Expedition 22
The Bathysphere
Welcome back for our next decent! Floss has spent the past week pretending to be someone else. Chris ponders games that pick a direction and messes around with a Game Boy camera, while Keith tracks down one of the first news reports on that wonderful photographic peripheral.
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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
Not a game exactly, but Riley Testut has made an emulator of the Game Boy Camera. It’s available on their Patreon while it’s in beta. You will need a ROM for the Game Boy Camera to run it, but the pictures feel very, very close to the pictures my Game Boy Camera still takes! It’s lovely stuff. CD
LITHOBREAKERS is an artist collective that holds an anonymous game jam twice a year. Their latest jam theme was “World Wide Weird,” and this was interpreted in every way you could imagine, from a cave painting simulator to a Twine game about internet cryptids. FSN
Interesting things
Fans of Mini Motorways might enjoy UnMapping LA, which is currently running in the Los Angeles Public Library. It’s an examination of the role of freeways in LA’s history and what good might come of some of them not being there. Debra Scacco’s art is wonderful. I wish I could go to this. CD
I was in Poland for a larp earlier this week, and now I’m in Czechia for another one! Larp stands for live-action role-playing, which involves physically acting out scenarios. An oft-discussed concept in larp is bleed, which refers to emotions bleeding over between a player and their character. If you’re interested to learn more I’d recommend this piece by Mátyás Hartyándi called “Bleed Before it was Cool: Early descriptions of dissimulative pretense, their unintended effects, and their impact on the evolution of roleplaying.” FSN
If you happen to be in Canada at the end of September, the organisers of the annual Vancouver Game Garden, a celebration of the city’s thriving indie development scene, have announced the line-up for this year’s event. Taking place on September 27-28, there are dozens of intriguing games on show and it’s free to attend. Even if you can’t get there, it’s worth visiting the exhibitor list to glimpse the games on offer. KS
Essay: Up or Down?
Without intending to, I’ve been reading a lot, and playing a lot, around the act of descent recently. In terms of reading, I’ve just finished Brad Fox’s Bathysphere Book, about the explorations of William Beebe and his colleagues. I think I wrote briefly about it last week. Beebe explored the ocean depths in a bathysphere off the coast of Nonsuch Island in Bermuda in the 1930s. The book is impossible for me to describe - it contains so much! - but it has this wonderful sense of descent running right through the middle of it. Beebe goes down and down and down into the darkness and sees beautiful, terrifying things and he brings back the faintest ghost of what he’s witnessed.
Slope downwards to thy depths, o sea! At the same time, back on dry land, I’ve been playing A Game about Digging a Hole. This is exactly what it sounds like, and yet it’s impossible to fully describe in its own way. What I can say is this: I bounced off it on PC, but on iOS it’s utterly compelling. The screen in your hands, that sense that mobile games have of offering you a portal within the face of a pebble.
Anyway, in A Game about Digging a Hole, you dig a hole in a back garden somewhere in pleasant suburbia. It’s very almost a clicker. You go deeper and get better ores that you then come up and sell to improve your kit. Better kit then allows you to go deeper and get better ores. You punch holes in the earth, which means that you’re often left with these little twills of dirt hanging in the air. Down and down you go, like Beebe, but you can place lamps on the walls to bring a little light to the darkness. There’s the sense, entirely palpable and unsettling, of digging towards something significant.
A couple of things about this game. One of them is the simple genius of it taking place in your back garden. You get down in the earth, in the oppressive depths, and even on a phone screen it can get to be too much. You’re so far from the sun! So you rocket pack back to the surface, hoping you have enough fuel to get you there, and the moment you explode into a landscape of sunlight and sparrow chatter and green grass is just glorious. Properly glorious. And incongruous, too. It reminds me of that last shot of one of the Portal games - I can’t remember which one - when you just get a glimpse of the main character collapsing onto the tarmac of a corporate car park. Free and under an open sky at last!
The other thing is that, while A Game about Digging a Hole is a fancy 3D affair, it does really remind me of a Commodore 64 game. Not any one in particular, but just the vibe. In retrospect, the Commodore was the king of enclosed spaces: Impossible Mission, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. So many great games at that time came with a sense of being sealed into their worlds.
All of these things together have made me think: how great it is when a game picks a direction. How strange and compelling. Exploration, I suspect, benefits from a little focus. Just a little. Like a direction: you’re headed down, or headed up. What will you find?
This simple trick explains to me at least part of why I find games like Spelunky and the recent Donkey Kong so compelling: I know where I’m going. But crucially, I don’t know what I’ll find there. So there will be that sense of expectation and excitement and I go deeper and deeper and - cor! - there can’t be more depth left, surely/
The same goes for heading upwards, of course. There’s a lovely vertiginous dungeon in The Minish Cap, I think, that turns the idea of a dungeon upside down and thrusts you high into the air. It’s magical. Ditto scaling mountains and skyscrapers: Jusant and Crackdown and 1001st Hyper Tower. There’s that sense of arrival, of being somewhere rare and precarious. There’s that sense, above all else, of a journey. CD
Retrospective adventures
As Chris mentioned the Game Boy Camera, I couldn’t resist sharing this news spread from Japan’s GameBoy magazine, published in January 1998. It’s an excited look at the coming tech, giving the domestic release date – 21 February 1998 – plus the expected prices for the camera (5500 yen) and the printer (5800 yen). The article promises a whole new way to play with the handheld and it focuses on the fun social possibilities. I remember we got hold of one on Edge and it accompanied us to the pub that night – the resulting images were largely unusable in the magazine. KS