Blips: Give 'em a Chance

Source: How an artist turned Shadow of the Colossus into a rumination on chance
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I'm elated that my piece on artist Oliver Payne's exhibition at Herald St in London has finally been published. Payne's show opened way back in February of this year and features a video of an installation with Shadow of the Colossus being played on two monitors simultaneously. Using video games in artwork is not an easy thing to do without the result coming out as pandering or nerdily out of touch, but this piece was much better than that. I contacted Oliver in April and we slowly exchanged emails throughout the summer (luckily I didn't have a deadline!). Finally I had enough to go on to complete my article, which was submitted in August, but seeing as it was about an art show that closed 6 months ago, featuring an already-thoroughly analyzed PS2 game, it was justifiably not top priority.

But hey, now it's here, and you can read all about the artwork's John Cage influence and how video games take on chance aesthetics, for yourself. Thanks for reading!

Blips: Secrets of the Colossus

 
Source: The Quest for Shadow of the Colossus' Last Big Secret 
Author: Craig Owens
Site: Eurogamer

Everything in a game is there for a reason. There's symbolism and deliberate design aplenty in Team Ico's PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus. Even though most of the landscape is empty of typical video game-y quests and characters, the pacing and journey through the vast expanses establishes a specific tone, which in turn colors the epic colossi battles when they occur. Sometimes though, the purpose of an object in game is a well hidden secret, and other times it's leftover from an element that was cut during development.

In Craig Ownes' piece for Eurogamer, he delves into a community of Shadow of the Colossus secret-seekers. These individuals have devised traversal methods for reaching areas unthinkable to the average player in hope of uncovering a hidden colossus fight. One seeker used a hacked version of the game to scour every bit of the existing terrain, discovering new landforms along the way. Still, a hidden colossus eluded secret-seeking the community.

I find the concept of secret-hunting in SotC perfectly fitting to the nature of its world. It's not that the game is largely empty, so there must be missing content, but that the game is structured around exploring ruins of a bygone age. The game is full of crumbling architecture that feels as if no one has visited for thousands of years. Secret-seekers take to the game like a relic full of riddles, concealed by code in the final retail version. It's a kind of meta-game usually reserved for the speed-run crowd (part of the SotC secret-seekers community, mind you), but here it's adventure, not execution that motives players to look deeper.