lend me ur eyes 081
I think that almost everything that people know about now comes from the videos on our phones. In the barbershop yesterday, the other guy getting a haircut was telling his barber about Arsenal and Michael Oliver and Saudi Arabia and how the PGMOL is corrupt. I recognised all the arguments he was making from videos I had seen on Instagram, and the way he delivered them was similar in style and sequence to the ways of the talking video men. Later the same day, I watched videos on Instagram for two hours without interruption. I tried to stop but found myself unable to pull away from the void. I watch videos where people who all own the same decorative books move various soft-hued lamps around different parts of a carefully calibrated room. I watch videos where people make coffee with expensive espresso-makers, play records very carefully on good sound systems, and project the same animated film through the same mini projector onto a wall. I watch videos where people put daily outfits together, which often start with a flash of them in their underwear. I watch videos called “top five Cole Palmer moments,” or “daily social reps,” or endless ones showing bulldogs on skateboards and odd noises being made by orange cats. Watching these videos makes me want to stay inside the house and buy new products. Beyond this, it’s unclear what I learn. People ask me what I’ve been doing recently, and I can’t say that I’ve been relaxing and watching videos on my phone. So I say nothing, and, for a second, have this vision in my head of a gravestone that has my name and then a line that reads: he enjoyed watching all of the videos on his phone.
The feeling that I have at the moment is that I am not doing anything. I cannot yet tell if this is a good or a bad thing - or possibly a bit of both. For many years people have telling me to try to learn how to relax. To learn to not see life as one long interconnected series of micro-projects, or an endless list of things to be consumed, commodified, and ticked off. To learn how to watch the programmes and turn the active brain off to become one with the television set. This has now been achieved, and one result is that I have little to no awareness of anything that is going on and minimal current motivation for that to change. I am unaware of all current culture or new trends. I am incurious about art. I have only a cursory understanding of world events. I do what people do: watch football matches and sitcoms, exercise, play video games, scroll on the telephone, eat big meals, and go to sleep. I am content in my stupefaction. I am totally relaxed. I open my phone and watch videos and think about which products I want to buy.
PLAYING
I have picked up a few 2024 games recently, in order to take a break from playing things made thirty years ago. I got Animal Well, a much praised 2D “search action game” made by a single developer who spent seven years making the game. I can’t yet quite tell what I think of it. It has beautiful pixel art and it is very intelligently designed. It does that really clever thing of making the player feel smart when they solve something by pushing them towards a direction that the game makes them feel they discovered themselves. Working something out or getting a new item opens up a number of new doors, and the game feels like it is always growing and expanding, sharing new secrets, and inviting creative thinking and intelligent forms of play. When I play it, I get completely sucked into its world. And yet, I don’t often want to play it because I know that playing it will involve lots of back-tracking and no small amount of puzzle-related frustration. At the moment I want games that stimulate, but not ones that make my head hurt.
Also on the deeper side, I played through 1000xRESIST, a really unique narrative game that tells a speculative-dystopian science fiction story that is a metaphor for, among other things, the recent protests in Hong Kong. Involving a future all-female society ran by a central figure and her various clones, the story unfolds over numerous chapters, using a kind of investigatory mechanic that involves moving around 3D space but also across various dimensions, time travelling back and forth to unearth more narrative fragments and piece together the expanding story’s full scope. The art is interesting and the narrative is fantastic, if often quite complex to parse. Overall, I found the game a little too long, but incredibly compelling and very well written, with some really stunning set pieces that think about what games can do as a medium that other narrative forms cannot.
One game that I didn’t expect to love as much as I did is Arctic Eggs. Also set in a future dystopia, it is a short narrative game in which you talk to the inhabitants of a small frozen future world, and pan fry them various dishes - mainly eggs. There is nothing more to it than that. You walk around, talk to people and cook odd things for them, hearing about their philosophies and their life. The game’s writing is sublime, really sharp and funny, and tinged frequently with a well measured surrealism that completely lands. And the egg-frying mechanics are excellent - tricky and awkward but also satisfying and strange.
And lastly, I’ve also sunk quite a few hours already into UF0 50, another indie game that has been getting great reviews. It is a package of 50 small-ish games, styled as if they had been made in the 1980s, compiled within a fictional games console, each with backstories and facts attached. You can launch and play any of the games for a bit, then close it, and then open another and play that for a few minutes instead. Games that claim to have been made at the start of the ‘80s are more primitive while those from the latter part of the collection are more advanced. Some games are more pick up and play, while others are more involved and complex. There are platforms, shooters, strategy games, and much else besides, and everything has some kind of clever twist or smart mechanic, but beyond the merits of any of the individual games, the concept, despite being very simple and obvious, is just really well executed. And the sense of discovery it invokes is great. It’s the perfect type of game to play for ten minutes and then jump out of, easily to later return. But it is also fun to try to think about what the project and its package is saying about game development history, as well as contemporary independent game commerce and design.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.