A video game that I find inspiring is the game Outer Wilds. It’s definitely one of those games where if you’ve heard anything about it, it’s probably been from somebody who goes on and on about it being a masterpiece, and I’m definitely in that camp. In short it’s basically a mystery game on the scale of a solar system, where you have total free range over where you go and your methods of uncovering the central mystery is through exploring and at times solving environmental puzzles through the settlements and technological structures of an extinct alien race, all while the player is stuck in a time loop where they die every 22 minutes. It’s the only game I can really think of where the “lore” of the game is basically the game itself, and the only piece of media where I’ve actually cared about truly understanding the mechanics of weird sci-go alien tech. The mystery in the game is surprisingly ingeniously crafted, and there were many times where I learned some new vital piece of information or where some sort of obscure mechanic clicked which absolutely dumbfounded me and completely recontextualized my understanding of the game world and everything I had done up to those points. It’s definitely a type of game that has reframed my understanding of what games can be and how to utilize games a medium for story telling.
What makes the game particularly inspiring to me, besides it being one of my favorite games, is that it had fairly simple and low-scale beginnings. The games creator, Alex Beachum, created the game’s alpha as a master thesis for USC’s Interactive Media and Games Division, and his original motivation in making the game was not to create a complex space mystery, or to push the boundaries of games as a medium, but just a desire to fly around in a space ship in a physics-based solar system. Everything else sprung out from the original goal, and I think that stands as a testimony that not every great piece of art was something that was planned out meticulously in advance, but that most time great art does and sometimes must develop and change overtime. From what I can find out, the developers behind the game were originally a team of 6, but the team has since grown to 13.
 |
ReplyForward
|