Noctuelles – No Enemies, No Puzzles, No Obstacles

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

‘Can we create a form of digital entertainment that explicitly rejects the structure of games? What is [the role of] an interactive work of art that does not rely on competition, goals, rewards, winning or losing?’ asks Michaël Samyn in the Notgames ‘Not a manifesto’.

Michaël’s call to action explores the possibility of the game-world experience as an artform, and as a platform for a creative [re]configuration of virtual space facilitating an exploratory experience of immediacy once the traditional ‘role’ is eradicated.

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Orihaus Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Orihaus has create a series of ‘first person exploration’ games where there are ‘no enemies, no puzzles, no obstacles’ containing procedurally generated landscapes layered with constructivist megastructures. These environments provide the disembodied psycho-geographer with a possibility to inhabit purely abstract geometric topologies. Virtual derives can be acted out in collaboration with spatial connotations generated by memory and ‘real’ world associations.

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

It would do no harm to recall Debord’s call to action [from his Theory of the Derive]:

‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Lumiere, Orihaus’s most recent game used Structure Synth to generate all architectural forms and constructions within the environment [source here]. The grey sketches generated from its design grammar approach provide a strong counterpoint to the final game environments which use strong emotive glow, lighting and depth-of-field Shader effects.

Related Posts:

Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen – Structure Synth
Patabotany #2: Grow your own Worlds
The Endless Forest – Tale of Tales
Tohu777 – Structure Synth Architectonics

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