On lyrics

Typically song lyrics struggle on the page. Without their musical settings, they can seem tedious, obvious, vague, lacking conviction or irony.

One exception I've come across is the Winterreise (or Winter Journey) written by the German poet and soldier Willhelm Müller and famously adapted into a cycle of 24 art songs by Franz Schubert shortly before the composer's death in 1828.

I don’t think it’s cheating to cite a group of poems which originally were published as mere words on a page. I can’t read the original German, and I can’t assess their actual prosody, but in English anyway they basically seem like typical early Romantic poetry.

However — especially as lyrics — I think they’re perfect.

Anchorhead

I’ve just finished playing through the 20^th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of Michael Gentry’s classic text adventure Anchorhead, the first version of which was published in 1998.

It’s very immersive and atmospheric—in fact it returned to me the sort of lucidly immersive reading experience I thought I might never be able to access again. The writing is evocative, the pacing is superb, and despite a few fusty implementation quirks, the experience of wandering through this dismal, drizzly New England town and uncovering its secrets is deeply satisfying and studded with dark delights, a handful of which I’d like to share.

Spoilers ahead.

Level-of-detail as artistic codec

This essay cannibalizes material from my earlier, much more scattershot "Preferences and proposals for real-time 3D imagery."

3D games, especially those with a non-fixed camera, typically have some sort of level-of-detail (LOD) solution in their rendering pipeline. That can include mipmaps (progressively lower resolution versions of a similar texture), progressive meshes, billboards and imposters (basically 2D “fakes”), distance fog, and virtualization or streaming of texture and even geometry data as in Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite system.

What I’d like to propose is the use of level-of-detail solutions not only for reducing aliasing and performance overhead but also for artistic effect. Often LOD solutions are judged on their invisibility — any noticeable artifacts such as popping are considered undesirable, and substitutions between assets of varying quality ideally would present the illusion of perfect continuity.

 

Spyro the Dragon, 1998

I think I can see the lights: Cass McCombs’ “County Line”

County Line, the single from Cass McCombs’ 2011 album Wit's End, was accompanied by two entirely different music videos. The first time I listened to this song, in 2011, it was watching the video below, directed by Aaron Brown. Sometime later, this video was taken down from Domino's YouTube channel and replaced with another before being re-uploaded on McCombs' own channel years later. But if you watch that original video, you might not be surprised to hear that it permanently colored my impression of a piece of music which has proved, for me, immortal.

Content warning: opioid use, blood.

Two early Freuds

Recently I've found myself bewitched by the early works of the British painter Lucian Freud.

Before he developed his mature style in the late 50s and early 60s — oils on canvas in wide, contour-ploughing brushstrokes — he was producing small, precise paintings on wood and copper, in a style no less unsettling than his later portraits but flatter, more lapidary and tempera-like.

Two paintings in particular stand out to me from this early period. The first, perhaps unusually for Freud, is not a portrait — at least not a human one — but his 1946 oil on panel The Birds of Olivier Larronde.

Vocalcity

This year I've become a bit obsessed with Luomo's (AKA Vladislav Delay AKA Sasu Ripatti) 2000 Vocalcity LP.
 
It's considered a milestone in microhouse, a genre I've historically been pretty partial to. I probably came across Vocalcity on some “best of the 2000s” lists, scrubbed through some tracks, and sort of wondered what the fuss was about. Admittedly, microhouse records can come on a bit academic, and skimming through it probably sounded monotonous, reticent, and like it leaned too hard on the sort of jejune synth figures which dominate the beginning of its first track, Market. Well, I've given the whole thing many attentive listens now and I think it may just be the best dance album ever made.

Narrative coherence in thematic card games

Partly prompted by working on my own card game, and partly by the recent influx of digital card battlers, I've been thinking about the semantics of customizable and thematic card games: how we narrate them to ourselves, what they represent and how they represent it, what themes they're inclined toward and under what conditions they achieve thematic felicity.

Your Slay the Spires and Monster Trains can generate some interesting optimization puzzles, and it's not that they don't have flavor, but even a Griftlands which tries to model diplomacy misses out on a lot of the literary suppleness I think the genre allows for. Many of these games consist of a discrete series of attrition contests, reducing your opponent's resolve while trying not to overexert yourself, your overall position judged more on preparedness for the next encounter than on your relative advantage in the one at hand.

To be fair, I wouldn't expect a deck-drafting roguelite to hang its challenge on the same structure as, say, a constructed format PvP. It's not just the fault of that particular subgenre, then. A number of perfectly physical two-player duels, like Flesh and Blood, suffer from the same sense of—to me—banal, pugilistic literalness.

Preferences and proposals for real-time 3D imagery

With a new console generation upon us, I thought it might be a good time to conduct sort of an opinionated survey of game art techniques, some old, some new, some speculative. Part of what I want to do here is to break down what I think is the disingenuous and handicapping binary between so-called "photorealistic" and "stylized" rendering, and to advocate for a more syncretic and intentional approach to 3D game imagery drawing on a variety of examples from what is at this point I think a more or less mature state of the art.

Consider it something like a "greatest hits" of individual rendering, animation and UX implementations, with some pet peeve kvetching along the way, but also highlighting some exciting recent developments and suggesting possible combinations of ideas illustrated therein.

Charles Bell, Double Bonus, 1987

Fax art

I tend to think of my first computer game as being Baldur's Gate, but it's possible that it was actually The Manhole.

A lot of that Mac software I cut my teeth on was stuff published by Brøderbund: The Manhole and Myst, both by Cyan, Prince of Persia, Kid Pix. Those Cyan games in particular maintained a deliberate picture book metaphor. The worlds called Ages in Myst, if you didn't know, are contained in books authored by the game's characters. The Manhole, before Myst, and before its Masterpiece Edition CD-ROM remaster, was originally a black-and-white HyperCard program.

There's a pleasant sense of continuity between those 1-bit raster graphics and the drawings one finds in analog picture and puzzle books by the likes of, say, Christopher Manson. And a common thread  one can follow through all of these images is a relish for perspective.

Which brings us to the present, or nearly. Almost as late to the party as our eagle-eyed East India Company insurance inspector, I've now completed 2018's Return of the Obra Dinn, and, in hopes of extending aforementioned continuity, hereby submit my own report on the maritime calamity.

Spoilers ahead.

100* Favorite Games of the Teens

Highlighted are games (video games) I haven't played yet but sincerely intend to, ranked where I expect they might land once I do play them. In a year or maybe in ten years we can check back here and see how I did.