Assassination. Government conspiracy. Terrorism. Human trafficking. The weaponization of the human body. The gratification of murder. The unceremonious silence of death. The expression of one's own humanity through the suffering of another.
Why must the world be this way? What is it all for?
Killer7 asks all these questions and provides answers to none. It is a vessel for reflection and wandering through the unimaginable horrors of the mind. It's not that it has nothing to say, but that it presents you with an unfinished puzzle, and lets you use the loudest pieces to fill in the rest of the picture.
Games as a medium have spent so many long years trying to understand what it means to 'tell a story' and to 'be art'. Decades of writers trying to give 'the right answer' to questions while fumbling over their own cynicism, egotistical tendencies and unchecked cultural biases. We are so concerned with the desire to be perceived as 'artful' that we lose sight of making anything with truly unique meaning or power.
I don't have a damn good answer to what needs to be done differently, - I'm the most out-of-touch, lost-in-their-own-head numbskull on the planet - but if I had 1 call, we definitely need to step back and remember the strength of letting players write their own endings. Games spent their first several decades owning the vagueness of their own format, right down to the dirty FM patches and choppy polygons. There's a lost art to the ability to 'allude' to things instead of just 'showing' them, and letting the process of trying to compute the missing links be part of the game too. Everything's a tasteless puppet to specificity, excessive details, and borderline machine-generated design philosophies.
Killer7 was a note that we have so much room to grow as not just an industry, but as designers. So much untapped potential. So many strengths we haven't even become aware of. And damn, a lot of room to mature in regards to how we treat real-world tragedy and sociopolitical issues.
I couldn't think of a smart way to integrate Dan Smith into this so here's a funny
Why must the world be this way? What is it all for?
Killer7 asks all these questions and provides answers to none. It is a vessel for reflection and wandering through the unimaginable horrors of the mind. It's not that it has nothing to say, but that it presents you with an unfinished puzzle, and lets you use the loudest pieces to fill in the rest of the picture.
Games as a medium have spent so many long years trying to understand what it means to 'tell a story' and to 'be art'. Decades of writers trying to give 'the right answer' to questions while fumbling over their own cynicism, egotistical tendencies and unchecked cultural biases. We are so concerned with the desire to be perceived as 'artful' that we lose sight of making anything with truly unique meaning or power.
I don't have a damn good answer to what needs to be done differently, - I'm the most out-of-touch, lost-in-their-own-head numbskull on the planet - but if I had 1 call, we definitely need to step back and remember the strength of letting players write their own endings. Games spent their first several decades owning the vagueness of their own format, right down to the dirty FM patches and choppy polygons. There's a lost art to the ability to 'allude' to things instead of just 'showing' them, and letting the process of trying to compute the missing links be part of the game too. Everything's a tasteless puppet to specificity, excessive details, and borderline machine-generated design philosophies.
Killer7 was a note that we have so much room to grow as not just an industry, but as designers. So much untapped potential. So many strengths we haven't even become aware of. And damn, a lot of room to mature in regards to how we treat real-world tragedy and sociopolitical issues.
I couldn't think of a smart way to integrate Dan Smith into this so here's a funny
4 Comments
now wouldn't THAT be novel!
no its called killer is dead
the gex meme at the end is gold. thanks for making my day.
MisterRaisin
2 years ago