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playunderground · 5 years ago

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Introducing OVERSOUL: An Interview with Derrick Saladino

Last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Derrick Saladino to talk about his brand, OVERSOUL. When he pitched OVERSOUL to me in his initial email, he described it as “a lifestyle brand created from identity crisis,” and that “counterculture/subcultures like anime, gamer, emo-punk, euro-techno, and underground hiphop/b-boy culture heavily influence the brand’s creative direction.” I stared hard at the first two influences, and then stared not-as-hard at the rest of the influences, wondering how these various subcultures could overlap.

My brain being comprised of worms and dirt, I assumed that the anime and gamer influences meant that the designs were going to look like Bart Drinking Lean or Sasuke Wearing Supreme. (In other words, a caricature of anime-inspired Instagram ad streetwear.) This assumption changed quickly after taking a look at OVERSOUL’s site. Their first collection, ISEKAI, is comprised of three pieces. The logo tee and hoodie both look great, but the third piece was what really caught my attention: it’s a button-down tee adorned with daggers. At a glance, it looks nothing like anime- or gaming-inspired clothing. This was the point at which I snapped out of my irony-poisoned haze; the world of memeified, ironic-but-not-quite-ironic hentai tees and Goku Smoking Weed edits had calcified my expectations of what forms of inspiration a brand could and couldn’t pull.

It makes sense in the context of the rest of his influences and the ethos that he operates under – to get ahead of myself for a second, Derrick had this to say of his interest in various countercultures:

"When people express their passions or life to a certain degree, it just pulls me in. It’s like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what the fuck it is, but show me. Let me indulge.’ That’s really how I get into things."

In talking to Derrick, on and off the record, I saw a talented designer who was unapologetic about what he was interested in and passionate about. He’s also a huge geek that runs a bi-weekly Smash tournament at a local nightclub.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

"Okay, wait, first and foremost, my name is Derrick Saladino and I am a fucking gamer. Before being a designer or anything, I am a fucking gamer. "

Daniel: What is OVERSOUL?

Derrick: OVERSOUL is about identity crisis. It’s my experience dealing with that personally. Growing up, I never really fit in to particular popular groups. Every time I would attempt to make new friends, I would stumble upon the randomest shit: anime culture, gamer culture, I’d end up becoming friends with a lot of emo-punk kids, techno. Nothing that I fell into was mainstream, popular culture. It was a lot to do with being lonely and trying to make friends. With OVERSOUL, thinking about all that kind of shit, dealing with identity crisis – obviously there’s a lot of people who’ve been through that – I want to create a new identity or community of people who share similar values and, you know, take pride in it?

I mean, even the name, OVERSOUL, I ripped the word from this really old anime that I used to watch growing up, Shaman King.

Shaman King? What the hell, like 4Kids shit?

Yeah. That wasn’t the first anime that I ever watched, but it was something that I was really into. From being like 12 to even later in my high school, I just loved it. The concept was so cool – taking a soul and imbuing it in an object to make it powerful. It just looked fuckin’ sick. When people wear my clothes, I want them to feel empowered. That’s how I want people to see it. Soul being clothing, putting it on yourself, there you go.

Spirit Integration is, I don’t think the tagline to the brand, but it’s also part of it. Spirit Integration is mind, body, and spirit, and for anyone into the spiritual side of life, that’s what makes us. Our thoughts and mind and DNA – that makes us who we are.

When I read the description on your site, I noted that you referred to OVERSOUL as not just a startup streetwear thing or a brand, but a conceptual design experience. What does this encompass, and why did you pick this specific wording?

None of the stuff I make or have made in the past is very conventional. It’s been pretty avant-garde, I would say. I’ll have an idea, and regardless of whatever trend is going on right now, I just fucking do it. When I make clothes, I’m not making clothes for the public, really. My mentality is more like, “You know what would be sick in a game? If the costume looked like this.” That’s why I say it’s a conceptual design experience.

Has being involved in the industry and working behind the scenes affected how you understand your own brand after launching? What about how you understand customers and other brands, now that you know what the design process is like?

First-off, let me just back up and go over a history of what I did before OVERSOUL. In high school, I made clothing because I hated what everyone else was wearing. This was 2011-2013. During that time, that’s when I had a brand and brands like Obey, Diamond Supply, and The Hundreds – literally peak Tumblr hypebeast, Zumiez, starter pack shit – were around. I looked around at everyone else and was like, “I can’t click that, it’s not resonating with me.” I had two other brands after that, and then came OVERSOUL. So I have this history of kind of knowing the market, even being a consumer, and evolving as a businessman and designer. I don’t think anything has changed. I think I’ve always stayed true to doing my own shit, rather than trying to compete with everybody else. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll notice what other designers are doing and some things I’ll take note of or inspo from but I hardly think about other people, to be honest. I respect everyone’s hustle, I just can’t be doing the same shit.

Give me your top 3 video game fits.

Top 3, oh my god. Snake from Metal Gear Solid V – very techwear, utility as fuck. My previous brand before this was techwear, and I had to stop it because techwear is so hard to sell.

I’m really into draping fashion. Cloud, Final Fantasy VII, it was the movie Advent Children – you play Smash, right? There’s two costumes in there: the black, and like this, not really skirt, but it covers up somewhat? All-black, huge sash going on, it reminded me of Yohji Yamamoto.

Something that I’m going to make in the future is inspired by Naoto from Blazblue. His outfit, I looked at it and I was like, “Yo, this could be fucking, like Chrome Hearts, like what the fuck? I’m just gonna abuse this character design, it looks amazing.” I think that fashion right now, what really gets people’s attention on social media, is just some crazy shit, I don’t mean dumb shit, but like, just has to be very bold, and I think that’s what Naoto’s character design is. His pants have this huge cross on them. I think that’s one of the most crazy things I’ve seen in awhile.

Let’s talk about Anime-den! It’s this thing that we started roughly 5 months ago. One of my best friends here, he actually works at Fortune [Sound Club, a nightclub in Chinatown], and he’s a music producer. We really bonded over clothes, anime and gaming, and we had this idea – I think we were just high as fuck one day – and I’m like, “Yo, you know what would be fucking dope? If we brought weeb shit into the club.” I think he was just joking around, but he was like, “That would be really fun to set up, we can do it.”

[Weeb being short for weaboo, a pejorative term referring to those obsessed with Japanese culture to the point of fetishization and idolization. It’s been ‘reclaimed’ by some fans of anime, used ironically as a form of self-deprecation.]

So, the next day happens, we’re talking, and he asks me, “Do you actually wanna do it?”, taking it seriously. I’m astonished. I was fucking joking, you know? We were just some high guys. He pitches the idea to Fortune and they approve it. At this point, we’re like, “Okay, we gotta actually invest all our effort into this,” because we’re actually gonna do something that I personally haven’t seen anybody do before – bringing a game into a club, anime into the club.

It’s really cool. Just yesterday, the commentator from Vancouver Street Battle came to Anime-den. Pride? He commentated for Battle of BC 3 and Pinnacle. He has ties with Animebae, too. [Animebae is a local anime-inspired startup streetwear brand.] Who would’ve thought that this guy would come through? And he brought his friends. He was telling us that what we’re doing is sick, and hearing this from a guy of that calibre in the gaming or Smash community, it really shook us. We’re actually bringing in people who play the game seriously here.

How has setting it in a club made it different from other tournaments that you’ve been to? How does the dynamic change?

It’s a little different because when it comes to actual competitive events, people have a different mentality when they enter. They’re there to win and they practice hard for it. As for Anime-den, it’s the total opposite. It’s very casual, we’re all just drinking, blazing, whatever. It’s just the environment where, you know, dim light in a club, there’s music going on in the back –I guess to some gamers it can seem distracting? But I think people, they don’t care. They just play. They’re just there to have fun. Totally different dynamic from an actual event.

I think that the purpose of Anime-den is to bring people together. That’s literally what Anime-den is for.

Yeah, I just noted here that I think it’s consistent with your brand, in that you’re translating the intangibility of these digital spaces like anime and gaming that people bond over, and you’re putting it into a physical space and letting people actually further develop what these subcultures would look like in person. Like, when you think of anime or gaming in real life you think of Anime Expo or cosplaying or some shit – and that’s fine, people have fun with that [Editor’s note – I think it’s fun!] – but it’s not the only mode of expression. With events like this, I think it’s cool that you’re saying, “If you’re a gamer, there’s another avenue for you. You don’t have to dress up or anything…”

I mean, walking in today and meeting you, you wouldn’t have gotten the idea that I was super into anime or gaming. I just look like a regular dude, right? And my clothing gets inspired by it, but I don’t really look like I’m cut from the legit anime cloth. Choosing these lifestyles and putting it into this real aspect, I think it can appeal to everybody. People tend to judge a lot of things, but once you step into the Anime-den room, whatever perspective you have about anime to begin with, I’m pretty sure that changes. Man, the crowd, they look all the same as you do too. We’re all normal people, we just like cool shit.

I think we should talk about ISEKAI.

OVERSOUL’s first small collection was ISEKAI. Translated to English, it would be ‘a better world,’ and I named it that based off of the anime genre, isekai. When you watch these sort of things, it’s usually someone going to another world. For my first collection, I wanted to welcome people to my world. That’s why I chose ISEKAI. One of the big graphics for the brand was the blade shirt. [On the site, it’s name is the Beginners Dagger Shirt.] My reference for that was playing MMORPGs. Typically, the first weapon you get [in MMORPGs] is a short sword or dagger. I wanted to be like, “This is the start of my brand.” This is your starter item. It’s funny, when I tell people this – they’re always like, “I never thought…”

[laughs] It’s really cool!

That’s why I went with ISEKAI. This is what my world is. One of OVERSOUL’s long-term goals is actually establishing ‘my world,’ if that makes sense? There’s only a handful of designers who have, like, captured a signature silhouette. For example, Rick Owens. When you see [a Rick Owens piece], you know it’s Rick Owens. If Zara did the same shit as Rick Owens, you would look at it and be like, “That’s Rick Owens.” You wouldn't call it Zara. That’s what I’m trying to establish for myself, to create that silhouette for myself eventually in the future.

What’s up next for OVERSOUL?

Hmm, how should I put this... should I leak something? I’m going to drop an accessories part sometime soon. That’s in the design process right now, but I’m looking forward to doing my next big collection.

There’s this one song that I found in the past during my peak weeb days: Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi. A couple of months ago, they released the first official music video for it, after like 35 years, which is fucking insane – they should have done that a long time ago. I totally forgot about the song until I saw the music video. It’s something that I could relate to before and can relate to now, and I definitely want to build my next collection based on Plastic Love.

I think Plastic Love works really well because I’m surrounded by that scene in Vancouver – I work in Yaletown, and that’s the Yaletown lifestyle. It’s very lustful, but you don’t care. It’s all fake shit, really. That’s what Yaletown culture sorta is. I wouldn’t say that I’m like that, but I think that I could definitely expand on the topic through my brand. It’s not necessarily identity crisis, but the genre and artist kind of make it a subculture.

There’s also a few collabs on the way. One with a music group, another with a tattoo artist. What I really wanna do with the tattoo artist – he does anime tattoos – is ero art. Like, erotica. I think it’s a slept-on art style. It’s not generally for the public, per se, so I think that it would be something worth making. Super ecchi, maybe line art. I want it very exaggerated, even bondage-type shit.

There’s a lot of things where people are like, “Oh, that’s too much!” But you know what, it could be sick! This is why I do things solely for myself. As long as I get a reaction from somebody, I’m happy with that. Wanting a response, not even approval, just being acknowledged, that this shit exists, it motivates me to keep doing what I do.

I thought about doing graphic design shit; anime erotica art goes really well with techno. That kind of scene, the way that European style posters are, if you take the art and fuse them together, it works really well. I’m like, “How come no one has done this yet?”

So you’re treating it more like art and not just a part of anime culture?

I view anime as its own respective art, and with art, there’s no rules, so I can just take this and this, and bang. At the end of the day, everybody wants to see new and cool things. People are always going to have their own subjective opinions, but as long as you have their attention, you’ve already won the battle. That’s the mentality that I carry, that everyone has their own opinions.

Last question: what are your top 5 video games?

You know, I was trying to prepare for this interview – I didn’t even think this would come up.

[laughs] Come on, man.

I’m gonna put Super Smash Bros. Melee on there – I’ve been playing it for so long, it’s literally been bonded with my DNA.

I don’t wanna say Ocarina of Time, because I think that it’s everyone’s favourite, but I mean, it’s still up there. It’s an all-time masterpiece, but I enjoyed Majora’s Mask a lot more. The concept of the world being blown up by the moon, in-game time, the moon crashes in like 3 days, and you keep going back in time, skipping whatever, I think it was so much fun, so yeah.

I really like Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s very recent, but I have so many hours on it already, and I can’t stop. I haven’t felt this way about a game in a long time. It’s so replayable. Once you finish Ocarina of Time, you probably don’t touch it for a while. When you play FE, you’re like, okay, let’s do the next one. There’s three houses! Even after doing all three, it’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna try again, but I’m gonna make this character like this.”

I grew up playing a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon, unfortunately, but it’s fun. It’s not a typical gamer thing, but I love it.

I might put Final Fantasy VII on there, too – when Aerith died, I real-life teared up, like, “Dude, no way, you’re really gonna kill her off like that? You gotta save her!”… and then she dies. I’m pretty sure after that happened, I didn’t touch the game for a week. I was actually emotionally harmed. I’m really into RPGs – being able to emotionally attach yourself to characters, I think it’s a beautiful thing.

Any last things you wanna say?

I want my brand comparable to Chrome Hearts, MISBHV or Rude [Vogue]; when they have their own aesthetic and that’s what they do, that’s what I want to build as well. The idea that I take a lot of inspiration from gaming, it really shows.

Maybe I’m hungover, so I can’t really find the words right now, but for anyone trying to do fashion, music, whatever, as saturated as the community seems at the moment, you just have to get your foot in the door and start. Yeah, there’s competition, but to be honest, with all the people here who have brands, I’m friends with all of the people who make them, and I have no judgement about if their clothes are wack or not. Some things I don’t agree with, but everyone’s on the same hustle.

OVERSOUL’s ISEKAI collection is available now online at oversoul.online.

#oversoul #anime #gaming

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playunderground · 5 years ago

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Revisiting Journey and Abzu, I Found Myself More Depressed About Our World’s Future

This is from the September edition of Play Underground’s monthly digest. In that edition, we focused on walking simulators! This edition is available for our patrons starting at $5 a month. If you aren’t a patron, $6 via Ko-fi will get you a copy.

If you like what you see here, please consider becoming a patron! Thanks for reading! ❤️- PUG! editors

As the days go by, it’s become easier and easier to lose hope. I don’t want to sound like a fatalist, but it’s true. Scientists say that climate change will be irreversible in 11 years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it seems that human civilization will crumble by 2050. Every day the world seems to be shrieking in anguish. It has become harder and harder to ignore her cries, or to know how to help.

It’s also become more common in my present day to revisit old pieces of art and media only to find that their exaggerated, absurd, or apocalyptic scenarios are simply regular, everyday life for us now in these turbulent times. My most recent experience of this was when I revisited 2 of my favorite games, Journey and Abzu. As I returned to these games with the intent of figuring out what I wanted to write about, I found myself often struck by the distinct scenarios one finds themself in when playing these games, and how much they feel like premonitions.

Journey and Abzu were released in 2012 and 2016, respectively. While neither are old games by any means, they both were released just before the moment we are currently in where we all collectively feel that nothing could possibly get worse, and then it does. Climate change has been talked about for decades now, but the painting of an apocalyptic future scientists have warned us about has been getting less and less impressionistic since 2016. Both of these games were developed and out in the world well before this moment of maximum capacity. The conversation these games have with our current culture should theoretically be over, yet upon revisiting them, I found a representation more accurate than ever before.

Let me begin with Journey, the older sibling of the two, a game praised for its music, emotional impact, and finding power in simplicity. In this game, a player controls a robed figure in a massive desert, with the goal of traveling towards a mountain in the distance. As you travel through the desert, you find relics from a once thriving civilization. Art covers the walls of ancient buildings that depict the rise and fall of the civilization that your character belongs to, which also parallels the journey of the character. The main enemies of the game that you must avoid are massive flying automatons that are left over from a war that ended the civilization.

As I finished yet another playthrough of the game, I found myself once again moved to tears. This time however, it was for very different reasons. I could not have predicted before booting up this game again in 2019 that I would be hit with such an impact upon realizing just how much this game is a potential self portrait of humanity’s future. The desert setting certainly isn’t far off from what a world ravaged by climate catastrophe might look like. What hit home for me the most was the fact that the automatons are the last thing remaining in this world after ending the civilization. The idea of military technology being our downfall doesn’t seem so fictional when the United States military is Earth’s biggest polluter. After feeling emotionally ruined in my playthrough, I went on to replay Abzu, and then fell into another emotional sinkhole. I did not know that the rug could be pulled out from under me again.

The game Abzu follows the journey of a female diver in a vast ocean. As you play the game, you explore various underwater environments, interact with sea life, and reanimate the ocean using magical springs. The story and design of the game take inspiration from Sumerian mythology and Middle Eastern culture. In the game, there are pyramid shaped devices that are harvesting energy from the ocean. It is clear that these devices are what are upsetting the ecosystem and are what caused the destruction of this game’s civilization. As you progress through the game, it is revealed that the diver is a mechanical being whose existence actually comes from the pyramid like structures that are destroying the ocean. The diver ends up teaming up with a great white shark to bring life back to the oceans, and revitalizes the world.

While the water based setting of Abzu is in stark contrast to the desert of Journey, they both seem equally accurate as potential apocalyptic futures. As the temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, it seems like we will all be living underwater very soon. Once again like in Journey, the downfall of Abzu’s civilization is due to the machinery that was created. All that’s left of the cultures in both games are the evil machines they fashioned, mindlessly continuing the uncaring and violent mechanisms they were made for.

None of this sounds hopeful, but reality never seems to be either. I do think however it would be a disservice to both of these beautiful games if I tried to argue that the main message at their cores was pessimism towards our future. Both of these games, while dystopian in nature, carry the seeds of hope within them. Journey and Abzu are both stories of sacrifice and perseverance. In Journey, you are on an emotional ride that borders on religious experience. Your character is willing to sacrifice their life for their people, their mission, and their beliefs. One of the major points of gameplay in Journey is that you can play with another player online anonymously. While this may seem like a random or inconsequential gimmick, it actually adds a comforting reality to the story: you are not alone. You are not the last of your people. There are others, and you can help one another to bring about a better future for the both of you. Your existence in the game brings a beautiful red color back to cloth based beings that help you progress through your journey as you interact with them. There is still a future and each being in the game can help you towards a good one, anonymous or not. While all of us may feel powerless in the current state of the world, none of us have to suffer in it by ourselves. By the time you reach that mountain, you are no longer the person you once were. You and your character have been reborn, for the better.

While Journey focuses mostly on what is needed for an individual, Abzu is a great companion in that the center is much more about the collective and the environment. The sacrifice your character makes in Abzu is for the greater good of the world itself. After the diver realizes that they themselves are a member of the very civilization that is responsible for the destruction of the ocean, they forego their connection to that history for the sake of a better collective future. Your character acknowledges their sins, and decides to make right with the world rather than continue down the path history laid out for them. There is a beautiful twist that occurs as you progress through the game. At first, it seems that the great white shark is one of your major enemies. You quickly realize however that the machinery you are a part of is the actual enemy, while the shark and the other natural creatures of the ocean are your true allies and friends. As you finish the game and the credits roll, you can control the diver in a pristine and beautiful ocean while swimming alongside the great white shark. The cycle of violence is broken, and the ocean is clean and teeming with life once again. I wanted to weep at the thought of a future like that, a world without something like the Great Pacific garbage patch.

It is clear to me now that the future of our planet depends on our willingness to forego everything we once knew. In both Journey and Abzu, a hopeful and utopian future only came after the destruction of a flawed present, and the depressing period thereafter. The downfall of entire civilizations in these games also meant the ending of the violent systems that had been pushing towards calamity. We must be willing to acknowledge our wrongdoings, both as individuals and as a collective. The characters you play as are all fundamentally changed by the end of the story in these 2 games. We will all have to make sacrifices, whether they be personal, political, technological, or otherwise, and learn from our past and the cultures within it. Much of the inspiration for Journey and Abzu come from non-white, non-western, and indigenous cultures, whose practices and histories are inextricable from environmental justice and liberation. War and colonialism are massive factors of climate catastrophe both in these games and in real life.

It appears to me now that we must all go on our respective journeys, to find ourselves and what our relationship to the world and one another must be. None of us will be able to come out of it clean, for none of us live in a world that is. The end of human civilization as we currently know it might just be the only option ahead of us. Perhaps though, there is a much needed future in collapse, and glory in rebirth. I pray that we all find it, if not for our own sake then for the world that comes after we are all gone.

#digest preview #journey #abzu

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playunderground · 5 years ago

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Yoshitomo Nara, Proteus, and Self Reflection

This is from the September edition of Play Underground’s monthly digest. In this edition, we focused on walking simulators! This edition is available for our patrons starting at $5 a month. If you aren’t a patron, $6 via Ko-fi will get you a copy.

If you like what you see here, please consider becoming a patron! We think that Francine said some very smart words here 😳 - PUG! editors

The quintessential Yoshitomo Nara artwork is this: a large painting of a tight-lipped, wide-eyed, serious-faced child standing against a bare, flatly-colored backdrop, dressed in a gown or onesie of some contrast color. Sometimes the child will have a prop of some kind, like a stuffed animal, a knife, or a cigarette. Sometimes the child will be bandaged or injured somehow. Sometimes there will be a more surreal detail — sometimes the child will appear as a cat, sometimes the child’s eyes will be unnatural or strange, and so on. There’s more to Nara’s artistic practice, and even just his painting, than this sort of image, but certainly this sort of image is very close to the center of it, or at least the child figure itself. It’s repeated throughout his work, often in different yet analogous configurations to what I’ve described, and it almost invariably creates a kind of tension with the viewer.

For me, when I engage with Nara’s work, and particularly this sort of painting, I feel that there is something for me to resolve in my viewing it, not that there’s some question or confusion for me to puzzle out, but that there is some understanding for me to achieve. I feel the impulse to read an emotion into the expression of the child and to consider what has made them feel that way, and without any specific information or expository details in the image to rely on — Nara doesn’t afford me any — I’m forced to recall my own childhood and my own experiences to find some kind of understanding and resolve the tension I feel. In the words of Miwako Tezuka from her 2010 essay Music on My Mind: The Art and Phenomenon of Yoshitomo Nara, herself quoting Nara from an October 2001 interview in the Japanese literary magazine Eureka:

Nara’s figures of small children and animals stand alone in an empty space without any geographical or temporal specificity that requires sets of codes — cultural or otherwise — to decipher. They are minimally figurative and highly abstracted images. In short, his children, dogs, and other creatures are presented barefaced, without any symbolic expression that implies a message or an intention to communicate. Nara tries to rid them of such coding, and instead, extracts the kind of authentic experience a child has just before he or she becomes a syntactical existence that acquires meaning only in relation to others, a society, an environment, culture, and history. Nara explains that he is searching for his “real reality: the first experience of heat, the first experience of sweetness, the first experience of sadness, and the first experience of being bullied or bullying… I’m not particularly expressing a message to others.”

In this way, by recognizing and resolving the tension I feel, and despite Nara not particularly intending to communicate with me as a viewer, I feel that I’m able to achieve some insight into my own “real reality” as I engage with the work Nara uses to discover his. In many ways, I still feel at odds with my childhood — I’m still making sense of it, I’m still trying to rediscover or reclaim it — and Nara’s work has come to mean something to me in that regard as both a tool and a methodology for achieving that. When I engage with Nara’s work, I feel myself recede into the past, searching for memories of the kinds of authentic experiences Tezuka describes in her essay, and in returning to the present I’m afforded an opportunity to actualize them, to take the memories and make them real again, to put them on paper as Nara does or search for them elsewhere. Nara’s work isn’t the only tool I have in this regard; music is another one for me, as it is for Nara — punk music is huge inspiration of his, and his child figures appear alongside words and phrases from the lyrics and song titles of bands like The Ramones and Shonen Knife as often as they appear without. Another set of tools I have in this regard are video games, and there’s one game in particular that I’ve connected to in very much the same way that I’ve connected to Nara’s work — Proteus, by Ed Key and David Kanaga.

Video games, like paintings, are usually highly subject to sets of cultural codes to decipher unless, like Nara, the artist takes special care to disentangle those dependencies from the work as much as possible. Proteus is like this; there is basically no configurative or mechanical challenge, there is no dialogue, there are no buttons besides “walk around” and “sit” and “take picture,” there are no kitschy video game-y elements like points and levels and collectibles for someone inexperienced with games to get caught up on or for someone very experienced with games to get distracted by. The visual style is minimal, planes of flat color are used for everything. The music is ambient, meandering, sometimes preoccupied with a particular sound or phrase and sometimes given to the dramatic but always returning to a gentle stirring. It’s still very obviously a video game — it looks like one and sounds quite like one and you interact with it very much like one — but like Nara’s paintings, it is presented barefaced, it is minimally figurative, it is highly abstracted. In doing this, the game makes room for itself to be what Nara’s paintings can be; more so than most other games, I see Proteus as a way to connect with my “real reality.”

For better or worse, a great deal of my authentic, pre-syntactical life and experience was lived through a video game screen. I was given a bright green Game Boy Color when I was very small, and it quickly became a huge part of my life. A lot of my earliest friendships were formed around video games, a lot of my earliest frustrations were with video games, a lot of my earliest experiences of independence, and of wonder, and of curiosity were with video games. A lot of my identity was formed in relation to video games, a lot of my earliest understandings about myself were discovered through video games, and a lot of why I continue to play video games is just that all of this is true — I’m compelled to continue playing games because they’re that deeply entangled with who I am as a person, or at least how I’ve come to be who I am. Proteus is almost spiritual in how affective it is to me because my “real reality” is so strongly, and rather pathetically, entangled with video games. Chasing the different animals and making music with them as they hop and rattle and fly away, feeling wonder and excitement when something special or secret happens, waiting with bated breath for the owl to appear — all of this feels authentic to me in a way so little of my day to day life and experience does, and it inspires me to go and actualize those emotions and experiences outside of the game in my own creative endeavors and lived experiences in a way few other games do, in the same way Nara’s work does.

#proteus #yoshitomo nara #digest preview

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