I am making a set of classic simple physics-oriented games like Pong, Breakout, etc. in which the key element of play (the ball, say) moves incredibly slowly.
I want to explore the feelings associated with playing a game like this, and in a perfect world end up with games that encourage a meditative state of detachment that gets that the idea – explored a bit in It is as if you were on your phone – that being locked into a screen-based videogame experience can be calming and therapeutic instead of immersive and depressing.
I am making four arcade games – versions of Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, and Missile Command – that each run incredibly slowly.
The point of this is to foreground the feeling of time passing during play, to play up and explore the tensions inherent in “ultra-slow arcade style play”. My basic hypothesis is that it will feel like something to play games this way, though exactly how it will feel I’m less sure of. My first guesses right now revolve around the idea of it being “strangely” relaxing or calming; but also that there will be something to the key punctuating moments of play (ball hits paddle, brick disappears, asteroid explodes, missile tracks toward its target) played at this speed. The role of anticipation feels like it will be increased, and the balancing against/with boredom is something I’ll be thinking about as well (as well as the eternal question: why would anyone actually play this and what is it reasonable to demand?) It could be that I’m subconsciously even making some arguments about how games “waste” our time with repetitive actions?
I have made three arcade games – Pong, Breakout, and Missile Command – that each run very slowly. In fact there are slow, slower, and slowest versions that as you would think run progressively slower and take progressively longer.
The starting objective with this project has remained true throughout: what happens when you slow down a game? The main “why” of the project has always been to explore that by doing it.
I can see from the first why that I figured it would be about the ways slowness can lead to a meditative state, and that’s actually where the game landed. I think that has been the most interesting question to try to “answer” with this game.
That said, I can see from the previous why that I also became interested in other properties of slowness like anticipation (I even connected it to eroticism), the risks of boredom, the questioning of repetitive action by making it even more unendurable. These are all still interesting questions/whys that are worth exploring as well.
But in the end the why of this project was about the feeling of time, the sensations of slowness, and the idea that a meditative and slow state of mind could be induced during arcade gameplay.