Journal Entry 4
For this assignment, I looked at the project FEATHERFALL. This project exploits games to make it where you fall through the map and see the game world above you. I find it interesting because the point of this project was to stimulate people’s nightmares of falling, and when players experience this is said to have it reoccur in their subconscious (aka their dreams.)I’m not quite sure how it works but I find it very interesting. I especially find it interesting since I have actually had a dream of falling endlessly after playing a buggy game where falling through the map wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.
The artist isn’t even using the mod to play the game at this point. They are not trying to progress at all and are simply having the floor glitch occur. It isn’t even really a game anymore when you can’t walk around the map. In “Countergaming” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Galloway stated “when the mod rises to the level of art, rather than a gesture of fandom — as Counter-Strike was to HalfLife — then, more often than not, the game loses its rule set completely and ceases to be a game after all” (107). This mod fits that case where it becomes unplayable. It is still a super cool project, but I feel the mod makes it that the game is no longer a game.
Citations
Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.