Hello there! Today we’re going into the deep with a camera. Well, a cameraphone, at any rate. Welcome aboard!

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I recently discovered the concept of a “SOUP-like,” a game that emulates the style of an obscure Japanese video game called SOUP that came out in 2007 in which you walk through abstract rooms and generally have a good time. There was recently a SOUP jam on itch so you can peruse a whole new menu of artisanal SOUPs. FSN

Interesting things

I’m going to shamelessly use this spot to plug a call for zines as part of a Games and Archaeological Play workshop myself and Mike Cook are running at the FDG conference in August. Anyone can submit a zine broadly related to the theme of archaeology and games - you don’t need to attend or register to take part! We’re hoping to put together a little zine library as part of the workshop. The deadline in July 17th, more details here. FSN

Essay: Roll for memories

Pictonico! came out a few weeks ago, but I’ve only just had time to really play it. It’s utterly fascinating. It’s a Nintendo smartphone game, co-developed by the authentic geniuses at Intelligent Systems. On one hand it’s a fairly straightforward riff on the WarioWare formula. On the other...

If you’ve played WarioWare in the past you’ll understand the deal immediately. Each round flings a bunch of tiny games at you, and in each of them you have a few seconds to work out what to do and then do it. You’ll need to wash someone’s hair in one of them, say, and then spot a ghost in the next. These games really rush at you and are gone just as swiftly. The whole thing’s wonderfully responsive and imaginative.

But there’s more to it, because the whole gimmick is that the game uses pictures from your phone’s camera roll to populate the games. So that person washing their hair? One moment it’s my daughter. And then the next time I play, it’s a PhotoShop of Terry Wogan a friend made for me because we both though the Wogan Experience would be a funny joke. (It kind of was. I miss you, Terry!)

Equally, the location where I was spotting ghosts was my house the first time I encountered it, but the second time it was my mum’s old kitchen and a photo I’d taken to check on some potential mold.

This gets at what’s so fascinating about Pictonico! I think. Essentially, we take camera phone pictures for a lot of reasons - a lot more reasons than we ever took 35mm pictures, for sure. Forget holidays and graduations. I have pictures of receipts and pictures of restaurant names I want to look up, alongside pictures of friends and families and pretty vistas. There’s also a question of volume. I’ve got 17,000 pictures on my phone at the moment, going back the best part of a decade, because my roll’s been steadily growing for years and following me between upgrades.

This length of time is interesting, because - well, I will put it like this: It took about an hour of playing for Pictonico! to build a mini-game around the face of an old friend who is no longer with us. Suddenly they were a bike courier delivering something to my door. I gasped when I saw them - you? Here? - and had to sit down for a few minutes and look out the window. A few hours later, Pictonico! came up with an ancient picture of a step-sibling I don’t see enough, leading to a long overdue phonecall, just to say hello.

I’m fascinated by the human messiness that this game allows for, just because it draws so much from your phone’s camera roll. Of course, there are guide rails in place and you can control which photos it has access to. Only a genuine weirdo like me would give it all 17,000! But I did, and the results have been kind of thrilling. Familiarity crossed with surrealism, unexpected people turning up in unexpected places. And all of it a reminder, to me at least, of how phones haven’t just made us take more pictures, but have made us rethink what pictures are often for. CD