Topology and the “Fishbone”

Topology studies the properties of spaces that remain unchanged under continuous deformation. Its most familiar explanation is that a person, a cup, and a doughnut have the same topological form.

When I need to design a completely new level, these are the first things I think about:

Setting: What kind of world does this level belong to?

Scale: How long do we want the gameplay to last?

Experience: What do we want the player to feel?

Sketches

When I learned that the next level in our game would be set in a mine, I excitedly started looking for directions I could sketch out. I tried to gather as much of a sense of the atmosphere of a “mine” as I could. For a fantasy mine, I thought there was room for glowing minerals, enormous pools of scorching lava, and exaggerated mining and smelting machinery. I kept the overall map within a space roughly 200–300 meters on each side.

Shannon Li

Samuel Sorensen

GAMES 101

Oct. 27, 2024

Enjoy Being Punished by Games

Game is an extremely violent mediation: it punishes you, it disciplines you. People can sit in front of a pile of matter, or a glowing panel, or immerse themselves in their own enjoyment without even having anything to do with it. It’s poetic in a way, but it’s also extremely creepy. For the player, in that emptiness, what remains is not cogito in the sense of René Descartes, because that assumes that ego congito is the only remaining behavior. But this is clearly not the case: in that immensely dark, yet endless void, the subject is self-absorbed: an ego without a body dances in a void without matter! In that suffocating void, subject can enjoy nothing, yet enjoying everything. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment.