The Longest Game

 Here's one of many tangents from a very enjoyable series of conversations I had with Katy Naylor, either side of Katy seeing Jonah Non Grata's Soho show, about that and other participatory projects:

Simon Kane:

Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?

 

Voidspace:

Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.

Simon Kane:

Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible, because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-playing game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology. The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.

 

Voidspace:

I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.

Simon Kane:

It’s about how you deal – it’s a Kobayashi Maru – it’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.

Voidspace:

In the modern Table Top Role-Playing Game world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.

 

Simon Kane:

It has to be. There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing you do, where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. It's horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.

Voidspace:

It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange, or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece. 

Tell me some more about Jonah.

... which, if you can bear it, I contine to do HERE.

 

 

 

 And you can try to play the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure for yourself HERE.

 If you want to see me in a dressing gown in Islington, you can come and see Jonah Non Grata's other preview, at the Hen and Chickens this Saturday, by getting tickets for almost a tenner HERE.

 Meanwhile, the PR continues to work, keep taking the PR, with a lovely piece from, of all places, ATV HERE and another from Midlands TV HERE.

 (And here is the final scene of Jack Aldisert's The Manikins (A Work In Progress) – one of many other things Katy and I talked about – as passed to me in a manila envelope when I left the venue. Enlarge for spoilers...)