Excuse a moment of indie fux0rism: I spent the other night playing two indie games. First, I broke in my new PlayStation 3 by downloading the much-praised title flOw – a game about being an amoeba. It’s possibly the most relaxing game I’ve ever played: hours can slip by as you let yourself float in ever-deeper waters, eating creatures or letting them be, and intuiting your way through the gameplay without feeling much of a rush to reach the end. The ambient electronic music is sublime. The experience was fantastic.
Next up: holy beJeezoid, Noitu Love 2. A breakneck all-action side-scroller filled with a ridiculous pastiche of sci-fi cowboy movies, aliens and cyborgs, tanks and bosses and a giant sign that blares “GO!” every other screen while insane 8-bit music spurs you on. My kind of game. I’m not an action nut, but I’m an activity nut: I like games that come from the school of “It would be so awesome if … ” – and Noitu Love 2 may be my Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD of 2008.
The two games couldn’t be farther apart in mood, pace or frenzy. But what I realized as I went from one to the other is that these are my most natural settings: too fast, or too slow. Take music. I love glacial, ambient music that murmers and sucks all the sound out of the air. For one example, I love Supersilent. Yet I also love jittery, hyper music – XTC, Dirty Projectors. Guillemots are more moderate, but they’re also over-the-top – the needle goes to the red, and it hits all my buttons. On the other hand, I don’t like music that sticks to the middle. I have trouble truly enjoying soul music, blues, and most mid-tempo pop. The classic pop single usually has no effect on me: a nice catchy song is nice, but if the artists don’t sound like they’re getting totally ahead of themselves, I start to tune out.
I really believe this isn’t a matter of taste or intellectual preference so much as hardwiring. This kind of music just feels best on my nervous system, when I need to clear my head or get over a bad day at work. And in the same way, many games hold my attention, but flOw and Noitu Love 2 had me rivited. That’s just how I’m wired. And my reaction to the games might have had a lot to do with the soundtracks: both titles treat music as their real secret weapon, and its effect on my nerves sealed my engagement.
I played Flow back when it first started getting press and I couldn’t agree more about the relaxing nature of the game. Flow made me realize just how tense I become when I play any other game. I downloaded an earlier version of the game and played… and played… and played until it dawned on me that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My little, I don’t know, being(?) kept growing and in spite of the fact that there was no clear objective I just kept playing. It reminded me of those early hints from Sega that they were flirting with unconventional themes like Ecco The Dolphin and Nights and in spite of the pointless nature of the games, they were extraordinarily relaxing and rewarding on a level that I could never really put a finger on.
Flow is a natural progression of the very things that sunk the Dreamcast and sealed Sega’s fate in the mainstream but the very reason I love off-beat quirky games.
Since you like music and video games and own a PS3, you *must* get Everyday Shooter on PSN.
I wanna play the amoeba game! Do they have it for Macs?
It’s funny, I’ve wondered for a long time what the dividing line between our tastes (er, hardwiring) in music might be, but maybe that’s it — I listen to an awful lot of mid-tempo soul, funk, and hip-hop! Although I have to admit that, for example, Stevie Wonder’s _Songs in the Key of Life_, which I’ve been spinning a lot lately, really soars highest when it slows down for barely-there numbers like “Knocks Me Off My Feet” and “If It’s Magic.”
@Seth: I dunno about the full-scale PS3 experience, but long before that was around, there was Fl0w in your browser:
http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/
Ha-ha! Thanks, Jessica — that was fun!