrote about. Likewise, you'll recall the first time you see an aurora borealis in Proteus, but to return to that moment via Postcard removes the euphoria of discovery from the equation. Your save state is interactive nostalgia, and only a facade of what you remember.

In 2007 French house music duo Daft Punk embarked on a much-lauded live performance tour. They garnered a great deal of attention for their accompanying light show that included multiple layers of LED-laced gridwork, complete with a glowing pyramid for the band's cockpit. The visual show was a vital part of what made the tour special, even though the music itself had its own constant stream of highlights. A live album was released, but never a video supplement. Band member Thomas Bangalter addressed the curious omission, saying "the thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released." Basically, you either had to be there or the closest you're going to get to the feeling of the show is the shaky, blurry phone camera footage of fans recording as the dance in a crowded pit full of raw energy.

Proteus is a far more subdued undertaking than a Daft Punk show, but the notion of presence, the physicality of sharing a space with a spectacular event, is equally resonant. Proteus' island is not a front for developer-mandated objectives, it's a place that you live, and life is short. The fleeting, untouchable nature of Proteus is a call for action, participation, and creation. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Proteus' Photogenic Landscape

I've been playing and thinking a lot about Proteus. In addition to a review I intend to write (done), I also discuss the game's musical systems in a forthcoming piece for Kill Screen (also done). Player-driven sound composition is the driving force behind Proteus' incentive to explore, but it's visuals deserve special recognition as well. I'm burned out on pixel art, but Proteus' mixture of flat-shaded polygons, gradient-laden color fields, and always-facing-you sprites hits a nice balance; no 8-bit nostalgia required.

I primarily play video games on consoles, but when I do play on my Mac, I like to take screenshots. Sure I use them in blog posts, but I also just enjoy in-game photography. With IRL cameras, landscape photography is not my thing, but Proteus presents such strikingly beautiful vistas, I couldn't resist.

After I'd already taken the shots you'll find below, I learned about Proteus' Postcard feature, where you can take screenshots using the F9 key. The resulting png files also have data embedded in one of their corners so the game can recreate the world from the image. This means if you run across a rare weather occurrence, you can both snap a dynamic picture and a shareable save state all at once. It's pretty neat.

Again, unfortunately none of my images are Postcards, but I didn't think I could recreate these same images on a new island so I'm sharing them as is. Enjoy.