i play the game Foam (download from mirror here) on the suggestion of my dear friend Bagenzo
when you see the foam you are in the zone.
quantum foam is the theory from the 1950s by John Wheeler that at a base level the universe is foamy rather than smooth. or something. fluctuations.
if you get down there you will see, mostly, fluctuations in the small scale of space-time (a foam) that results in reality on the big scale… uh… and something about, virtual particles.
i think that if you look at something like Foam (2012, by Stwelin) you see a good example of a game that represents a reality fluctuating based on just being within it and bouncing around. a kid is in a room with some painting supplies, they wander outside and find a bird that chirps on bumping, and a raccoon over a hole, a house with a person who says… leave. and another kid, who wants an umbrella. these are in distinct areas and they feed back to me the state of the kid.
find an umbrella, go through your house and out into negative space, an umbrella seems to be on the other side, and yet you go across to get it and then load into, the other world.
there you find three eggs for a mysterious one, as part of your living in the world. go through many doors and encounter objects, people and animal that talk and make noises and move and other things… into more and more of these boxy areas.
these spaces just dark around the borders of the navigable. peppered with trees and plants. floating in suspension. the spontaneous eruption of something from nothing. nature abhors a vacuum.
what are you? kid in the egg world.
i have no issue now with rejection aside from it filling me with dread. lightning coimmdse eoth.
three cookie raffle on picture day, amd matg guy.
falling asleep as i type i think and type things from these fluctuation worlds. the foam of reality that persists inside me a storage loop in my brain. the words from dreams.
and the kid finds they become other on touching some others. fire. a different kid. a raccoon. the eggs. obstacles stand in the way that only can be passed by another form of being. a cloud. a submarine. else you get shot with lightning by hostile forms. or drown.
Foam relies on logic to propel its egg capture, and yet to go from place to place the negative space it employs leaves the question of where you will end up. it’s easy to get lost, to forget, to repeat a loop.
this is a logic of its own that unfolds to be mapped and while it can be captured, like any mapping the elusiveness of the whole picture reflects its foaminess.
the dreamlike in its way, feels like a direct access to reality… that is… the ancient idealised and philosophised thing beyond the waking. and the artistic, metaphoric representation of that place is perhaps our capturing in a sense the universe as it is experienced by itself at the level of foam. as fluctuation.
Foam returns its kid to a world more familiar to a waking logic and walks you up to an ending, an umbrella in rain, still looking for that other kid. were they there at all though and who is to say that while more ordered the now persists as anything but foam on the other side of the pillow.
GlitchOut 