Expedition 11
The Bathysphere
Welcome to the 11th journey of the Bathysphere. This week Christian writes about the idea of photogrammic games, Keith is stuck in another strange horror game and Florence looks forward to a festival of interactive performance. As ever, some of the newsletter is available for free, but some is only available with a paid subscription. On that subject we are currently working on making the archive of previous Bathysphere expeditions available to paying subscribers, but our host ButtonDown is having to fix a bug. More news soon. For now, please enjoy the journey.
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
Veteran Finnish developer Jesse Makkonen’s latest project is well worth a look on Steam, especially if you love idiosyncratic horror. Without a Dawn is a visual novel about a woman seeking isolation in a woodland cabin and getting more than she bargained for. With a striking and unusual ASCII art-inspired aesthetic, it’s a short, hallucinatory experience. (CW for self-harm). KS
I’ve been back on the Playdate this week, largely consumed by Subset’s whirligig delight Fulcrum Defender, which kicks off the console’s second season of games. But I’ve been reminded that while Playdate’s a fascinating machine in its own right, it’s also a really lovely controller.
Plug the Playdate into a laptop and you can operate it on a bigger screen, using software called Mirror that is available on Playdate’s website. For me, it makes the newsprint feel of the graphics even more newsprinty. It’s a proper delight. CD
Interesting things
The V&A’s new exhibition Design and Disability opens on 7th June and it looks absolutely fascinating. It examines the radical ways that “Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people and communities” contribute to design and culture.
I’ve always felt you can see this kind of thing very clearly in videogames, even if it’s something relatively straightforward like the threat awareness ring in Fortnite that makes all nearby sonic elements of the game visible. It’s transformative stuff and beautifully crafted, and it highlights, in one simple example, how much creativity is taking place in accessibility alone. CD
Hideo Kojima once had a regular column with Glixel, a gaming website set up by Rolling Stone, which was shut down a few years ago. To mark the imminent arrival of Death Stranding 2 (so much topicality this week! What has happened to us?!), I just wanted to link to this Reddit post which has archived links to all of Kojima’s writing for the site. He is a divisive figure, and there is a lot to discuss about who gets to be an auteur in this industry, but these pieces are interesting and revealing, particularly about the Metal Gear series. KS
Algoraves are events where people bop and generally enjoy music generated by algorithms, coded live. The algoraves scene is really thriving in London right now, with events every month including open mic slots for beginners to take part. If you’re interested, a good way to keep in touch with the algo-grapevine is algorave_london on Instagram. FSN
Voidspace Live is a festival of interactive performance and playable art hosted at Theatre Deli in London over the coming weekend. There’s everything from LARPs to interactive dance performances and a poetry installation. It’s a bit short notice, but there are still tickets available for Sunday 8th June. I’ll be there! FSN
Essay: Photograms but for games by Christian Donlan
In last week’s email I wrote a little bit about photograms – photographs taken without a traditional camera – which are a new obsession of mine. Cyanotypes are a good, cheap example of this: you lay some specially treated paper out in the sun with an object on top of it, and after a while you get a sort of photograph of that object.
Learn about cyanotypes and they crop up all over the place. If you live in Brighton and know the Starbucks next to the library, those big floral prints on the walls are cyanotypes, I think, made of different overlapping plants.
Something else that crops up all over the place is the idea of photograms but for different artforms. This week, with the Switch 2 on the way – and this is as topical as this newsletter will ever get – I’ve been thinking about my favourite consoles, but I’ve also been pondering games that exist outside of consoles and PCs and the traditional places where games are found, digital and physical. These are the sort of photogram equivalent – games made without traditional game stuff. And they’re all over the place too.
I started off thinking about games that exist online or in the digital world in places they aren’t meant to be – like the games that are coded to run inside browser URL windows, or all the versions of Doom that have been made to play on scientific calculators and the computers that come in fancy fridges.
Beyond that there are games that just crop up in odd places. Fellow, which makes high-end coffee machinery that I inevitably really want, also hide games in their machines. These are photogram games, I would argue, as was the weird snail maze game that fired up if you accidentally turned on a Master System without a cartridge in the slot. Yes, it was a game console, but that snail game really didn’t feel like it was meant to be there.
I think the ultimate example of this kind of game is probably something like avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk. As long as there have been cracks in paving and feet to walk over them people have been playing this game. No consoles or boards or counters. No designer even – we all design it independently. (Is parkour the ultimate extension of this? – KS)
And one last example. Over the last few months I have fallen deeply, improbably in love with oscilloscopes, which I’ve also written about in this newsletter. Tennis for Two was a very early game that played out on the oscilloscope, so I figure that’s kind of the patron figure of photogram games. No console involved, by definition, but I think these weird, scattered kinds of games might be my favourite format of game in general.
Apologies if I’ve accidentally typed Phantogram in here at any point instead of photogram. I do love that band tho.
Retrospective adventures
This week I wanted to share a cartoon with you from Blip, Marvel’s short-lived video game magazine from the early 1980s. You can find scanned copies on the Internet Archive and they’re worth browsing for their extremely contemporary approach to games writing. I really like this image because it’s actually quite a profound, multi-layered comment on the gaming experience and the notion of avatars, immersion and control. As you’d expect from Marvel, Blip was full of comic strips and cartoons, but this was actually common in early video game mags, as it was often difficult to capture screenshots of actual games, and also the simple graphics weren’t always that compelling on the page. Also, before the development of a critical vernacular to examine video games and their milieu, cartoons were sometimes the only exploration of game playing culture and conventions. Lastly, the artist’s interpretation of Mario is, let’s say, unusual. KS