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Cactus (pictured above during a recent trip to Disneyland) is a ridiculously prolific game designer known for producing strange and occasionally brilliant games with blindingly acidic color schemes. And according to several reports from GDC, he is every bit as crazy-provocative in person as his games suggest. Here are some reactions from his talk at the conference, poignantly titled “Abusing Your Players Just For Fun.”
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It’s probably a good sign when a presentation opens by informing attendees that it may kill them if they’re prone to seizures. Much like his games, Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström’s GDC talk was filled with flashing lights, garish colors, clips from David Lynch movies, and the feeling that somebody is having a joke at our expense. It’s a good joke, though, even if he didn’t follow up his awkward, adorably nervous foreigner act with a superb Elvis Impersonation. Mostly on account of the fact that he actually is an adorable, awkwardly nervous foreigner, but I was still waiting for it. Anyway, aside from the bizarrity and weird movie summaries (“Dr. Strangelove is actually my favorite comedy of all time… or something. You don’t have to laugh at it, though.”) he actually name dropped a lot of games that are thematically linked through their incomprehensibility and enjoyable bastardry.
Cactus also spent a great deal of time talking about works in other media, especially film, that willfully challenge their audiences. David Lynch was cited as a particular inspiration—in the course of listing practically every movie Lynch has made and proclaiming how awesome it is, Cactus showed that famous “mystery man” scene from Lost Highway as an example of cinematic difficulty. I have been thinking lately about the parallels between accessibility in film and difficulty in games; I touched on it in a Death By Cube review a few weeks back. Some of the more dogmatic game theorists preoccupy themselves with exploring only how games are utterly different from other media, a line of thought that I find naïve and self-defeating. So I really enjoyed hearing the way Cactus drew inspiration from a diverse range of media. He drew parallels to progressive rock, as well, quoting John Holmstrom’s definition of punk: “It’s rock and roll by people who didn’t have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music.” He suggested that might describe the more experimental end of the indie scene, as well.
Soderstorm credited game artist Mark Essen (a.k.a. Messhof) as being his “idol,” so it wasn’t surprising how many of Messhof’s games factored into the discussion. Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, Flywrench, and Thrill Of Combat were all namechecked, and the aptly titled platformer Punishment was demonstrated via a video play-through. Punishment employs nearly all of the methods Cactus mentioned for abusing players: Annoy them with blinking and rotating graphics, defy them with nonsensical logic, and boast an almost-impossible difficulty. It looked like fun, actually. Kayin O’Reilly’s I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game, a bizarre and insanely challenging game perhaps only beatable by watching play-throughs on YouTube, was also mentioned.
Long story short: [Soderstrom argued that] fantastic, surreal works can be found quite frequently in film (El Topo, the works of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick), but almost never in videogames [...]
Shadow of the Colossus borrowed a lot of narrative stuff from El Topo, but the visuals and style, Soderstrom argued, shared more in common with Studio Ghibli films. And these works are fine, but they aren’t pure, unique, unfiltered self-expression like David Lynch films are.
Soderstrom quoted John Holmstrom, referring to progressive rock: prog rock was for people who weren’t good at music, but had a need to express something personal. And that’s the idea behind abusing, or ignoring, your player.
