Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing Press Kit

Play Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 5 April 2019
Platform: Browser (desktop only)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/lets-play-ancient-greek-punishment-teaches-typing
Price: $0.00

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Type! Type the boulder up the hill! Type the eagle away from your liver! Type, damn you! It’s Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in the depths of Hades! Feel the burn of your repetitive strain injuries!

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing is another edition in the Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment series begun in 2011 and comprising: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Art Edition Edition (2015), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Limited Edition (2016), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: CPU Edition (2017), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition (2019), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: UI Edition (2019). In Teaches Typing we return to the original style of pixel art but with the player’s typing speed determining their interaction with the game. Typing quickly, consistently, and accurately enough allows them to proceed with the punishment in question, whether it’s pushing a boulder uphill as Sisyphus or reaching for an apple as Tantalus. Each game has three difficulty levels which present different texts to type in. There’s even a bonus Albert Camus level!

History

The Teaches Typing version came up essentially as part of my response to the birth of my son Felix. Once he was born I realised that I was fundamentally going to need game projects that would be fairly easy to conceptualise and execute, while still providing me with enough design interest to be worthwhile. I sat down and came up with around ten variations on the Ancient Greek Punishment series, figuring that I could just spend the year making and remaking the “same game” over and over in different versions. So far so good! If you want some beard-stroking style meditations on the game and what it means, see the process journal or the research questions.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing is also a continuation of my project to apply the game development documentation approach I’ve been working on with my colleagues Rilla Khaled and Jonathan Lessard. We’ve come to call this approach the MDMA (for me it stands for Method for Design Materialisation and Analysis) and it forms a fundamental part of our Games as Research project. So, if you want to, you can read a lot about the game’s development by reading its process documentation and by going through its commit history.

Technology

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing was created in JavaScript using Phaser 3. The Advanced texts in the game come from Wikipedia. The text in the Camus level comes from Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.