Explanation: I'm an academic researching glitches in videogames, and what fascinates me most is how glitches—often ones discovered by speedrunners, though not always ones that speed up runs—completely destroy the stories the games are trying to tell. Characters get chopped and changed, plot sequences get broken, settings get demolished, even space and time get bent around the exploits and accidents of the game's programming going wrong. Some examples: 1) Using the FF6 "airship glitch", you can break sequence to do things like moving from the World of Ruin back to the World of Balance, making Terra become her own father, or taking General Leo to visit his own grave. 2) In the Pokemon Reverse Badge Order runs, the player essentially warps space and time to pull the various gym leaders to him, beat them soundly, and then dismiss them again. That's no longer the story of a young hero on a personal-development quest, it's now about a young god screwing with people. 3) Stretching the definition of glitch a bit, but I think definitely not something intended by the developers: the Any% for Two Worlds where the main villain is killed within the game's first two minutes by aggro'ed townsfolk and the game takes that as its cue to end. Glad to clarify further but that should give the general gist of it. I'd love to know your own favorite examples of stories getting broken. (And if I end up using it anywhere in the book or articles I'm writing, I'll be sure to cite you there.) submitted by /u/epikt to r/speedrun [link] [comments]

In didactic texts, artist talks, personal websites, and private interviews Cory Arcangel describes Super Mario Clouds as “an old Mario Brothers cartridge which I modified to erase everything but the clouds.” Exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, 2009, 2011, and 2015 the game’s blue sky and leftward floating cloud forms have come to represent not only Arcangel’s twenty-first century pop art practice but one horizon of videogames as an artistic medium. However, attempting to reverse engineer Super Mario Clouds according to the artist’s original source code distributed in exhibition catalogues, documentary videos, DIY websites, and GitHub repositories reveals that Arcangel’s ROM hack does not actually contain Nintendo’s ROM. Despite claims of erasing “everything but the clouds,” there is no erasure. There is a discrepancy between art historical accounts and the technical operations of Arcangel’s artwork. This video documents the history of Super Mario Clouds and demonstrates the results of my own attempt to “erase everything but the clouds,” a ROM hacking exercise that produces a different game altogether. This example of practice-based research and digital art history operates at the intersection of close playing, critical code studies, and media archeology to articulate the intractable materiality of the mechanical, electrical, computational, and even economic processes that characterize videogames as technical media and ultimately disrupt Arcangel’s narrative of erasure.Cast: Patrick LeMieux

Shiraz Art House • Daralhokoomeh Project • May/June 2014 As part of Bitrates - an exhibition curated by Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at the Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project, Shiraz, Iran – I asked 50 artists to create or curate an animated GIF with a short snippet of audio, to be looped together ad infinitum at GIFbites.com. For the opening of Bitrates on May 23rd a select version of this project will be displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, opening on May 30th in Shiraz Art House (Daralhokoomeh Project). GIFbites In an era of ubiquitous internet access and the extensive post-production of HD and 3D images, the animated GIF has an ironic status. Small in dimension and able to be squeezed through the slenderest of bandwidths, GIFs hark back to a World Wide Web designed for 640×480 pixel screens; a web of scrolling text, and not much else. Brought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the animated GIF has become a primary medium of communication on the contemporary net. The simplicity, freedom and openness of the medium allows even the most amateur web enthusiast to recuperate images plucked from TV, cinema, YouTube, CCTV footage, cartoons, videogames and elsewhere in their desire to communicate an idea or exclamation to the world. GIFbites is a mesmerising homage to brevity and the potential of poor, degraded images to speak beyond the apparent means of their bitrates. The results will hopefully navigate the web for many years to come, stimulating cut-and-paste conversations undefinable by Google’s search algorithms. GIFbites Project Page • بیت بر ثانیه / Bitrates Facebook Event Coming Soon: Bitrates/GIFbites Lp! Featuring the work of 50 artists

Morehshin Allahyari Mizaru/Kikazaru/Kyoungzaru Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach

Eltons Kuns Anthony Antonellis Lawrence Lek

LaTurbo Avedon Gretta Louw Jeremy Bailey

Sam Meech Alison Bennett Rosa Menkman

Emma Bennett A Bill Miller Benjamin Berg

Lorna Mills Hannah Black Shay Moradi

Andrew Blanton Nora O Murchú Nicolas Boillot

Alex Myers Tim Booth Peggy Nelson

Sid Branca David Panos Nick Briz

Eva Papamargariti elixirix Holly Pester

Jennifer Chan Antonio Roberts Theodore Darst

Daniel Rourke Angelina Fernandez Alfredo Salazar-Caro

Annabel Frearson Rafia Santana Carla Gannis

Jon Satrom Emilie Gervais Erica Scourti

Shawné Michaelain Holloway Krystal South Nathan Jones

Arjun Ram Srivatsa Nick Kegeyan Linda Stupart

Jimmy Kipple Sound Daniel Temkin

Science and videogames! Together!

Minecraft can be a great tool for visualizing complicated subjects, such as the speed of light (aka "c"). Using a straight track and simple math, we can see how the universe might be limiting speeds for very fast things, such as light.

The "doors" metaphor is admittedly, imperfect. While they do limit speed outside of "acceleration", they falsely imply that there is something "in space" that slows things down, which does not appear to be the case at the moment. The actual mechanisms that limit objects to light speed will be the topic for a future video. (Hint: It has to do with time!)

I want to change the way we think about videogames. Will you stay in the loop? chrisnovello.com and twitter.com/paperkettle In the video, I directly manipulate the RAM of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers to transform it from a game into a strange instrument. I use two hardware controllers: illucia (a patchbay instrument I designed that lets me connect computer software with cables), and the Soundplane (an amazing multitouch surface by Madrona Labs). I begin by playing the game as one normally would, just using buttons on illucia.. but I also have access to the game's memory, so I use the Y axis on the Soundplane to alter the value in the memory address that determines Mario's Y position onscreen. This is how I make Mario fly and hover during the playthrough. Also, before I start playing, notice that I flip a switch on illucia. This triggers recording — not video, but actually recording the entire memory state of the NES for each game frame. Because I'm saving the game ~30 times a second (and keeping log of all saves) I'm able to go back to any moment in Mario's life. Sort of like a Super Mario time machine. So then I use the X-axis of the Soundplane to sweep through the timeline of Mario's universe. Not only that, but the Soundplane is multitouch, so I use a second finger to specify start and endpoints in a playback loop. This is similar to the way samplers and granular synths work, but for recordings of the entire memory state of the NES rather than audio data. Conceptually, it is like Super Mario meets Groundhog Day. Mario's universe computer / time machine gets caught in hellish loops. Then I use illucia to send alien data into Mario's universe, which makes for all sorts of audiovisual insanity amidst the spacetime loops. I found some memory addresses that produce interesting results, so I use illucia to pump them with unexpected data. This is sort of like circuit bending, but in a protected sandbox - at any point I can revert back to the clean recording of RAM states (aka moments in Mario's universe). At that point I try to go back to "playing" the game, watching Mario navigate a melting world of glitched-out ephemera. Toward the end of the video I use a pair of rubberband mallets on the Soundplane to jump around in Mario's timeline, all while illucia is left pouring a heavy stream of alien data into Mario's RAM state. I eventually (accidentally/luckily) land at a place that triggers the game over music, and decide to end the take. ===================== Disclaimer: I don't condone piracy or the distribution of Nintendo's IP. I'm posting this video as part of a critical-cultural project. Further - although the emulator tools I used to make this performance are fully legal, I'm not distributing any other materials related to making these interventions into NES games, so please don't ask. The video is shown with the intention of stimulating critical thought about the role of software in our lives. By showing that there are other ways one could interact with this well-known cultural artifact, hopefully I can inspire others to consider: Who decides how and what we see in a computer program? What is hidden? What sorts of strange other things lurk beneath the surface of our trained expectations? What if we lived in a culture that deeply embraced the expressive possibilities of computer programs? What if we encouraged curiosity about the interior of the systems that compose game worlds? Is that curiosity and critical inquiry itself not a form of play? Indeed there are platforms that embrace this sort of approach, but many don't. In fact, many close it off. What if we prioritized this sort of inquiry more? Might we find new frontiers for communication or even human knowledge and representation? What is a videogame, and how can it relate to all this?Cast: paperkettleTags:

Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed to linger as long as it likes while everyone else gets on with the future. In the last few years the "free-to-play" model— where games are given away on mobile phones or online while the developer makes money through advertisements or the sale of in-game items—has encircled the videogame industry. At first it seemed like a curiosity, a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games like Ragnarok Online, The Legend of Mir, and World of Warcraft found a perfect match with internet bar culture. Meanwhile Activision and Electronic Arts competed for dominance in a luxury business energized by dreams of $180 Rock Band bundles and franchises with the "potential to be exploited every year across every platform." When rumors began circulating last month that Nexon, one of the biggest free-to-play comp

On value of cheese, mutilated limbs and torture tools...

The value of an item is surprisingly flexible in open-world RPGs. It can be determined by three factors - the game’s formal currency, the player’s personal tastes and its rareness. In game worlds where the player has somewhere to call home and a large enough range of items, those items create their own economies of worth. Give someone a home, and if they have any pride they’ll start putting possessions in it.

Bethesda is the king of providing this kind of player-determined canvas. Megaton’s house in Fallout 3 was always a ridiculous depository for me, being the place where I dump the spoils of scouring the wasteland, which I did purely for my own sense of achievement (and something to show off for laughs). I’d fill the entry hall with rocket launchers and miniguns while stockpiling ammunition, drugs, cigarettes and teddy bears on the upper floor.

From Roger Ebert’s pedantic proclamation that “video games can never be art” to the clichéd fawning over the truckloads of revenue generated by each new release in the Modern Warfare series, gaming consistently inspires overarching conversations about media and culture. At this point, these ‘big conversations’ should surprise no one, as with each passing year gaming becomes less esoteric and permeates more and more demographic groups (e.g. the popularity of social games on Facebook, senior citizens embracing the Wii as an exercise platform, etc.). So while gaming may be everywhere, it is strange that it is often difficult to locate conversations about it that speak to how we actually integrate play and simulation into our everyday experience. What can games tell us about relaxation, work and routine? What do they have to say about movement and the body? How might we subvert gaming conventions through pranks and humour? Ian Bogost’s recent book How To Do Things With Videogames thoughtfully considers questions like these while endeavouring to re-frame the medium through a series of focused, topical texts that draw on familiar and engaging points of reference.

2011 was a tremendous year for the videogame.

A pile of big-budget, years-in-the-making blockbusters delivered on all of their promises and then some. Clever independent games pushed at the edges of the form. People are still hopelessly lost in Skyrim, their former meatspace lives abandoned without a thought for the promise of infinite adventure.

Wired magazine, Wired.com and Ars Technica editors teamed up this year to hash out a list of the most exquisite gaming pleasures of 2011. Some of our personal favorites didn’t make the cut; such was the extent of the competition this year.

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way.

The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating and winning. Sometimes designers think this is just a matter of technique or technology. But it’s not, it’s a fundamental constraint borne of the psychology of play. It will always be so, and is why in 40 years there have never been any good game stories.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence.

Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose.” And both points are right. The best games do look great, and we do have a lot of choice, not just inside game worlds but among them. Raised on the flashing cursors of Zork, we’ve learned to adore the newer, pert, pretty avatars, so much sexier and more powerful than we’d ever dare imagine ourselves. We too have played the games with lush graphics inspired by Breughel and Bosch and Kurosawa; the first-person shooter games; the strategy games in intricately wrought alternate worlds or ages past; the Sims; the online worlds of Warcraft and Second Life; the spo

The film critic Roger Ebert’s recent comments about video games and their potential as art, and especially the immense stir the comments caused on discussion forums all over the internet, shows the intrinsic interest there is in the question of whether video games are art. Of course, many people see the debate as entirely pointless, and there is the separate question of why we should want to establish that video games are art.

But the question remains, and it is entirely sensible: are video games art?

Individual opinion on this issue is understandably varied, but what has not be been noticed in all of this debate is that video games are increasingly a topic of study within the philosophy of the arts. A number of recent philosophical papers and books, including those by Aaron Smuts, Dominic Lopes, and my own book The Art of Videogames, have taken up the task of explaining video games in terms of the arts. A natural aspect of this explanation is the status of this new medium within the

When one plays most videogames there is a tacit understanding that one is entering into a fictional world – the term virtual world, is often deployed to mean exactly this. It is self-evident that this also happens when one plays a tabletop role-playing game, the play of which is precisely concerned with conceiving of a fictional world and taking actions within it. The same is true of boardgames: players of a game of Cluedo enter into a fictional world in which they are attempting to solve a mystery. It is even true of the more abstract games – players of Jenga enter a fictional world in which (rather arbitrarily!) the player sitting to the left of the player who collapses the tower is declared victorious.

According to Walton's theory, the appreciator of a painting or the viewer of a movie plays a game of make-believe with the relevant prop or props, and thereby enters into a fictional world. Walton also identifies a separate fictional world – the world of the prop, known as the work w