Life and Trust

We went to Life and Trust in New York. It's a wild Martha Graham-esque dance performance taking place simultaneously on five floors of a fabulous Financial District skyscraper. Like Sleep No More, which Emursive also produced, the actors/dancers do a scene and then scurry off to another floor to do another. You chase after them in a herd, or if you're quick, you chase after them and the herd chases after you. Or you wait around to see what else will happen in the space you're in.

There are zillions of characters and theoretically there are interlocking plots involving deals with devils and a suspiciously addicting syrup, all happening on the night of Wednesday, October 23, 1929. (Guess what happens on Thursday!) I had almost no idea what was happening in the plots, but the dancing is spectacular, and the site-specific set is, too. Go see it if you can get to New York. It may spoil you for proscenium theater, though. It's hard to get excited about theater you watch from a single chair for the whole performance, in a space that has nothing to do with the story. 

 (The set is ADA-compliant, but you can't chase after people on stairs if you're not very abled indeed. But you can guess where stuff is going to happen and they'll give you a guide, if you like, to make sure you're there when it happens.)

Oh, you! New York Times

A civilian friend sent me an opinion piece about video games from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over single-player games you play once and move on from. Which, predictably, it bewails.

Fair enough. Live games do make it harder to release a new game. The "next Fortnite" is probably also Fortnite. 

On the other hand, I'm working on a live game that releases March 6, and I'm happy that I won't be unemployed on March 7 (inshallah). And if people didn't want live games, they wouldn't buy them.

The article is off base on two points. One, yes, some games do have a lot of sidequests that can come off as grindy chores, but then also, that's an issue that game devs have identified and rejected. We often have conversations like, "We're not going to ask the player to collect one thousand feathers."

The other is that it's ridiculous to say games used to be better. Of course the MOMA is collecting old games. Museums collect old things, after their worth has been proven. There are amazing new games all the time, just as there was filler and trash twenty years ago. Games like Disco Elysium, Balatro and Hades are future classics. The present always looks worse than the past, in any medium, because we only remember the good stuff from the past. Not all ancient Greek epics were Homer. It's just, most ancient Greek epics have gone the way of the ancient Greeks.