my body often feels like it is falling apart. not in the long term sense, in the short term one. like i need glue to fill in the gaps, or to lay very still.
affects of the flesh around the brain like, and in there the experiential perception of ‘chemical imbalance’ due to ‘brain damage’ so that if i tell anyone this they know it’s ‘not normal’.
putting our bodies in and around in the ways that we each can is a very common ‘folk cure’ for boredom. it’s also a driver of expression. i do it a lot without noticing, and it tipped me off to having ADHD partly, the constant tying myself in knots while sitting so that i was ‘occupied’. and then suddenly pins and needles.
what’s this have to do with videogames?
i am making a game called crisis arcadia, it’s compiled in 3d using unity, with various packages therein for arranging stuff, from a bunch of different art bits made and gathered elsewhere.
i just released a private demo and am making a platformer level pack as a kind of side project with the same assets to release soon.
it’s a longer narrative project, the main game, based around some space cemetery attendant, their dead end life as a horny queer left alone for months at a time, and some sci-fi/horror things that change up their situation.
what’s this have to do with bodies and where we put them?
i was thinking about it! about how, the game demo i’ve designed around the placement of bodies.
the goal of the 3d bit is to move a dead body through a series of rituals to their coffin.
these rituals include the placement inside machines, one of which is for determining the current placement of the body as a body in space.
the protagonist, crisis, needs to be in many different places for the events of this to occur. trigger boxes that let her/you interact with the world.
the posing of the people who deliver the body to her, of the people in the posters and images that sit behind moments of visual novel type text was key to me giving the game some sense of ‘being’.
i felt that really the first time from posing her resting against glass with a desperate forlornness.
that sense of expression was something i got from posing these characters like puppets. i designed them like puppets though there’s no definite in my mind as to whether they’re mechanical or biological or both. they just are, vessels for expression.
i’ve been drawing characters without faces, or with minimal parts for expressing facially, for a long time… because i always feel the faces i sketch look inconsistent with both themselves and ‘style’.
the ‘how to draw faces’ never clicked with me, through laziness, or just, not feeling in tune with the ways various cartoon styles express via the face. size of features, all that… body language and actions, as in, how people use their entire apparatus, i find, gives a canvas for drawing and posing, that i in myself use and know from the first person to express because i know how i use my body, both with people and when alone. the way i don’t really know my face and can’t generalise others too well.
in posing my early model of crisis, as based on my sketch characters, there was a depth of feeling i was surprised to get in even a pretty simple image like this…
i was thinking last night how, the ‘place your person is’, the body, is so bizarre as a fountain of ideology but i guess really makes sense. the experiential outcome of almost every politic, is where your body is right now and what it’s doing.
the borders, the work, the privatisation of space, the experience of sexuality, of social policing of identity at various levels of violence, up to that of being murdered for just being… your body and its position and reaction express so many stories, but ones that get read often wrongly and inaccurately based on this vector alone. yet that’s the same for all communication.
things i think coalesce towards the general impression that you are ‘wrong for existing’, and this is true evil. i would like that to be over somehow. some kind of, thinking about how the use, the direction, the need to control other’s bodies has many connotations.
crisis arcadia is in some ways a game about my life more recently, as an adult, the body falling apart feeling, my relationships to other people and the body left behind by violence in earlier years.
i don’t know if it’ll ever rest, be settled, but i am glad for people, experiences, conversations and self-understandings recently that hitch into stuff like compassion, sharing, love in ways that feel right.
honestly my recent games ‘The Most Desperate Angel’ and ‘Bloodgarden: Violation Syndrome’ are about violent experiences of self and violations (it’s in the title) by various types of stuff that you’d want to be ‘aligned’ with you. that aren’t your ‘enemy’ on face. of sexual manipulation and imprisonment by those in power who are ‘trying to be good’, and of violent relationships to self caused by power.
crisis i think is most like me as a character. person in a dead-end situation who likes junky, weirdo, sleazy stuff because it feels like something, trying to get somewhere, but not knowing how or having too much conviction about where. faced with the probability that bigger changes will have to be made than just same old same old for another few years.
i find it immensely interesting that the storytelling I’m designing around that relies on posing, positioning, and transition between different spaces, because of the loop back that means it’s as much for me what i do with my body as it is the word. of setting up, the body as an artistic and living feature alongside the brain. sculptural self participation in being.
GlitchOut 