# a hallucinatory resemblance to itself fave steam garme screenshots 'reality by proxy'; a gallery of cool screenshots from various steam garmes standalone vignettes with added fictional descriptions + a brief overview of the ever receding electronic shoreline of the video real // images here **+** in virtual worlds there's often no reason for scale to exist except as just another dynamically shifting garme mechanic. dig this shot from a l4d2 mod of a luxury cruiser and consider how it would look to people on the ship to see a giant rifle outside ir window knock the whole thing on its side with a single push + giving new meaning to father ted's dichotomy of small / far away image missing presumed deleted **+** it would be cool to think this location is objectively real in that someone could actually 'work' there in-garme almost have a career + and even effect the outside world from ir monitor i used to work here for a couple months part time. surfed the net checked my mails (non ever arrived + even the spam mail bots stayed away) + and occasionally took parking tickets from polite rival gangs of near-future cyber-tech road warriors who duelled to the death over non-specified matters of 'peace gained through subtle application of superior (all amerikan) firepower' > the pay sucked but the hours were bad. i played ultra-violent video garmes most days and occasionally let the barrier down on passing motorcyclists. what an odd use of life/time _that_ was.. > ~ researcher phil raptor / 'big science' // images here **+** another scene from off-limits mod. the enemy players appear to the main juggernaut as bizarre winged data angels. the contrast between the desaturated environment and the electric blue of the players the iron heavy clack and clunk of the minigun spinning up and down + beautiful. if only the entire environment was meaningfully destructible john woo style // image here **+** screenshot from unknown garme probably zombie survival in garry's mod. dig the classic missing model "error" sign as seen from underwater what's cool about the ripple effect is that one imagines a myriad of physical details and effects taking on important in-world / garme meaning + viewing an ecology of dynamic sub-systems inter-acting as though alive (as though one were alive / as though they were alive + not sure which) // image here **+** an imaginary example of what i call direct player based generation / manipulation of 'video-garmespacetime' (vgst) on the fly. there's something about tiled floors which always evokes sensations of magical surrealism these however paradoxically confuse utterly all distinctions between inside and outside. the light in this scene imparts messages from the missing present virtually impossible to explain in simpler terms using any aesthetic schemata other than the post-newtonian logics expressed therein / without. this scene acts as though waiting for something + just as we do image: sky rig final approach **+** perhaps a map from garry's mod this is what i call a "final approach" to a sky rig. final approaching means an immanent one-way philosophical or conceptually abstract journey to a location or state of mind just like approaching a runway final approaches to / within video garmes are delicate matters of the heart as a lot can go wrong + and all too right + before (/crash) landing // image here **+** the feeling that there's something interesting perhaps even profoundly revelatory over the other side of an (often arbitrarily) impassable invisible knee-high garming fence is common in modern advanced video garming such scenes are an inevitable part of the design process. while they 'physically' indicate natural world-boundaries psychologically and symbolically they represent an unexplored philosophical and ideational-gravity potential often of a high magnitude such scenes seem to say that despite / because of inherent design limitations of a garme system there exist inherent gaps voids inconsistencies + unexpected views of unplanned exploratory potential and expansive imaginative possibility like the petrol sign such scenarios are mentally inflammatory as they simultaneously bring alive otherwise dull video garme spaces to life and bring a melancholic pain to players unable to explore and experience an alternative existence forever just beyond the barrier // image here **+** a scene from l4d2. something went badly wrong with the chopper. we were trying to get to it when all the textures momentarily inverted and turned partially fluid. the fluid then formed a sentient eye from the surface of the heli's side window the eye does not blink but just stares in amusement. to our dismay and violent surprise it was only then we realized we were heavily augmented vat grown cyborgs on a liquid ninja stealth mission deep into the artificial mind of modern postmodern video ultra-garming. word // image here **+** a box full of light perhaps from occupied city 17. plants or parodies of organic life growing steadily in the heat and moisture of some unknown (/player) processing facility the opportunity to observe an existence independent of the events around it. faint bubbling noises. diffuse border slowly permeating organic data. the occasional silent hop of sand fleas in a hidden fractal microworld // image here **+** light and shadow and all the shades between + perhaps still inherently limited. the pointless of brick textures except as emotional texturing. seen from this angle one wonders what a garme of raw philosophical speculation might look like // image here **+** reconsidering (someone tiredly once again) the meaning of what it is to be an in-garme object. perhaps it would be cool to be able to instantly swap andor combine the properties of objects + a bike you can shoot like a shotgun a shotgun that uses players on bikes as ammo. a sudden cry of fear as one realizes everything in a particular universe features unstable properties // image here **+** another chance encounter with the video real. what it means to be a player in a world that always accepts you + as an integral component of its system. rooftop conversations about currently contested meanings and dramatic implications. the unique quality of the light which says so much through being invisibly ubiquitous the class distinctions between; mingebags as yet unable to access rooftop level and the self-anointed guardians of enforced fun unable to tell them how less the social pecking order be disrupted // image here **+** deus ex: human revolution lab complex. ultra-hyped cinematic realism everything in this room is now meaningfully interactive + has an effect on the (as yet) unknown system of teh garme no more will wires pipes switches and valves suffer from a lack of player minds touching ir surfaces with virtual hands inter-acting with them in a carefully a.i modulated dance of feedback // image here **+** behind the scenes is where we now play meta-religiously unburdened by meaning. aesthetic appreciation is what we seek; the chance to express the ineffable digital context of our current epistemological dislocation and other sentient myths. in an-flight movie for the monad // image here **+** "ok we're here.. now what?" yet why question the potential for events to happen but not the very existence of the place where they're allegedly supposed to be taking place? in what way are we precisely supposed to think we are here? this seems all there is + itself another illusion it seems. entire misty coffee mornings spent puttering around in small island life listening to the damp creak of splintered planks long swollen and warped by the acidic digital tide // image here **+** the feeling you could go anywhere and do anything + if only the whole world were inverted into the nth dimension where the sight of blue skies no longer signifies fake 2d infinity plastered on as an afterthought the (/useless) feeling when you look at two buildings and wonder if two communications satellite-crossed lovers live there forever separated by farcically arcane and obtuse social adult (global) networks of prevention and control + but then drive on in your abandoned junker content to continue with your deadpan-laughably blase player existence // image here **+** to come across an unguarded access node in a virtual landscape + to realise one is possibly already the nth in an infinite nested series a fractal holographic // image here (architectural) compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal rules of melody harmony rhythm metre + much like musique concrète. oh for a chance to burst through that wall of rust to burst that pipe to play with the lights set up a stage a campfire + to more fully utilize space as a function of the social / narrative acts of play (not merely as a result of teh garme as an abstract system) // image here **+** a stalker done of the citidel + as posed in gmod // image here **+** in which there is no escape from the citadel; the citadel as everywhere and everything (except the citadel itselves unnaturally) // republic of bob