Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition Press Kit

Play Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 29 January 2019
Platform: Browser (desktop only)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/lets-play-ancient-greek-punishment-inversion-edition
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 associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Torment characters from Greek mythology! Forever! Push Sisyphus back down the hill! Peck out Prometheus’s liver! Withhold the apple from Tantalus! Albert Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy! So the boulder must be even happier! Right?!

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition 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). In the Inversion Edition the player takes on the role of the oppressor/tormentor who ensures the eternal punishment of the traditional protagonist. Thus you become the boulder that attempts to push Sisyphus back down the hill, the eagle that pecks out Prometheus’s liver, or the flag the marks the end of Zeno’s footrace. At heart, beyond the basic gag of a role reversal, the game is about asking the key question: in a game of eternal punishment, isn’t it just as bad for the punisher as the punished?

History

I started Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition as a way to kick of 2019 with a different spirit to 2018. 2018 was a tough year for me in terms of trying to be a little too serious and “worthy” in many of my projects and I wanted to make something that, at a base level, just made me laugh. It worked! I find it pretty hilarious. In fact, I’ve enjoyed rethinking these punishment games so much I have it in mind to make yet more of them, devoting the entire year to it if need be. We’ll see.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition 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. By making a small and nicely self-contained project, I figured it would be a good way to demonstrate the documentation process. 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: Inversion Edition was created in JavaScript using the Phaser 3 game development framework.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition 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.