Perhaps more importantly, it is not experienced entirely sequentially. Mechanically, Gorogoa differs from these games in that it is neither first nor third person but is rather a point-and-click game. Gorogoa (Jason Roberts/Buried Signal, 2017) takes an entirely different position. Peering through one provides the view from the other. Using the portal gun to fold space in on itself, two distinct and separate places become either side of a single plane. By placing portals on two flat surfaces, Chell creates an interspatial shortcut and can effortlessly pass through one portal and out the other. You play a voiceless protagonist named Chell, a test subject in the Aperture Science Lab’s test chambers designed by a malevolent AI named GLaDOS.Īs Chell, your goal is to navigate through and escape from a series of increasingly complicated and challenging levels, using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device or “portal gun.” The portal gun enables the player to make interdimensional portals between the physical planes of her 3-D surroundings. Portal (Valve, 2007) is a first-person perspective puzzle game that plays with ideas of dimensional comprehension. Escher: The Game.” (In fact, if the term “art game” has ever held any meaning, it’s here.) The goal of the game is achieved through carefully maneuvering a 3-D model of an impossible structure around until it presents itself to the player at such an angle that it makes some kind of physical and structural sense, allowing the mannequin to traverse the space in accordance with our own spatial understanding. It is a game about guiding an artist’s articulated mannequin through a series of impossible structures, but really Echochrome is very much “M. Certain games have played with the fissures and tensions between the always-on-ness of the simulated space and the player’s fixed viewpoint of it by being both “flat” and “deep” at the same time.Įchochrome (Game Yarouze, 2008) is a striking example of this logic at work. In a video game the computer engine is always in possession of every conceivable viewpoint within the game, but must deliver it sequentially to the player via the “window” of the monitor or screen. We, as human viewers, classically experience pictures straight on, a strict limitation of the possible affordances of both the canvas and of the viewer.Ī unique attribute of the black box of computation is its ability to provide all possible perspectives of a 3-D environment simultaneously. Artists occasionally, but not very often, ask the viewer to work a little harder to see the whole picture. More recently, a five-panel painting by Laura Owens ( Untitled, 2015), on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, could be wholly perceived only by fixing oneself to a specific spot in the gallery. It has been speculated that the piece was intended to be hung on a staircase so the descending viewer would always see the skull. Game State is a column by artist Oliver Payne covering the mechanics, aesthetics and ideas of video games.įamously, the painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533) displays an anamorphic image of a skull inviting viewers to shift their physical perspective - and the very idea of linear perspective itself as developed in Renaissance - in order to make the form familiar.
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