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wordimagesoundplay - PlayStation 2 (2004) |
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Japanese cover (front) |
Japanese cover (back) |
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Yes, this cryptic bit of text on the back cover is basically the thing closest to a synopsis you'll ever find for wordimagesoundplay. Released on the PlayStation 2 in 2004, this obscurity not only remained unpublished outside of Japan but was also distributed in limited quantities - a few thousands - in the only country it was available. Strangely enough, the game was published by Sony Music Entertainment, not Computer Entertainment. Well, it actually makes sense in some way, as wordimagesoundplay isn't really a game in the traditional sense; it's more of a multimedia projet, similar in approach to productions like Aquanaut's Holiday or Electroplankton. While the game is Japan-only, its developer - called tomato - is actually British. It's not a video game studio, though; rather, it's an art collective funded in 1991 that comprises artists, designers, musicians and writers who dabble in different domains of the digital world, either for artistic expression or commercial creation. They have taken part in a lot of exhibitions and have produced a substantial ammount of short films; but they also have created TV ad for brands such as Chevrolet or Guinness, and even the typefonts used in the Quantum of Solace James Bond film. The collective is also intrinsically connected to a music act, whose members Karl Hyde and Rick Smith so happen to be the founders of tomato: Underworld, a progressive electronics group, which was actually reponsible for wordimagesoundplay's sountrack along with the now-defunct downtempo band Johnny Conquest.
Let's start with "miracle & wonders". You wander around an aetheral and immaculate white empty space steeped in ambient music, in which float a bunch of frames displaying landscapes of some sort. These work as doors to other "zones", which all are connected through this network. Around these gates, levitating bits of text can be read, and they allow you to understand the story that is "going on" or rather "through which" you're going. These texts are also read by a female narrator when you get close. The idea is to make the player "explore" a story as if the chapters weren't in a linear succession. It's very short, though, so you'll have everything covered in very little time. Let's then pursue with "latlong". Narration still is the central concept of this one; however, there are now two different narratives, and they aren't really visually represented apart from the rather abstract black-and-white videos going on in the background. We're getting closer to what we could call an actual game, though: The two narratives are scrolling, one horizontally and the other vertically, and you can control that scrolling with the joysticks. You may sometimes come accross redish words; it means they're common to both stories. If you manage to superimpose them, what we could call a "link" is made: The background then suddenly colors itself with warm tones and the trip-hop-like music gets more erratic; and if you do it once more, it all goes back to normal. The idea was to make the player match elements of (un)related stories to create some kind of parrallel between them. It's a bit hard to follow both narratives though, but it's also part of the principle. Now, let's try "phonology". It's something else entirely, since it's not about narration anymore but about audio; music creation, to be precise. You are presented with a whole bunch of instruments... Well, human being that function as such, and who so happen to be digitized sprites of the development team. Each character can make a series of differents tunes and noises varying both in lenght and pitch, and you can freely compose your song while modifying the interface to your liking. The idea as to allow the player to create a composition with the help of often incongruous sounds. It's also the only session that can be saved to your memory card (and the only one that could require it, anyway). And, finnaly, "sleeping eyes". It's clearly the strangest of the four, but also the most complete. At first, you are faced with a sliding puzzle; there is nothing to actually solve though, as the game does it for you. What's of importance to you is what appear in the empty space left after the tiles have moved around: It acts as a teleporter to minimalistic, weird-ass mini-games. You can leave these at any moment, but they also often contain a key element that warps you to the following mini-game without getting back to the main puzzle. Those short gameplay sessions are kind of... special: The "maze", for example, in which you assume the role of an horse trapped in a snake-infested labyrinth with no visual representation whatsoever. There's also "penis", where you just have to... shake an evocating tree trunk for a long time enough. And then there's "advice horse", where you don't even get to play, and just have to listen to a childish horse sculpture tell you tips like "love love but don't love hate" with a synthetic voice. Yeah. The idea is to make the player experience a whole bunch of unsettling experiences by modifying and letting him guess the way he's supposed to react to them. I guess. And that's it, we've seen what there was to see in tomato's imagesoundplay. And it's not very impassionating, to be honnest. Let's have a quick review of its content: miracle & wonders is way to poor to be actually enjoyable, latlong is in fact interesting but quickly gets repetitive, phonology becomes annoying after ten minutes of fooling around, and sleeping eyes really make too little sense to really make up for anything. I don't know what the guys who developed the "game" tried to convey through it, really. Oh, it has to be conceided that it does have a bunch of interesting ideas, but that actually is the very poblem: It has ideas... but not much of anything else. Basicaly, wordimagesoundplay embodies the issues with conceptual art in the concept of interactive media. For those who don't know, "conceptual art" is a form of artistic expression that doesn't rely on the actual aesthetic beauty of the end product but rather on the artistic process itself and the meaning it supposedly has; the "concept". Two typical examples of this trend would be Malevich's White on White and Kosuth's One and Three Chairs. Obviously, these works' point lies not in their appearance but on the idea behind their creation. What meaning? Well, we'd like to know. The problem with these decontextualized and isolated "concept" pieces is that they rarely manage to make any real or potential sense, and have very little impact on their public. There's an "idea", for sure, but why didn't they really do anything with it? It could enjoy an actual creative existence by being fleshed out or integrated into a wider system, but conceptual artists generally aren't intersted in that. If you talk to a game designer, however, he'll probably acknowledge that finding both meaningful and enjoyable concepts that fall into place in a project is among the hardest task he has to carry out, because that's an essential part of creating a complex interactive work such as a video game. Conceptualization is the art of finding concepts... but conceptual art is the art of finding concepts and doing nothing with them. That's what happend with wordimagesoundplay: It had a bunch of leads, but never tried to elaborate on the concepts because the designers were content with them as they were. There is a lot of chance, however, that the player won't. Yume Nikki is a good example of a conceptual game: It is heavily centered around its concept of simplistic aimless free-roaming, but it didn't rely solely on finding the idea and throwing a game based on it. Cluelessly wandering around is enjoyable because of all the work that went in the freaky art direction, and it's also meaningful because that gameplay makes the player feels lost, alone and isolated. And it ended up with the game becoming an international phenomenon! wordimagesoundplay, however, doesn't do any of that: It's nice-looking but it doesn't really feature anything aesthetically compelling; and more importantly, its concepts have very little positive impact of the actual experience itself. Yume Nikki's clever use of simple gameplay mechanics is why it was a success. wordimagesoundplay's unwilligness to propose an actual game rather than just put up concepts for show is why it was a failure. It may entertain you for half an hour, but it will be quickly forgotten afterwards. |
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