In my last post I wrote that a platformer celebrates how its own medium is constantly in motion. Breaking.
That was quite a stressful thought.
I have been reading The One-Straw Revolution (notes here), and though I am cynical about the type of finger-pointing at “business is the problem with our world” it continues to get through to me. A quote from it leapt out at me, and I had to write about it right away:
an unnatural or exotic diet creates a hardship for the farmer and the fisherman as well. It seems to me that the greater one’s desires, the more one has to work to satisfy them.
I would also like to present a quote from a few pages back:
When the old man who runs the sushi restaurant in town tasted one of these natural eggs, he said that this was a “real egg,” just like in the old days, and rejoiced as if it were some precious treasure.
~
In stark contrast to all that I said in Platformer Kigo, my recent game awake doesn’t break a thing. It’s almost boring in how unexperimental it is, in terms of platformer physics. When you turn the lights off, it does force you to experience these “standard” platformer physics in a new way, but by no means is it the Abstract Platformer to which I alluded. It is simply a platformer.
It does me no good to stir myself up into a mania and suppose that, to be worthwhile, a platformer or any work of art must be unnatural or exotic.
SirMilkman’s starchild (pictured above) is an even more natural platformer, and I felt an unspoiled simple pleasure in experiencing it. In some small way I want to say it is a “real platformer” — just like in the old days — and rejoice.
~
addendum: thoughts from the artist
i think with everything ive been making in the past month ive tried to make really new and creative ideas that make people think
and since i was feeling so crappy yesterday i just decided to make something really bland and unoriginal
and it was nice
— SirMilkman, via Discord
