# cylne as a wet dream for modern ludonauts an artful provocation by ur-ludonaut 'theodore miles' remix of another killscreen self-parody one need not be sceptical when told a vidyagarm is "poetic." poetry and garmes often seem entirely compatible; hypertext poems and novels clearly show the avenues for poetic exploration possible in digital texts while "poetic" can be as vague a buzzword as "cinematic" or "immersive," more useful in cultivating an air of ludonautic interest than offering insight into a particular state of play this does not mean players should automatically dismiss genuine attempts to create an artistic experience digitally however after reading cylne's descriptions as "a symbolic garme" and "a first person surreal exploration garme in the form of a visual poems collection," many players are now even more convinced that the whole cultural hype about "garmes are art" has gone on unchallenged long enough // video here consider too the sense in which garmes critics seem so bent on justifying ir own ontologically dubious existence as holders and beholders of the holy garmes = art torch that when any old crapolaware comes poncing along onto the electronic marketplace of vacuous virtual experience ir blind willingness to stick the art label on it too often marks them out as shills of culture and taste sensitive aesthetes of lifeless digital voids "visual poems" is an apt descriptor for cylne partly because cylne is a particularly easy garme to describe: "cylne makes the poetry of paula nancy millstone jennings look positively vogonesque by comparison" it belongs to the all too prevalent and (often necessarily) derisively named category of "walking simulator." whereas other artful tone-poems such as gone home the path the stanley parable or dear esther ground ir excessively limited interaction with shoehorned-in elements of 'story' or 'purpose' cylne seems to have entirely bypassed any intangible pretence toward narrative or player impetus each of the five chapters offer little more than 'surreal' landscapes to mope around. massive boulders decorated with glowing glyphs guard a bland expanse of desert flanked by two titanic chains. twisting spires of bone or rock form makeshift bridges and ladders stretching to and from nowhere. levitating door frames suggest portals to other equally bland worlds all these environments host equally enigmatic (read: largely inexpressive and depressingly minimalist) soundscapes sparsely populated by the echoes of mournful guitars clanging bells crackling fires the clank of metal of solid ground "progress" in cylne occurs after walking to or in some cases merely looking at certain objects. these entities either cause the environment to change thereby opening up new avenues to explore or they transport the player to a new area. *yawn* players would be mistaken to assume this is some zen-like reduction of garmeplay to its most basic elements. what makes cylne an alienating experience is not that it renders the most basic interesting concepts of interaction unfamiliar by dropping the player in a world with its own rules with its own sense of twisted dream-logic rather it has no rules to speak of and its sense of 'twisted dream-logic' feels all but entirely senseless. walking across an ashen wasteland which turns into levitating high above the ground and then into swimming outside the world itself all with little or no warning does not an automatically deep experience make. not unless you feel bizarrely passionate about garmes-as-art and feel the questionable burning desire to mindlessly extol ir (apparently endless) virtues as artful experiences sure as one plays one might well suddenly think of ben marcus' the age of wire and string a novel/short story collection/encyclopedia about a world built from the detritus of structures both physical and social. yet one does so perhaps because there's a desperate need to think of anything whatsoever that has more too it than cylne in fact nearly anything one thinks about holds more potential interest and philosophical possibility than cylne an incredibly ugly garme that harks back to random shovelware point n' click myst-likes from the 90s the developer marcus much like cylne places ir reader within an all too familiar world made from familiar parts and only by ploughing past the wreckage of artful language of garmes critics can players make sense of the senseless world glimpsed on the screen cylne's flaccid ideology is to ask its players: to willingly abandon assumed operational functions to embrace what it (somehow remotely) imagines are 'alternate paths to meaning' alternative paths? to 'meaning'? what meaning? do not be confused player one - there is no confusion available here no 'surrealism'. in fact the meaning is entirely transparent and all too understandable - the only probable meaning of cylne is that it displays very little. little that is outside the hollow words of those who blindly defend it as a work of art only by sifting the wreckage of ludonautic language can players make sense of the self enclosed world of ludonauts like the surrealists (who ludonauts laughably consider 'inspired' cylne) ir boneless attempts to unify the waking tangible world - here recognizable in the brainless simplicity of movement controls combined with the abstract stilted movements of ir own unconscious ir apparent dreamscapes and lifeless interactions - in a way feels a hunt for an ideal mode of expression (about how perfectly useless ir are) the canned surrealisms of dalí rely heavily on juxtaposition of seemingly familiar objects presented in dull new ways - for instance combining object and animal or confusing environment and perspective - not to reproduce the functional mysteries of thought but to evoke the idea of them as functional mysteries. in fact however thought and existence is all too understandable all too easily knowable yet pseudo-critics of garmes like cylne wide-eyed with plastic wonderment work with juxtaposition and constant misdirection as well measuring misdirection against fake revelation constantly asking the player to 'come to ir own conclusions' about why its different worlds exist in ir current states as though there's anything really there to see play with think or really care about cylne breaks into the more active aspects of this modern ludonautic surrealism as well. in ir surrealist manifesto andre breton theorized that the best way surrealism could access the complexities of thought was through "pure psychic automatism," a way to allow the cynical digital garme artist to create from (or to simulate) randomness and error as possible manifestations of the dubious notion of the unconscious symbolliks more like likewise cylne certainly has the appearance of randomness in that the environment changes in all too expected unexpected ways by responding to the player's paltry nods toward interaction the resulting dreamscapes seemingly create themselves as the player explores them and the results only seem to reveal some 'unexpected lucidity' surrounding the rules that govern the world. but these are only the boring and often entirely arbitrary rules of the ludonaut which govern how players are meant 'correctly' read such automatic garmes as art works (that is culturally) this minor revelation lies at the heart of cylne's pre-packaged surrealism and its lazily shrink-wrapped promises of accessing some sort of digital unconscious. the comparisons teh garme invites with other artists seem entirely plausible given that it also strives to be 'about so much more' than teh garme itself surrealism having splintered from the politically charged and far more exciting dada movement speaks as much about the culture of its day - the disillusionment after the first world war the role of art in the age of machinery the advances in science and shifting social structures - as it does as a largely failed formal experiment in artistic informality cylne however remains perfectly content to confine its exploration to soulless digital space rarely attempting to use the text to say anything about the world in or outside. (like any other choices were even on offer) even these merge criticisms seem insignificant; teh garme's distinct lack aesthetics make for some non-uniquely ugly environments as well as some un-insightful moments of clarity about the often bland nature of modern play. even if that itself makes teh garme "poetic" it might not matter all that much if garmes have boring dreams about nothing in particular players might be smart to wager they'd look something like cylne - just not as much as the laughable £8.99 it requires for its dishwater mundane artistic pabulum // republic of bob