Wiley Wiggins just posted about this inspiring essay by the Superbrothers called Less Talk More Rock. The essay talks about how videogames should be a more aesthetic, visceral experience, and less of a intellectual one. More about exploring a weird little internally consistent world with its own set of physics than trying to replicate some aspect of the real world. More about breaking bricks and nabbing coins that select weapons, watching cutscenes, and navigating through menus. Here’s the paragraph that really got me:
Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element — the brick, the turtle, the pipe — was a well-formed, understandable audiovisual videogame unit.
This article made me see a lot of similarities in what they’re looking for in videogames and what I look for in comics – an engaging synesthetic experience grounded in some sort of otherworldly physicality.
It looks like Superbrothers lives up to their own ideas, too, here’s a screenshot from their currently in-development game Sword and Sorcery:
You can go to their site for videos of gameplay.
