do you know what does it mean?
semper games



Every videogame, song, poem calls up a kind of phantom audience that it's addressed to as well as a phantom tradition to belong to: previously disparate elements which get knitted together when seen retroactively through something new. The sense of mystery and depth in videogames is sometimes just the feeling of not being a part of the audience for a work, or not being able to imagine a context which would make it coherent."What is the jagged blue thing meant to represent?" "Is this referencing a previous game?" "Am I supposed to be able to do this?" "Is this a secret?". Or when you find someone's private little webpage listing a mixture of tech demos and heartfelt projects, or the tiny community around some obscure development kit, or a list of strange titles for a system you didn't know about. You might not ever play them just like you might not get all the way through a particular title or have the time to figure out everything that somebody's trying to say, but that's okay because this absence can have a quality of its own.

Discrete, self-contained objects, worlds, histories - things that can be entered into at any time but whose central purpose is just to exist, and by the fact of their existence to engage a sense of curiosity or imagination or just an awareness of externality that can be carried with you after you pass by. Tiny circumscribed spaces of infinite potential, life frozen in time, a kind of reticent promise that you intercept by accident. The sense of a distant, contained potentiality. It’s the feeling that everything hides a story, no matter how small, how fleeting, or how insignificant. Large spaces and tiny objects give the same feeling. That they're not quite to a human scale gives a sense of secret depth. I would like to be a builder of ghost towns....
- thecatamites [harmonyzone.org]