A Window, A Light...

The book I'm reading right now is called "The Making of a Counter Culture : Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition" by Theodore Roszak. Initially published in 1968, I'm reading a revised volume for a pretty specific purpose. My initial thoughts were to read something about the formation of counter cultures prior to 1980, or when cyberpunk took off. The book's a series of essays, going in fairly different directions, so it's not worth it to me right now to do any kind of summary, but I guess what I'll say for now is that it's marginally helpful in terms of thinking about my original goal (cyberpunk) and more interesting as a broad spectrum discussion of counter culture formations in the early 70's. I mean, it's due back to the library in 10 days, so I probably need to wrap it up, though.

Kay did get a job, by the way, just not the one we were thinking about before. The sure-thing is a minimum wage position as a stocker at the grocery store, which Katie was primarily interested in because it's not sedentary. Katie's interviewing for another position at US Bank on Tuesday, though, and that's kind of the one we're hoping for because it pays a real, living wage. We're literally down to our last couple of bucks (I get paid today, so I'm not immediately concerned), but if we didn't have this good news coming down the pipe, we'd be really incredibly stressed. As it is, we're just regular poor person stressed.

So, there's this game that's just called A Dark Room. If you google it, it comes right up; you don't have to download it. You just go to the page and you're already playing. It's delightfully simple to start playing and surprisingly soothing, while being just a little bit creepy. It reminds me of the old Commodore 64 games I played when I was younger (I'm really dating myself, here), like a cross between Wasteland and Roguelike map adventures.

The premise is really simple. You're in a dark room with a dying fire, and as you stoke it two things happen - a helpful stranger comes in from the cold and you realize you're out of wood. What follows is basically a tutorial; you quickly learn to build traps for game and expand your reach with the assistance of your new friend before striking out into a dying, post-apocalyptic world. There's a fun twist at the end, as well.

The writing is terse and moody, adding to what I would call a surprisingly well-created atmosphere. The game itself is quite short and saves automatically, though if you clear you cache, you'll have to begin again.

Games like A Dark Room add to the ever-growing list of games that are probably a little too small even to be considered 'indie'. Many are created by individuals using very basic tools bent to the ends of creating simple but atmospheric games which are short, but surprisingly sophisticated in their taste. Games like ".flow" are pretty representative of this, and are almost always free. (Some end up being a few dollars, at most.) They come at a time when huge games on expensive consoles are more entrenched in our cultural dialogue then ever. To me, it's almost like an act of rebellious creative expression that these games have come out. In the past, games were created by individuals and very small teams because the gaming industry was amazingly tiny. They were low-fi, but their expression was based on those individuals. This is an interesting return to that gaming ethos. I'm not saying that people should hang up their consoles and gaming rigs, but I would definitely give these games some time.

Edit : Also, I'm tempted to have someone print and bind my copy of God Machine updates. I hate reading pdfs, which is the only reason I haven't gotten to it besides an incredibly superficial overview. I'll either be talking about counter culture essays or doing the WIR thing pretty soon, I just haven't picked a book.